The Bellman Book of Fiction, by Various

p. vTO
FORMER READERS OF
The Bellman
WHOSE GENEROUS GOOD WILL
AND LOYAL SUPPORT MADE
ITS SUCCESS POSSIBLE

p. viiPREFACE

The kindly reception given to The Bellman Book of Verse is mainly responsible for the publication of this collection of short stories, originally printed in The Bellman, and should it find favor equal to that of its predecessor, it is probable that other volumes of like character may follow this.

Indeed, the former editor of The Bellman has in mind the publication of a series of books, uniform in size and appearance with this, including a second and perhaps a third volume of fiction and, finally, The Bellman’s Book of Essays, to contain some of the essays and editorials of that periodical which are esteemed of more than transient value; in all, perhaps half a dozen small volumes.

Whether this congenial undertaking shall be carried out or abandoned depends very largely upon the welcome given this, the second book of the contemplated series. There is no desire to exploit the files of The Bellman for commercial purposes, but should it appear that there exists a sincere demand for such literature it will be the writer’s pleasure to supply it.

More than two years have passed since The Bellman was discontinued, and it is most gratifying to its founder, as well as to all those who were concerned in its publication, to note many continuing evidences of the regard and appreciation p. viiiin which it was held by its former readers and to receive repeated expressions of regret that it has ceased to exist.

The Bellman is no more, but his memory still endures, and evidently a large number of his loyal old friends continue faithfully to cherish it.

For them, more especially, is this collection published. The selection has been made almost at random and does not pretend to be a choice of the best stories that were printed in The Bellman, but merely a few of those among the many which appeared under the familiar heading, “The Bellman’s Tale,” and which the editor considers meritorious and worthy of perpetuation in book form.

p. ixCONTENTS

p. 1THE MUTE

Le Muet started as the cold steel of a rifle barrel touched his neck, and turning his head stumbled to his feet. Behind him stood four Bavarian soldiers grinning maliciously at his surprise. They spoke to him, and he made no attempt to answer.

He gaped at them with an empty expression. One of them seized him by the arm, and twisted it cruelly. A low, hoarse, guttural sound came from Le Muet’s lips, and his face was convulsed with effort. Shaking himself loose, he pointed to his ears and mouth, then let his chin sink upon his breast. He spread his hands in a gesture of despondency, and shook his head from side to side.

The soldiers looked at him angrily, then their leader, giving the peasant a push which sent him upon his knees among the turnips, issued an order in a low voice, and as silently as they had come the four men disappeared, with bodies bent low, among the trees of the plantation.

When Le Muet looked again they were out of sight. His heart was beating, he trembled, and it seemed as if there was no strength in his limbs and that the struggle he had made to utter intelligible sounds had left him exhausted. For a long time he knelt staring at the woods before he rose to his feet and shook his fist in the direction in which they had gone. Then he took to his heels, and ran as quickly as he could to the village.

p. 2When all the able-bodied men in the village had gone, there remained only two, Monsieur the curé and he whom they called Le Muet, a strapping big fellow with the strength of an ox, to whom, for no fault of his own, had been denied the gifts of speech and hearing.

Naturally Le Muet was not called upon to do his years in the army. His dumb deafness would have broken the heart of any drill sergeant as it did that of his schoolmaster who, having heard of lip-reading, experimented with him for a month and then broke his best ruler over the lad’s stupid head.

Not that Le Muet was stupid except in book learning. When one is dumb, one talks to beasts and birds in sounds that they can understand, and as for hearing, there is no need of that with a dog who speaks with his eyes, his tail, his body. And Le Muet had a dog, a shaggy, unkempt animal with vagabond habits, who disappeared for days at a time, and returned without explanation from marauding expeditions in the woods. It was said that the gamekeeper had sworn to riddle him with shot the first time he caught him in the act, but, after all, the gamekeeper was a merciful man, and there is no doubt that he missed many a good chance to rob Le Muet of his heel companion. The dog was harmless enough, although it may well be understood that he would not have hesitated to try his teeth upon those Bavarian invaders, had he not gone the day before upon a poaching quest.

There was only one person to whom Le Muet could betake himself in the hour of need: Monsieur the curé, who had remained behind to look after the women and children. The curé was a robust p. 3little man, with a brown, wrinkled face and eyes full of understanding and sympathy: eyes that, alas, no longer twinkled merrily, but were dulled with a great sadness. He was standing on the other side of the square from the church, looking intently at the building as if to commit to memory the position of every one of its timeworn and hallowed stones, for it was known that even churches were not spared by the barbarians, and any day they might appear in the village with fire and sword.

Le Muet hesitated a little, standing with heaving breast, his eyes bloodshot with his running, before he ventured to lay his hand upon the sleeve of the black soutane. The curé, as if roused from a dream, looked at him, then grew grave with apprehension. Hastily he looked in the direction from which Le Muet had come, and pointed. Le Muet nodded his head eagerly, and in clumsy pantomime told his tale: four fingers for four men, the helmets, the barrel upon his neck, the crouching retreat.

The curé, laying his hand upon Le Muet’s arm, patted it gently, and led the way across the square and into the church. Near the door he knelt, and Le Muet followed his example. For a few seconds they remained thus, side by side, their faces turned to the altar, then the curé rose to his feet and let his eyes pass lovingly from window to window, from painted saint to sculptured and, guiding Le Muet to the door, came out, locked the carved double door, and descended the steps.

For a moment he stood there with bent head, then set out briskly, going from house to house, telling the women not to be afraid, but to collect p. 4the children, get food and covering together, and to meet in the square. Soon they were there, a piteous band, very silent and hushed. One mother carried in her arms two children, a baby a few months old and a boy of three, and as the curé saw her stumble, he reached out and took the boy into his arms.

As the curé led the way, there was a moment of panic, and some hung back, but gradually the little band fell in behind him, and at the end came Le Muet, stepping out with short strides so as not to tread upon any one’s heels. They passed through the village street, their eyes straining in front of them that they might not see the open windows and the doors, the flowers climbing and crowding about the green shutters, the smoke still rising from hearths on which the midday meal had been cooking. An old woman sank to the ground, and without a word two of the younger raised her and, supporting her, guided her frail and stumbling feet.

At the crossroads, the curé halted and, standing on the steps of the cross with its carven figure of the Redeemer, looked over his little band, and raising his hand blessed them in a trembling voice, then in a command, ringing out strong and clear like that of a soldier, set them in motion once more on the road to safety.

All at once Le Muet halted. What was he doing? He who had no human kin had left behind him the one thing he loved: his dog. His brain was confused by the excitement of the day, otherwise he would not have forgotten how often he had been sought out and found by the faithful creature. He looked in front of him. The company of refugees was just turning the corner. He must find his dog. Surely Monsieur the curé would forgive him; p. 5besides, with his long legs, he could easily catch up. Resolutely he turned on his heel and trudged back the way he had come.

As he passed through the village square, from an open door came a tempting odor of cooking, and with a sly grunt he stepped inside, filled a bowl from the soup pot and sat down. One must eat, whatever comes to pass, and it is easier to die with a full stomach than an empty one.

He had just sopped up the last drop of cabbage soup with an end of loaf when, turning his eyes to the open door, he was amazed to see a couple of horsemen dismounting in front of it. As if they knew their way, they tethered their horses to a post and strode into the cottage.

Le Muet rose to his feet, and the intruders covered him with their rifles. Suddenly one of them broke into a grin and, turning, spoke to his companion. They lowered their rifles, and the first comer nodded in a friendly fashion to Le Muet and offered him his hand.

In a daze Le Muet accepted the courtesy. What a surprise! Here, in a Uhlan uniform, was the peddler, Woerth, who had travelled the countryside for many a year. He had not been seen for a long time, and now—Le Muet grinned in response. The peddler had done him many a kindness, and tramped the woods with him more times than once: a sharp-faced, thin man, with white-lashed blue eyes.

He sat down at the table again as they dipped their cans into the soup pot and divided the loaf. With a careless air the peddler knocked in the head of the cider cask, and filled three glasses. Le Muet began to feel at his ease. After all, he knew the p. 6peddler, and if this was war, surely it was not an affair of bloodshed; one sat at the table with an old friend and drank cider. He could not understand what they were saying, but he could discover nothing to be afraid of in their looks.

When they had eaten and drunken their fill, the peddler lit his pipe, and with a smile strolled about the room, opening closet doors, lifting up the lid of the linen chest, pulling out the drawers of the carved bureau and scattering the contents on the floor, knocking the walls and stamping on the floor as if to discover the hiding place of treasure. But nothing of value rewarded his search, and he appeared angry, for he swept the few little china ornaments from the mantel shelf and stamped upon them.

Le Muet rose to his feet. He must be going. His dog might be searching for him, and, besides, if he was to catch up with Monsieur the curé he must be getting along. As he walked to the door, the peddler turned sharply, and taking a couple of quick strides let his hand fall heavily on his shoulder. There was no good humor in the peddler’s face now. He gave a word of command to his companion, who produced a rope, and putting a tight knot around Le Muet’s wrist, gave him a shove that propelled him out of the door.

What was going to happen now, wondered Le Muet. He was not long left in doubt. His captors went from house to house, picking their plunder, clothes, bric-a-brac, copper cooking utensils, till they had accumulated two huge bundles tied in blankets. They were loaded upon Le Muet’s back and, mounting their horses, the peddler and his comrade rode on slowly, driving Le Muet like a cow before them.

p. 7A dull rage, all the more terrible since it could find no expression, filled his heart now. His load lay upon his neck and shoulders like lead, and the sweat trickled down his face and the furrow of his bent and tortured hack. When he stopped, a prod from lance or saber set his failing legs moving once more, and he ground his teeth in speechless agony. So, too, perhaps feel the dumb carriers of burdens, but in the brain of Le Muet the suffering was intensified. In his obstinate way he had set his heart upon finding his dog, and now with every step he took he might be going further away.

They were going through the plantation now, and approaching the forest. It was hard going among the low brushwood that caught like so many grasping hands at his legs and tripped him up. Would they never stop for rest? They were within the woods now. At last the two horsemen dismounted, and looked about them as if seeking a landmark. Seeing a pile of white stones from the quarry, they nodded their heads, and with a look at their watches sat down on the edge of the pathway.

Le Muet lay on the ground exhausted, and they let him lie undisturbed, talking to each other in low tones. The mute must have slept, for when he opened his eyes again there were gray uniforms all about him, their wearers sprawling on the ground in easy attitudes. Here and there dimly among the trees he could see others leaning upon their rifles. He sat up and looked about him.

The peddler had a map in front of him, and bending over it was a fine officer; for so he must be, since the peddler nodded servilely whenever the other spoke. Le Muet was still staring when the p. 8officer raised his head and caught sight of him. He turned to the peddler, who laughed and pointed to his mouth and ears, assuming a stupid expression, and the officer nodded curtly and bent over the map again. In a little while he called some of his men about him and spoke to them. They disappeared on either side of the narrow path. There was no sign of a horse anywhere, and Le Muet wondered if they were stabled in the quarry, and if their lot was better than his.

The peddler folded up his map, and coming over to Le Muet pointed to a clump of brushwood, and with a struggle the weary unfortunate rose to his feet, shouldered his bundles and followed. They lay down, the peddler with his rifle by his side. In a moment they were joined by the officer and six of his men. They reclined quietly, as if listening.

Suddenly the officer raised his pistol. Something was coming through the brushwood; but he lowered it with a grim smile as a shaggy head, followed by a shaggy body, made its appearance. There was a bound, and Le Muet felt himself tumbled to earth under the impact of a clumsy body. A rough tongue was licking his face. His dog had found him.

Nothing else mattered now, and with strange, uncouth murmurings he clasped the shaggy body to his own again and again. He did not see that the officer’s face had grown dark with anger or that he had raised his pistol again only to slip it back into the holster as the peddler touched his arm and cautiously pointed through an opening in the bushes. A man in a blue uniform had just risen to his feet on the path, and was looking about him p. 9with a searching glance. Nothing stirred in the thickets, and he walked on.

Le Muet saw the figures beside him stiffen, and rifles raised. Suddenly the dog moved uneasily and gave a low whimper. With a savage indrawing of his breath the officer turned sharply and, shortening his sword, drove it into the body of the dog. A whispered command, and a heavy rifle butt fell upon its head.

Le Muet sat upright, staring, confused. He held the quivering body close against him, dead to all thought but that of this strangely cruel deed. What was it all about? In a flash it came to him. Those about him were lying in wait to kill, and those whom they would kill were his own: Frenchmen like himself, like the man who had risen in the clearing and walked on unconscious of danger.

With a mighty effort he held himself from flinging his weight upon the officer. He was not afraid now. They had killed his dog. They might kill him, only there were others coming, unwarned, and he without voice to warn them: those others who were also of France.

Oh, if only Monsieur the curé were with him. The curé had shown him pictures of miracles wrought by God, the blessed mother and the saints: miracles wherein the sick were healed, the blind were made to see, the dumb to speak. Perhaps, if he tried, words would come to his lips, words would come in time to save those who were about to come into this trap. Bending his head low, he filled his lungs, he felt the muscles about his abdomen tighten. His mind was surging with desire, he was about to speak at last; and then the breath he had sucked within him filtered through the passage of his throat in harsh and broken gasps.

p. 10A buffet on the mouth from the officer threw him on his back, and for a moment he lay stunned, but for a moment only; then bounding to his feet, with a desperate leap that cleared the brush he was out and upon the path. Through the trees in front of him he saw the glint of bayonets. They were coming, coming into the trap. He must run to them.

All at once he felt arms about his knees. Two of the Germans had crept out from the other side of the path and were holding him by the ankles. With a wrench of his strong legs be loosened himself from the hold: two swift kicks, and he was free. To run—he did not notice the rope stretched across the path at the level of his ankles and with a jerk he fell upon his face. At once they were upon him. He felt a writhing hand that tore at his throat and, bending his chin, he bit savagely at it with his firm teeth. It seemed to him as if he had superhuman power, and that he had but to open his mouth to send forth a ringing cry.

He was on his knees now, a man upon his back, and bending forward suddenly he swung the clawing thing over his shoulder to the ground. His hands sought the throat. Then came a sharp, agonizing pain. The other had stabbed him in the back, with a wrench and a twist of the bayonet blade.

He rose to his feet as if by a miracle, one foot uplifted to step forward, then set his foot down upon the ground. The earth was trembling and swaying beneath him. With his lacerated hands he tore at his throat as if to pluck the useless vocal cords from their covering of flesh. A strange bellowing came from his lips,—now red with a bloody p. 11foam,—growing in volume, and then, as he strained at his throat with compressing hands, he felt a great joy and triumphant peace come upon him. He was speaking—no, it was a shout—so clearly—so easily:

“Back, comrades—a boche trap—” and then, as he sank to his knees, “Vive la France!”

He did not hear—how could he, the deaf one?—the volleys that passed over his body as the French halted and in a swift rush deployed to left and right of the path; the tramping of feet in the brushwood; the dull thud of rifle butts, and squeal of agony as bayonet found what it sought.

When it was over, the French commander looked grimly and without compassion at the sullen face of the German captain staring up at him from the ground, then turned to look down curiously at the body of Le Muet.

“A peasant from the village—captured; he was deaf and dumb,” grunted the captain with a spasm of pain.

The peddler, lying against a tree endeavoring to staunch a leg wound, saw the French commander look at him inquiringly.

“Surely, he was a mute. It was impossible for him to say a word. I knew him very well,” he hastened to answer.

“I must have been dreaming, but I could have sworn he called out, ‘Vive la France’”; and then, p. 12because he was a poet, he added: “But then, when every stone of la patrie cries out, why not this dumb peasant? It is a war of miracles.”

p. 13THE LAUGHING DUCHESS

The optimist, safely outside our own environs, prescribes the old formulas: “Look Around You and Write; Look Within the Human Heart—”

“But, dear sir, where is the story?” Usually it is a “Sir,” and this time it was Felmer Prince. “Look Around You!”

I mocked: “I defy you to find anything more stirring than old Sam Peters, driving a moth-eaten mule to the mill.”

But I retreated behind the gate and barred it upon the “human heart,” retorting that if the organ disturbed me as it did some people I should confine my conversation to “Yes” and “No.”

“You are sufficiently expert in the use of the negative,” said Felmer, switching at a dead brier, and I proceeded: “As for ‘looking within,’ when Martha and I reach the homicidal point I take a walk.”

“How many subscriptions have you gotten for that confounded thing, Enid?” he asked, abruptly. I temporized.

p. 14“Not the place!” he broke in. I asked him, as a man and a neighbor, if he thought that any sane tenant would invest in a left-over colonial, with roof leaking, paint off, shutters hanging; populated by generations of bats, and with a frog pond beside which Poe’s Raven was a pæan of joy?

“Except beauty,” he added. I clung to the gate’s bars, my brow upon my hands, and pain shaking my heart.

“And I’m a fool about it!” I said, miserably. “Every mossy old flagstone, and the very wizardry of its black woods against the sky, means me. It is psychic with inherited memories.”

“The ivory Buddha and the Mercury, at the Collectors’ International Exposition opened up in town. Now is my chance.” He nodded.

I reminded him that the vice president was Cary Penwick, a cousin of my own, the fear and fascination of childhood’s idolatry. Prince said rather gloomily that he had never heard me mention this cousin, which was not surprising; the last time I saw Cary Penwick he was a wild boy of fourteen, with hair in his eves and a brain full of adventurous mischief. I was an imaginative child of eight years, and memory’s tenderest association with Cary was a mutual and unappeased hunger.

“We roasted corn at the field’s edge and climbed the roof to steal bricks out of the chimney, to build the oven.” I marched on, with Cary borne banner-like before, to relate how the poor boy’s father had p. 15been the family skeleton, grandma’s black sheep son, smirched with disgrace, who died in Paris. Finally, Cary’s mother’s family had sent him off to school, from which he consistently ran away, and we never saw him again. He had vowed that one day he would return— At Prince’s laugh, I ended haughtily: “To get even with me for kicking him, when he carried me dripping from the frog pond. I remember that he slapped me. Now, the papers call him a famous collector, and I am sure Cary will help me dispose of the things to advantage.”

Prince dug wells in the mud with his stick. “Of course, Enid, being a relative—but it is safer always to have the opinion of more than one before coming to a settlement.”

This being her perennial, I stuck them on the fender and drank tea, while Martha hovered, hen-like and solicitous. “Did you get any, miss?”

As on preceding afternoons, I explained that “The World at Home” did not drag subscribers in with a seine.

“You know that I got one last week, Martha, but the people look for me now. Poor Mr. Petty was at the gate with a flaming sword. I mean, the shovel.”

“Obviously not. I let sleeping Pettys lie, since he put me out of the house as ‘them agents.’”

“Eight sticks, some fence rails and three p. 16barrels,” chanted Martha, to the wood-basket on the hearth.

“And the last timber sold for the mortgage,” I ruminated. “How’s the caravansary: the food, O faithful Achates? I can eat less.”

“For the land’s sake, don’t, Miss Enid! You don’t weigh more’n a sparrow now. It’s a long road that’s got no turnin’, but joy cometh in the mornin’, as the hymn says.” Martha stood over me, her hands under her apron, her little shawl crossed and tied behind. “There’s some corn meal left—”

“And you call it low rations!” I rebuked. “I’ll bet my hard-earned subscription that your grandfather wasn’t a highwayman, Martha.”

“My soul, no, miss! There wasn’t nothin’ of the kind in our family. He was a elder.”

“I feared so. There is nothing of the pirate concealed about you, else you’d not be toasting starvation with half a ham and a pound of rice in reserve. You and Dr. Prince could do ensemble work as star pessimists. Now, nature contrived me in a perverse and whimsical mood. Give me a black night and a star’s twinkle, and I’ll dig for doubloons; a red sunset and a dark woods converts me into a doughty knight, ready to hew his way through the thorny hedge of the world! Eight sticks and half a ham! Woman, we’re good for flood or barricade.”

“And there’s that there Duchess, Miss Enid, sittin’ in there in a gold frame, not doin’ no good to nobody. The collector gentleman said it would bring its price, miss.”

I came to earth with a thud, and retrod the battlefield peopled by ghosts of past encounters. The Fierienti Duchess, my grandmother’s great-great-grandmother, had been the family mascot for generations. Cary Penwick alone, as grandma’s last surviving male relative, should have the responsibility of the Laughing Duchess.

“But, don’t forget it’s yours, Miss,” Martha held on. “Your grandma says, ‘Martha,’ she says, ‘take care of her always, and keep the Duchess dusted!’ ‘I will, ma’am,’ says I, ‘long as there’s breath in my veins!’ says I. ‘Tenny rate, Miss Enid, there’s that there Chinese idol settin’ on his heels, lookin’ enough like Wung Loo at the laundry to be his brother—”

I admitted the possibility, but was determined to submit the Fierienti only to the first authority among collectors.

And, at that moment, with the ringing of the telephone, the unexpected stepped in as stage manager, and gave me a protracted performance for twenty-four hours.

p. 18“I guess Dr. Prince’s ringin’ to see if we’re all right for the night,” speculated Martha, who invariably gambled upon a letter before opening it.

“Suppose you go up to town tomorrow, Enid, and consult Penwick,” came Prince’s kind voice. “We are instructed to catch opportunity by the forelock. And, if you want me to go along—”

“Collecting becomes an unmoral science,” he went on. “Knowing your incredible enthusiasms—”

“—Your incredible enthusiasms, you should not take the antiques with you. Let a collector come out and value them.”

As I had a vision of starting with eight inches of Buddha and returning with five hundred cash, I demurred, but he held his point, and finally I capitulated, and for peace at any price agreed to telephone him which train to meet. In the morning, I covered the two miles to the station with the elation of the adventuress who casts her last two dollars on the roulette of the railroad, and draws a possible fare to fortune.

In the exposition building, I went from office to committee rooms, only to discover that the vice president was away for the day, and not expected to return until evening, and, having dropped forty degrees mentally, I sat at the end of a corridor, killing time upon the pretense of examining a telephone register. Three delegates, obviously wined and lunched, halted near, talking.

“Yes, yes, smart chap,” said number one, “but keen on the main chance. Ever hear the story of old Mrs. Mace’s Romney? Old Mrs. Mace, widow p. 19of his friend, owned a great Romney. He was hard on its track and sent an agent, who valued it, as a good copy, at two hundred. The old lady indignantly refuses. The collector goes off to Mexico to investigate the Talahiti excavations, but sends a second agent, who declares it to be worth all of three hundred. The old lady, finally, at the cud of everything, sells. The Romney disappears. When her money goes, the old lady in despair dies. Now, his Romney sells high in the thousands. Not a nice story, what?”

The chorus admitted that it was not, and I sat petrified, and thankful that I had a relative among the elect. Number two spoke:

“There is big betting on his wager with Dantrè. He swears to better Dantrè’s exhibits with a gem that will knock them into cockles. Says he can produce a genuine original Fierienti.”

“Piffle!” exclaimed number three. “There were two Fierientis, the Laughing Duchess, destroyed in the great fire of London, and its copy, made by Fierienti, now in the Metropolitan.”

Arguing this point they passed on and I sat with face bent over the book, and with thought rushing tumultuously. My picture, at Brookchase, was the original Fierienti, the copy of which was in the Metropolitan. Of this there had never been a doubt; the Chevalier de Russy, member of the French Academy, had vouched for it, when on a visit to grandma. Besides, I had its records. Who, then, was “he”? And where could “he” find another original Fierienti?

I was on my feet to follow and find out, when Prince’s words swung back to me: “Knowing your incredible enthusiasms—” I sank back, crushing p. 20down impulse, and then, under a desperate desire for action, gave his number to the local exchange, and entered booth number four.

Inside the booth, through the blurred reflection of my own image upon the glass, I discerned the outline of a man, in the adjoining booth: a smooth, dark head bent upon a slender hand, above which was visible an odd cufflink, two swastikas in red Roman gold. My call was answered by Prince’s old housekeeper.

“This is Miss Legree,” I said. Then came Prince’s voice: “What luck, Enid?”

“None,” I replied. “Penwick is away for the day, and I am glad that I left the Fierienti at home, although I am eager to solve a mystery. I overheard something about another Fierienti, whereas I know that there is no other. I will be at Brookchase by the four o’clock express, but can walk to the gate at the crossroads.”

Prince laughed, and as I rang off I clearly heard the voice of the man in the adjoining booth, repeating his number. He, in turn then, must have overheard me. Dismissing this as irrelevant, I went to the station and waited morosely until the afternoon express bore me back to the realization of being the poorer by one railroad fare.

“If a woman loses an eye or has a toothache it is quite intelligible,” I resented. “But if she collapses from nerves, or stares nothingness in the face, men tell her not to worry. I shall write to Cary Penwick tomorrow, and hand the Laughing Duchess over to him. He may sell it for what he can get.”

p. 21Prince flicked the colt to a trot, and said: “Better go slow. I’ve heard some queer things about collectors.”

He jerked the reins abruptly: “What of it? There was an old Mrs. Mace in our home town who owned a Romney. Jove! I’d forgotten all about that. Why—” he stopped short, his brows drawn sharply into a frown. I related the story I had heard, but added that all collectors were not pickpockets. Prince, however, drove in thoughtful silence. “I wish you’d let me do more for you,” he began at the gate. But I ran up the path, laughing back at him.

At seven o’clock the unexpected again rang the telephone, and thought instantly visualized the voice as fat, florid and fed. The revolution was therefore complete when it said: “Cousin Enid, this is Cary Penwick. I hope you remember me. . . . Yes, my dear girl, twenty-five years! You would not recognize me.”

“Oh, but I should!” I cried, happily. “A dark-eyed boy with his hair in his eyes, and a brain set on adventure. . . . But your voice does not in the least sound like you. Do come out and let me see you.”

He assured me that such had been his intention, but an official banquet and a directors’ meeting intervened. Finally, it was decided that he should motor out after the banquet, and remain at Brookchase for the night. “Do not wait up for me. Your man can meet me. I shall be there by twelve,” he said.

Having recovered from the natural effects of p. 22hearing that there was no man, he added: “By the way, Enid, I seem to remember that your grandmother had some quaint old things. Were there not several paintings and a carving or two? Trifles probably, but I might help you do something with them.”

“Trifles! Why, Cary, surely you remember the Laughing Duchess? It has been the family treasure for generations, that and the Mercury. It is about these things that I want particularly to consult you,” I replied.

“Well, well,” he said, tolerantly, “I vaguely recall the piece. A very nice copy, no doubt, of Fierienti’s Duchess.”

“Copy!” I cried. “Indeed, it is the original from which Fierienti made his copy. I can prove it from grandma’s records. It is the Fierienti thought to have been destroyed in the London fire.”

“I will have a look at it, Enid. I hate to disillusion you, but old ladies attach exaggerated value to their treasures. No doubt your grandmother believed in it.”

“Surely, surely,” he continued cheerfully, “but the things are yours, my dear girl, and it occurred to me as an opportunity now for you to raise a little something on them.”

He rang off, and I sat with my head in my hands. The Fierienti a copy! I could not credit it. In spite of the disappointment which the mirage of a fortune almost invariably disguises, this alluring, laughing little figure’s identity had been family history. Three centuries had staked p. 23their faiths upon it. Yet, Cary Penwick was an expert. . . . I paced the floor, assuring myself that even experts were not infallible; the Chevalier de Russy was an authority, whereas Cary had been but a careless boy when he saw the Fierienti. My mercurial spirit soared upward again; I refused to believe the worst until confronted by it; then I would surrender gracefully. I ran to tell Martha of the guest’s coming, and found her poised, Mahomet-like, between the ether of joy and the mundane condition of the larder.

“There’s enough coffee for one, with corn muffins, rice fritters and broiled ham—”

“If he asks for truffles, serve the Buddha; if for partridge, bring on the Mercury!”

“Eight sticks and two barrels,” chanted Martha, “and I say it’s the Lord who sent him here at this time. Maybe he’ll buy that there Duchess at your price, miss. But, I can’t heat up the library: it would take the whole woodshed. Many’s the time, when Mr. Cary wasn’t but ten year old, he would climb up on them shelves and pitch the books down on me. And eat! Anything this side of a tin can that boy could eat.”

The living room at Brookchase was early Victorian. Its threadbare, flowered carpet, high cornices, brass fender and firedogs, with long mirror over them, its harpbacked chairs, and Dickens at Gadshill, were free of more modern innovation than a brass lamp and the crashing contrast of a telephone.

By nine o’clock three of the precious logs crackled on the andirons, and grandma’s armchair was drawn before them. On various pretenses Martha peered in the door, like the prompter in p. 24the wings, at every few revolutions of the minute hand, and latterly found the house owner before the mirror, adjusting a stray lock of hair.

“That gray does become you, Miss Enid, if ’tis your grandma’s made down, you being so straight and slim. But you didn’t put her pin on. That weepin’ willer is a grand piece!”

This worshipful object was the cameo of a lachrymose female playing the harp over a mortuary urn. “Yet, I don’t know but them amber beads has more style!” added Martha. I assured her that unless Mr. Cary had changed beyond belief, he would be as impervious to beads as to sackcloth; and at the moment a motor horn sounded in the lane.

“He has come out early!” I cried, catching up a candle and lighting it, while Martha opened the outer door, like the warden of a castle, sending a beam of light straight into the eyes of a tall, slender man on the threshold.

“Cary! Cary Penwick!” I cried, drawing him into the firelight’s glow, where he stood, smiling a little behind a dark, Van Dyke beard, and blinking a little behind horn-rimmed glasses. Martha hovered with: “Are your feet dry, Mr. Cary? I’d best be bringin’ your grandma’s cordial!”

“How good of you to leave the banquet early,” I said, conscious now that an intent, but veiled, gaze was studying me.

“I left it as the lesser attraction,” he said, in a reserved voice that gave me a sense of baffled surprise.

“Why, you do not in the least resemble your voice over the telephone!” I told him. “Telephones are so misleading.”

“Rather fat and—clubby,” I confessed; “but you are really like my childhood’s vague dream-knight,” I laughed, as Martha reappeared with cordial, in infinitesimal glasses. Inside the door she lingered.

“What of the old Deacon, Mr. Cary? He died, of course, poor creature! A body couldn’t help bein’ fond of him, for all his ways.”

“The Deacon, of course”—he looked absently in his glass. “Well, his habits killed him, after a while. He drank too much, you know.”

“Then it wasn’t hydrophobia, sir? That was a blessing! I never seen a dog more devoted than the Deacon was to you, Mr. Cary!” Martha closed the door, and my guest stood on the hearth rug, smiling gravely, but with an expression best described as a listening face. Glancing from ivory Buddha to winged Mercury, his look returned to me, and lingered, as in indecision.

“You are looking for the Fierienti,” I smiled back; “I am immune to the wiles of collectors.”

“But you must see grandma’s last portrait first. Brookchase remains primitive enough for candles.” I held one under the picture above the mirror. “The Chevalier de Russy sketched her in oils, to preserve what he called the expression ‘angelique,’ and afterwards sent me this from France. The eyes always follow one with understanding. See how they smile upon you, Cary! As though she knew that you had fulfilled her pride and faith, and had become the honorable man she had aimed to make you in spite—” I stopped. His eyes were upon mine, in the glass, with profound questioning. “In spite of all,” I ended.

p. 26“In spite of all!” he repeated, drawn to grandma’s look, and although aware that when a skeleton is safely locked in its closet, it is wise to lose the key, I felt the moment to be surcharged with unspoken confidence.

“You remember that she would not admit inheritance to be a menace to you, and held that a man’s character lay in his own hands.”

“You mean that because my father happened to be—a rascal, I could successfully live over the effects?” he asked, impersonally; but the question in his eyes caused me to motion him to the easy chair, and I sat beside him.

Prince calls me half irrepressible pagan, and Prince has an aggravating way of winning out; but there are moments when nothing more romantic than the protective hen seems uppermost. Therefore, I attribute the hour which followed to the subconsciousness, groping to assert its right of divination. Back of his impersonality lay an expression of profound solitariness, an appeal as impassioned as it was naïve: quickly masked, but revealing some dumb tragedy of soul. The source mattered nothing to me. Words from a modern philosopher swam through my thoughts: “All tormented souls are not in Inferno. They sit beside us, smile in our faces, devoured by the flame of present torture. Reach to them the drop of cold water.”

Imagination’s shuttle began to spin its swift, silent threads around this aloof personality, and I spoke without restraint of grandma’s enduring, pervasive spirituality, and of his boyhood’s promise. Gradually, then eagerly, response came, his restraint unveiling boyishly under the luxury of sympathy. He talked glowingly of Italy, of p. 27unconfessed adventure in Egypt, of wandering and wonder in Sahara, of unexplained mystery in India. Conversationally, his proved to be a sentient comprehension, finely imaginative and suggestive, and momentarily revealing an unsuspected, dual side, alien to the wild boy that I had known in childhood. At last, I said:

“Forgive me, but experiencing and appreciating life as you do, is it not remarkable that you have not married?”

“No. Some are born to be units,” he paused, “and the women I have known have not been like you.”

“Ah, now you shall see the Laughing Duchess!” I returned, rising for the candle.

“It has been an unusual hour for me. You have caused me to forget time and errand. But, now I must look at your things and go.”

I reminded him of his promise to remain for the night at Brookchase, and he cast a wistful look around the room, but repeated:

Feeling baffled, yet mentally exhilarated, I went into the adjoining library, but the cold draft blew out my candle. Groping my way back, with the little picture, I was arrested by the scene in the room beyond. My guest stood with arms folded and face lifted to grandma’s portrait, as though, in a tense moment, he were asking an impassioned question and receiving a benedictory answer. When I entered, he turned to examine the Mercury through his glass, and presently said:

“This is undoubtedly a genuine Benvenuto, Miss Legree. I believe your fortune lies here!”

I reminded him that grandma owned only originals, and related the history of the Fierienti; how it had been painted by the great Italian for the queen, who was godmother to the little Laughing Duchess; how it came into England with the eldest son of the duchess, and thence into France with a grandson, an émigré from the Revolution, who was grandma’s father.

“It was her treasure, but you, yourself, prevented us from making a fatal mistake,” I smiled back to the luring laughter of the picture. “She needed money once, almost as badly as—” I stopped. In his bladelike glance of comprehension, quickly sheathed, lay the perception of a forlorn hope in the shape of half a ham and eight sticks of wood. “As many do,” I added, tritely. “The mortgage was due and I suggested selling this picture, but the sons of the family had owned it, and she wished to wait for your coming, that yours might be the decision. You may call it an old lady’s over-scrupulous sense of loyalty, but I think it very sweet. She sold, instead, the companion to the Buddha, and left the Duchess to me. Now, I can, in a measure, fulfill her wish. Sell the bronze and ivory, Cary, but do as you will about the Laughing Duchess.”

I put the picture in his hands, and he sat under the lamp examining it with an expert’s eagerness. At last he said:

“I believe this to be the original Fierienti. Will you trust me with it, irrespective of relationship?”

I said that I would trust him with anything, and he smiled, gravely, and took out pen and p. 29check-book. “I must feel that you believe me to be acting for your best interest. I confess that I came with the intention of buying the picture. Its records were hazy where the London fire was concerned, and it is a gem, but the Cellini Mercury must be valued by the committee. I will leave you a deposit to secure both as my property, and you will receive the maximum value after the final estimate is made. But you may withdraw the sale at any time during the coming month, by wiring to the bank upon which this check is drawn.”

“Acting merely upon a personal basis? Not in the least. I am eager to own the things, but will hold them at your disposal for a time.”

“Then they are yours,” I said. “For I confess having intended to sell them to the first collector tomorrow. And probably rue it ever afterwards, like old Mrs. Mace and her Romney.”

“So! You have heard of that nefarious transaction? Well,” he added, cryptically, “you may have cause to thank old Mrs. Mace’s Romney. Justice has a strange, inexplicable way of working out her problems in spite of us.”

“I feel like Cinderella,” I said, my hand in a strong clasp which was folding a check in it. “I do not want you to go, Cary!” For something told me that I should see this brave, elusive personality no more.

“And I astonish myself by not wanting to go,” he said. “This room, this hour, will linger like the perfume of a dream. Adieu, Cinderella!”

His lips touched my hand. A motor horn p. 30sounded sharply. He caught up the antiques and his overcoat; there came a rush of cold air, a door slammed and the motor rolled off. Then a blinding wave swept over consciousness, and for a second I saw two lamp flames instead of one. I caught at the table, and stood helpless with fact hammering the thing upon unwilling reason, for, on the cuff, lifted to thrust into his coat sleeve, I had seen two swastikas, in red Roman gold.

The smooth, dark head, the slender hand, the swastikas, belonged to the man in the adjoining booth who had overheard my conversation with Prince, even to the Brookchase address. Thought, like the wireless, was humming electrically, putting together the sinister puzzle, insisting upon me that I had been robbed. My fortune was gone; and at the same time perverse subconsciousness was whispering: “No! No! No!”

Like the heroine of a movie melodrama, Martha advanced from the door, with face set to tragedy. She held out a newspaper, uttering hoarsely:

The front page was lavishly decorated with the heads of officers of the International Exposition, the center one in large headlines: “Cary Penwick, vice president.” Martha pointed dramatically to the heavy-jowled, baggy-eyed visage, fully illustrating the voice over the wire. She looked over her shoulder fearfully, and around the room, before whispering:

“Oh, he has gone,” I said, hysterically; “quite gone, and everything with him!”

p. 31“I said we’d wake up some mornin’ and find ourselves murdered in our beds on account of that there Duchess!” she wailed. I laughed helplessly; so after all, I was juggled by fate into old Mrs. Mace’s successor! I smoothed out the bit of crumpled paper, under the light, and read it mechanically.

Dantrè! . . . And Dantrè had a wager on with Penwick. . . . And somebody had vowed to exhibit a Fierienti! And Dantrè had cried out about old Mrs. Mace’s Romney! What did it mean? . . . And that heavy, shifty-eyed countenance in the paper. . . . I sprang up, as the telephone again rang, with hope surging upward. It was the voice of the vice president of the Exposition:

“I could not get out tonight, my dear girl. . . . ’Fraid you’d wait up. I’ll see you in the morning.”

The sharp contrast of that voice’s quality enhanced the memory of the other. I thanked him, and proceeded to play the game.

“A Cellini? Oh, my dear girl, that is nonsense! No doubt, though, yours is a nice little imitation that ought to bring you as high as fifty dollars.”

“Martha,” I said, breathlessly, “something tells me that we are on the brink of a fortune.”

Martha shook her head. “You always have p. 32been, Miss Enid,” she said. But I went to bed with a sense of elation and fearlessness, prompted by the memory of a voice.

“Are you willing to catch the eight-thirty express, and to stop first and relieve me of a check for forty thousand dollars?” I asked. “Stop, you will hurt the receiver!”

After all, an ideal supplanted is hardly overthrown. I confess, however, to a day of apprehension until the rural free delivery handed me a letter. It was consistently terse:

When I ran to the gate at sunset to hear Prince’s sequel, it was with high heart, for I felt that the day of the lady agent had waned. Martha was joyfully trolling a somber tune in the kitchen; ahead of me was the radiant vision of a new roof, a basket laden for Mrs. Petty, and sticks innumerable in the woodshed. The vision materialized, when Prince gravely placed a bank-book in my hand. His measures had been summary. He went first to Penwick’s hotel, and called him up to say that his estimate of Miss Legree’s antiques was too low; she had sold them.

p. 33“Stick to the past tense, please,” said Prince, briefly. “His language over the wire wasn’t publishable. He is safer at a distance, and I implied as much.”

“Banks conjure by that name. You did a wonderful stroke of business, Enid—for a woman.”

“Dantrè is a Richard Burton for wandering, and an infallible expert. Collectors swear by him. I heard an odd thing about the man today. It seems that Dantrè is not his name. His father was a notorious criminal speculator, and ruined many before he served his time in the penitentiary, Dantrè is equally keen on the trail of tricksters in collecting, but the disgrace made a recluse of him. He has gone again, and his agent was placing the Fierienti on exhibition today. I’ve no doubt that he turned up from the end of the earth just to get even with—” Prince hesitated. “You see, Enid, I remembered the name of the collector who bought old Mrs. Mace’s Romney. I hated to tell you. It was Cary Penwick.”

But memory swung back to a firelit hour and a dark, listening face upon a slender hand, with two swastikas—

p. 34LONG, LONG AGO

When the brakeman swung back the door and with resonant indifference shouted in Esperanto “Granderantal stashun,” Galbraithe felt like jumping up and gripping the man’s hand. It was five years since he had heard that name pronounced as it should be pronounced, because it was just five years since he had resigned from the staff of a New York daily and left to accept the editorship of a small Kansas weekly. These last years had been big years, full of the joy of hard work, and though they had left him younger than when he went, they had been five years away from New York. Now he was back again for a brief vacation, eager for a sight of the old crowd.

When he stepped from the car he was confused for a minute. In the mining camp at present substituted for the former terminal he was green as a tenderfoot. It took him a second to get his bearings, but as soon as he found himself fighting for his feet in the dear old stream of commuters he knew he was at home again. The heady jostle among familiar types made him feel that he hadn’t been gone five days, although the way the horde swept past him proved that he had lost some of his old-time skill and cunning in a crowd. But he didn’t mind; he was here on a holiday, and they were here on business and had their rights. He recognized every mother’s son of them. Neither p. 35the young ones nor the old ones were a day older.

They wore the same clothes, carried the same bundles and passed the same remarks. The solid business man weighted with the burden of a Long Island estate was there; the young man in a broker’s office who pushed his own lawn mower at New Rochelle was there; the man who got aboard at One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street was there. There was the man with the Van Dyke, the man with a mustache, and the fat, smooth-shaven man, and the wives, the sisters and the stenographers of all these. They were just as Galbraithe had left them—God bless ’em.

Swept out upon Forty-second Street, he took a long, full breath. The same fine New York sky was overhead (the same which roofed Kansas) and the same New York sun shone down upon him (even as in its gracious bounty it shone upon Kansas). The thrill of it made him realize as never before that, though the intervening years had been good to him, New York was in his blood. His eyes seized upon the raw, angular buildings as eagerly as an exiled hill man greets friendly mountain peaks. There are no buildings on earth which look so friendly, once a man gets to know them, as those about the Grand Central. Galbraithe noticed some new structures, but even these looked old. The total effect was exactly as he had left it. That was what he appreciated after his sojourn among the younger cities of the West. New York was permanent—as fixed as the pole star. It was unalterable.

Galbraithe scorned to take cab, car or bus this morning. He wanted to walk—to feel beneath his feet the dear old humpy pavement. It did his soul p. 36good to find men repairing the streets in the same old places—to find as ever new buildings going up and old buildings coming down, and the sidewalks blocked in the same old way. He was clumsy at his hurdling, but he relished the exercise.

He saw again with the eyes of a cub reporter every tingling feature of the stirring street panorama, from gutter to roof top, and thrilled with the magic and vibrant bigness of it all. Antlike, men were swarming everywhere bent upon changing, and yet they changed nothing. That was what amazed and comforted him. He knew that if he allowed five years to elapse before returning to his home town in Kansas he wouldn’t recognize the place, but here everything was as he had left it, even to the men on the corners, even to the passers-by, even to the articles in the store windows. Flowers at the florist’s, clothing at the haberdasher’s, jewels at the jeweler’s, were in their proper places, as though during the interval nothing had been sold. It made him feel as eternal as the Wandering Jew. The sight of the completed public library restored him to normal for a moment but, after all, the building looked as though it had been long finished. A public library always does. It is born a century old.

The old Fifth Avenue Hotel was gone, but he wondered if it had ever been. He didn’t miss it—hardly noticed any change. The new building fitted into its niche as perfectly as though it had been from the first ordained for that particular spot. It didn’t look at all the upstart that every new building in Kansas did.

He hurried on to Park Row, and found himself surrounded by the very newsboys he had left. Not p. 37one of them had grown a day older. The lanky one and the lame one and the little one were there. Perhaps it was because they had always been as old as it is possible for a boy to be, that they were now no older. They were crying the same news to the same indifferent horde scurrying past them. Their noisy shouting made Galbraithe feel more than ever like a cub reporter. It was only yesterday that his head was swirling with the first mad excitement of it.

Across the street the door stood open through which he had passed so many times. Above it he saw the weather-beaten sign which had always been weather-beaten. The little brick building greeted him as hospitably as an open fire at home. He knew every inch of it, from the outside sill to the city room, and every inch was associated in his mind with some big success or failure. If he came back as a vagrant spirit a thousand years from now he would expect to find it just as it was. A thousand years back this spot had been foreordained for it. Lord, the rooted stability of this old city! He had forgotten that he no longer had quarters in town, and must secure a room. He was still carrying his dress-suit case, but he couldn’t resist the temptation of first looking in on the old crowd and shaking hands. He hadn’t kept in touch with them except that he still read religiously every line of the old sheet, but he had recognized the work of this man and that, and knew from what he had already seen that nothing inside any more than outside could be changed. It was about nine o’clock, so he would find Hartson, the city editor, going over the morning papers, with his keen eyes alert to discover what had been missed during the p. 38night. As he hurried up the narrow stairs his heart was as much in his mouth as it had been the first day he was taken on the staff. Several new office boys eyed him suspiciously, but he walked with such an air of familiarity that they allowed him to pass unquestioned. At the entrance to the sacred precinct of the city editor’s room he paused with all his old-time hesitancy. After working five years under Hartson and then five years for himself as a managing editor, be found he had lost nothing of his wholesome respect for the man. Hartson’s back was turned when Galbraithe entered, and he waited at the rail until the man looked up. Then with a start Galbraithe saw that this wasn’t Hartson at all.

For a moment Galbraithe believed this was possible, but every scarred bit of furniture was in its place and the dusty clutter of papers in the corner had not been disturbed. The new city editor glanced suspiciously toward Galbraithe’s dress-suit case and reached forward as though to press a button. With flushed cheeks Galbraithe retreated, and hurried down the corridor toward the reportorial rooms. He must find Billy Bertram and get the latter to square him with the new city editor. He made at once for Billy Bertram’s desk, with hand extended. Just beyond was the desk he himself p. 39had occupied for five years. Bertram looked up—and then Galbraithe saw that it wasn’t Bertram at all.

“What can I do for you, old man?” inquired the stranger. He was a man of about Bertram’s age, and a good deal of Bertram’s stamp.

“I was looking for Billy Bertram,” stammered Galbraithe. “Guess he must have shifted his desk.”

He glanced hopefully at the other desks in the room, but he didn’t recognize a face.

“Bertram?” inquired the man who occupied Bertram’s desk. He turned to the man next to him.

“I’ve held down this chair for fifteen months, and before me a chump by the name of Watson had that honor. Can’t go back any farther than that.”

Galbraithe put down his suit case, and wiped his forehead. Every one in the room took a suspicious glance at the bag.

p. 40“That’s all right,” Green encouraged him. “If you have a line in that bag you think will interest us, bring it out. It’s against office rules, but—”

Galbraithe tried to recall if, on his way downtown, he had inadvertently stopped anywhere for a cocktail. He had no recollection of so doing. Perhaps he was a victim of a mental lapse—one of those freak blank spaces of which the alienists were talking so much lately. He made one more attempt to place himself. In his day he had been one of the star reporters of the staff.

By this time several men had gathered around the two desks as interested spectators. Galbraithe scanned their faces, but he didn’t recognize one of them.

“Why, yes,” answered Galbraithe, fumbling for his case. The group watched him with some curiosity, and Harding, the youngest man, scenting a story, pushed to the front. With so many eyes upon him Galbraithe grew so confused that he couldn’t find his card case.

“I’m sure I had it with me,” he apologized. “Remember where you were last night?” inquired Green.

He drew out a card and handed it to Green. The group gathered closer and read it.

“I used to work here,” explained Galbraithe. “I came up on a vacation to see the boys.”

“Nineteen seven,” exclaimed Green, with a low whistle. “You are sure some old-timer. Let’s see—that’s over fifteen hundred days ago. When did you come on?”

“Just before the Spanish War,” answered Galbraithe eagerly. “Hartson sent me to Cuba.”

“Gee,” he exclaimed, “those must have been great days. Why in thunder can’t Taft stir up a little trouble like that? I ran across an old codger at the Press Club once who had been with Dewey at Manila.”

He spoke as Galbraithe might speak of the Crimean War. He pressed the latter for details, and Galbraithe, listening to the sound of his own voice, allowed himself to be led on. When he was through he felt toothless, and as though his hair had turned gray.

“Those were the happy days,” exclaimed Harding. “The game was worth playing then—eh, old man?”

“Yes,” mumbled Galbraithe. “But don’t any of you know what has become of Hartson?”

He looked wistfully about the room to the corner where the exchange editor used to sit.

p. 42“He died last spring,” said Green. “Guess he was the last leaf on the tree.”

“He came on five years ahead of me,” said Galbraithe. “He and I did the barrel murders together.”

Galbraithe looked at Harding to make sure this was not some fool joke. At the time nothing else had been talked of in New York for a month, and he and Haydon had made something of a name for themselves for the work they did on it. Harding was both serious and interested—there could be no doubt about that. That was eight years ago, and it stuck out in Galbraithe’s mind as fresh as though it were yesterday. But what he was just beginning to perceive was that this was so because he had been away from New York. To those living on here and still fighting the old game it had become buried, even as tradition, in the multiplicity of subsequent stories. These younger men who had superseded him and his fellows already had their own big stories. They came every day between the dawn and the dark, and then again between the dark and the dawn. Day after day they came unceasingly, at the end of a week dozens of them, at the end of the month hundreds, at the end of a year thousands. It was fifteen hundred days ago that he had been observing the manifold complications of these million people, and since that time a thousand volumes had been written about as many tragedies enacted in the same old setting. Time here was measured in hours, not years. Only the stage remained unchanged.

Galbraithe stood up, so dazed that he faltered as though with the palsy. Harding took his arm.

p. 43“Steady, old man,” he cautioned. “You’d better come out and have a drink.”

Galbraithe shook his head. He felt sudden resentment at the part they were forcing upon him.

“I won’t,” replied Galbraithe, stubbornly. “I’m going back home, I tell you. And in ten years I’ll be twenty-five years younger than any of you.”

He spoke with some heat. Harding laughed, but Green grew sober. He placed his hand on Galbraithe’s arm.

“I expect he’s younger than any of us,” replied Green, soberly. “He’s measuring time by eternities.”

He moved toward the door, and the entire group stood stock still and without a word saw him go out. He hurried along the narrow corridor and past the city editor’s room. He went down the old stairs, his shoulders bent and his legs weak. Fifteen hundred days were upon his shoulders. He went out upon the street, and for a moment stood there with his ears buzzing. About him swarmed the same newsboys he had left five years before, looking no older by a single day. Squinting his eyes, he studied them closely. There was Red p. 44Mick, but as he looked more carefully he saw that it wasn’t Red Mick at all. It was probably Red Mick’s younger brother. The tall one, the lanky one and the little lame one were there, but their names were different. The drama was the same, the setting the same, but fifteen hundred days had brought a new set of actors for the same old parts. It was like seeing Shakespeare with a new cast, but the play was older by centuries than any of Shakespeare’s.

Peering out the window, he watched the interminable procession on street and sidewalks. He gazed at the raw, angular buildings—permanent and unalterable. Overhead a Kansas sun shone down upon him—the same which in its gracious bounty shone down upon New York.

p. 45THE RIGHT WHALE’S FLUKES

In the old whaling museum on Johnny Cake Hill there is a big room with a fireplace where, on a rainy or stormy day, the whaling captains like to gather; and when storms or cold keep him from his rocking chair on the after deck of his Fannie, Cap’n Mark Brackett climbs the hill to the old museum and establishes himself in a chair before the fire. From the windows you may look down a short, steep street to the piers where great heaps of empty oil casks, brown with the grime of years of service, block the way. Tied up to the piers there may be an old square-rigger, her top hamper removed, and empty so that she rides high in the water and curtsies to every gust; and you will see squat little auxiliary schooners preparing for the summer’s cruising off Hatteras; and beyond these the eye reaches across the lovely harbor to Fair Haven, gleaming in the sun.

The old museum is rich with the treasures of the sea, and this room where the captains like to gather is the central treasure house. An enormous old secretary of mahogany veneer stands against one wall, and in cases about the room you will find old ship’s papers bearing the names of presidents a hundred years dead, pie crimpers carved from p. 46the solid heart of a whale’s tooth, a little chest made by one of the Pitcairn Island mutineers, canes fashioned from a shark’s backbone or the jawbone of the cachalot, enormous old locks, half a dozen careful models of whaling craft with the last rope and spar in place, and the famous English frigate, in its glass case at one side.

I found Cap’n Brackett there one afternoon, in an old chair before the fire, his black pipe humming like a kettle, his stout body relaxed in comfortable ease. He had advised me to read “Moby Dick,” and had loaned me the book; and when I entered, he looked up, a welcoming twinkle in the keen old eyes that lurk behind their ambush of leathery wrinkles, and saw the book in my hand.

I nodded, and drew up a chair beside him, and opened the volume to glance again across its pages and to dip here and there into that splendid chronicle of the hunt for the great white whale. The old man watched me over his pipe, and I looked up once and caught his eye.

“He’s stretching it a bit, of course,” I suggested. “You would never meet the same whale twice, in all the wastes of the Seven Seas.”

One certain method to provoke Cap’n Brackett to narration is to pretend incredulity. I smiled in a wary fashion, and said nothing.

I turned the leaves of the book, and chuckled provokingly, watching covertly the captain’s countenance; and, as I expected, he began presently to tell the story that was in his mind. His gruff old voice ran quietly along; the fire puffed and flared as the wind whistled down the chimney, the snow flurried past the windows and hid the harbor below us. Cap’n Brackett’s voice droned on.

“You never heard of Eric Scarf,” the old man thoughtfully began. “Not more’n three or four men alive now that knew him. He were mate of the Thomas Pownal when I knew him; a big, straight, fiery man, powerful and strong. He came of some Northland breed, with a great shock of yellow hair, and eyes as blue as the sea; but he was not like most Norsemen in being slow of speech and dull of wit. Quick he was; quick to speak, and quick to think, and quick to act; quick to anger, quick to take hurt, and quick to know Joan for the one woman, when she began that v’y’ge on the Thomas Pownal.

“James Tobbey was the captain of the Pownal; Joan was his daughter. She was a laughing girl, always laughing; a child. Her hair was fine-spun and golden, and it curled. When the fog got into it, it kinked into ringlets as crisp as blubber scraps. You wanted to rub them in your hands, and hear them crinkle and crackle between your palms. And her voice, when she laughed, was the same way, crisp and clean and strong; and her eyes were brown. Give a girl light curly hair and dark brown eyes, and any man’s heart will skip a beat or so at seeing her.

p. 48“She used to be everywhere about the ship, always laughing; and little Jem Marvel forever hobbling at her heels. Jem was a baby, a little crippled baby, the son of a sister of Joan’s who had died when Jem was born; and Jem’s father was dead before that, although no one knew it till the Andrew Thomes came back without him, two years after.

“Thomes had been a hard, bitter man; and little Jem took after him. The baby was black—black hair, black eyes, a swart skin; and when he dragged his withered leg about the deck at Joan’s heels, his face worked and grimaced with spleen that was terrible to watch. Maybe six or seven he was then; and for all Joan tended him like a mother, I’ve known him to rip out at her black oaths that would rot a grown man’s lips.

“Cap’n Tobbey kept his eyes away from the boy; but Joan loved the little thing. None but her could bear with him.

“Eric Scarf was the only man aboard that ever tried to win the baby. I’ve seen him work for weeks at some dinkus he was making for the boy, only to have Jem scorn it when it was done. He put six months of whittling into a little model of the Pownal, with every rope in place; and when he gave it to Jem at last, the boy smashed it on the deck, and stamped upon the splinters.

“Eric but laughed. The mate was a hard man with men, quick with them; but with the child he was as gentle as Joan herself.

“He loved Joan. I loved Joan. Every man aboard the Pownal loved the girl; but Eric more than most of us. He sought ways to please her, and when he bungled it, it was a fight with him to p. 49hide his grief. One of the greenies, when the Pownal was but a few days out, bumped against the girl in the waist of the ship at the lurch of a wave; and Eric knocked the man halfway to the fo’c’s’le scuttle with one cuff. But while the greenie was scrambling to his feet, nursing his mouth with one tooth gone, Joan flamed at Eric.

“Eric’s face crimsoned; he whirled to the man. ‘Here,’ he shouted. ‘Forget I’m the mate. Do you want the chance to get even?’

“The man stared affrightedly, then ducked down the scuttle like a rabbit, with Eric glaring after him. But when Eric turned, Joan had gone aft without another word, and he was left to grope for understanding of her.

“Scarf was the strongest, quickest man I ever saw. He was tall and powerful, and built slim and flat like a whalebone spring. He was boiling with his own strength all the time. He suffered for a vent for it; and he trod the deck on his toes like a tiger, his fists swinging, not from any lust for battle so much as from the excess of his own power and vigor.

“I’ve seen him set his hands to tackle, and brush the fo’mast hands aside, and do three men’s work himself for the mere peace and joy it gave him to put forth all his strength for a space; his shoulders and back and arms would knot and swell and bulge with his efforts, and his lungs would shout with gladness at the task.

p. 50“Eric was never still. On deck, where others would lean against the rail with an eye to the ship and their thoughts somewhere off across the water, he was always moving, pacing up and down, climbing into the rigging, shifting this and stirring that, restless like a caged beast. Something drove him. He could not rest. The springs of life and energy in the man would have torn him to bits if you had held him motionless for an hour. He had to move, to act, to do; and when he buffeted the men, it was neither native cruelty nor bullying. It was but the outburst of his own impatient, restless power.

“It was a strange thing to see such a man gentling little Jem Marvel, or wooing the boy to a romp about the deck; and it was strange to see Scarf stand near Joan, watching her, and the muscles in him twitching and straining with the agony of inaction. Eric worshipped Joan; and she bewildered him. He used to plan little pleasant surprises for her, and watch her joy at them and take his reward in watching. He never spoke love to her, never so much as touched her hand unless it might be to help her along the deck when the ship was wallowing; and when the things he planned failed to delight her, a man watching him could see that his very soul was writhing.

“I said Scarf was a quick man, quick of thought and quick of deed. But where Joan was concerned, he was very dull and slow. He never could learn, try as he would, to please her; and his own impotence and his strength combined to drive him to feats which he meant for wooing, but which the girl abhorred.

“He trapped a little sea bird once, and made a tiny cage for it, and left it for her to find; and p. 51when the girl discovered it, she cried out with pity for the captive, and ran on deck with the cage and set the little creature free. Eric Scarf saw her, and she knew it was he who had done it, and pitied him.

“‘I’m really grateful,’ she said, smiling very gently at the big man, ‘but he is so unhappy in a cage.’

“Eric tried to speak, and saw one of the men by the tryworks grinning at him; so he went forward and drove the man with blows to the knight’s heads, and Joan scorned him for days thereafter.

“I’ve seen a cock pa’tridge ruffle his feathers and beat and drum with his wings, all glory and strength and vigor in his wooing; and no doubt the hen liked it. But if the pa’tridge had tried such measures in the courting of a singing thrush, he would only have frighted and dismayed her whom he sought to please. It was so with Eric. His courting would have pleased some women; Joan it but disgusted and disturbed.

“‘Eric Scarf and I were closer friends than you would think; and I knew the big, strong man to be as shy and as easy to take hurt as a child. But it was his way when he was hurt or shamed to strike out at the nearest, and so to those without understanding he seemed a mere bully, cruel and exultant in his strength.

“Lucky for us on the Pownal, Scarf delighted in the whaling. There was no other task in the world so fitted to the man. So strong he was that nothing short of a whale could give him the fierce joy of battle which soothed him. He drove his men as he drove himself, and they either broke under it or became hard-bitten and enduring hands, fit to match him. His boat was always first away; p. 52and he would strike and kill one whale and then another while other officers were content with a single catch. I’ve known him to do what few attempt: to lower at night when moonlight revealed a spout, and make his kill, and tow the fish to the ship by dawn. Cap’n Tobbey never interfered with Eric, for the mate was too valuable; and when the mate’s watch was on deck, he would lower and kill without ever calling the Old Man from his cabin at all.

“I had heard of Scarf before this v’y’ge, but never watched him work before; and many a time I found myself biting my lip and holding the breath in my chest at the daring of him. In any weather short of a gale, he would lower; and once two boats were swamped in lowering before he took the third mate’s and got away—and got the whale.

“With such an officer, and decent luck, a quick voyage was sure; and so it was this time. Before we’d been out two years, the casks were filled, oil was stored in everything that would hold it, and the Old Man gave the word to fly the Blue Peter and put for home. We threw the bricks of the tryworks overboard to lighten ship that much, and struck across the South Pacific, fought our way around the Horn, and took a long slant north’ard toward Tristan.

“There was no place to store more oil if we had it, and we could not try out if we had the blubber; so, though we sighted fish now and then, we let them go—though I could see Eric was fretting at it, and wishing the ship empty again.

“For months now, Eric had been wooing Joan in his own wild, longing way; but the girl would have none of him. He must have known it, and he p. 53bridled his tongue as he could. But the word was bound to come some day; and it came at last when we were rocking in a calm, with an island two or three miles to starboard, and the sun hissing on the sea that sighed and swelled like the bosom of a sleeping woman whose dreams are troubled and disturbed.

“The ship was idle, the men squatting forward in what shade they could discover, and the rigging slatting back and forth as the Pownal rocked on the long swells. Eric had the deck, the Old Man was asleep below, and Joan and the boy, Jem, were sitting aft, the girl sewing at something she held in her lap.

“Scarf, with nothing in the world to do, fretted and paced about, his eyes never leaving her, and a worship in them that all the world could see. The afternoon droned away, the Pownal creaked and swung in the cradle of the sea, and the sun burned down endlessly. Scarf could not bear it. He strode across to where the girl sat; and she looked up at him to see what he had come for, and at the look in his eyes rose quickly to face him, her face setting hard.

“Eric must have seen; but he blundered blindly on. The words came awkwardly. He lifted no hand to touch her. ‘I love you. I love you,’ he said, in a dry, husky voice. ‘I love you. I want you to marry me.’

“Black little Jem looked up at them and, with the quick perception of the child, grinned malignantly. Joan’s face turned white beneath the soft bronze the sun and wind had given her cheeks. She could not help pitying the big man; but she could not love him.

“‘I love you,’ he repeated, as though it were an argument he were advancing.

“‘I’m sorry,’ she told him again. ‘I’m sorry to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. But I don’t love you.’

“His eyes were quivering and trembling like the raw flesh of a wound, but he stood impassively before her, staring down into her eyes, searching there for something he would never find. Little Jem chuckled, and the sound broke the spell upon the man. He turned rigidly away; and as it always was with him when his heart was torn, his great body clamored for action. His fingers bit at his palms.

“And then one of the boat steerers, standing in the waist, uttered a low ejaculation; and Eric turned and saw the man was pointing toward the shore, where a misty spout was just dissolving against the dark background of the cliffs that dipped to the water there.

“It was the vent Eric wanted for the torment that was tearing him. Without a word, he leaped to his boat; and his men, well trained, came tumbling at his heels. In a minute’s time, Eric had caught up some gear that had been removed from the boats when the fishing was finished, and gave the order to lower.

“Joan came softly to him. ‘You are not going to kill the whale, are you?’ she asked. ‘We have no need for it.’

“Eric did not hear her; for the boat had split the water and was bobbing there below him, and he dropped with his men and in a moment was p. 55away. Joan, her eyes burning angrily, watched him go; and presently she brought the glass to see what was to come.

“The whale inshore was lying quietly, but Eric sent the boat along as though his life hung on success. He drove the men till the oars bent like whip-shafts; he drove them and he drove himself; and they ran fair upon the creature before they realized their speed. Then, at Eric’s cry, the boat steerer in the bow leaped up and drove the harpoons home, and the boat sheered off while Eric changed places with the man.

“They had struck a cow whale, a right whale, with a calf not a week old tucked under her fin; and the little thing lay there, lifting its tiny spout against its mother’s side, its fins feebly fanning.

“A cow whale is the easiest of game; and there is no sentiment in the whaling ships. If the Pownal had been empty, she would have been counted clear gain. With the Pownal full to brimming, this that Eric was doing was mere murderous slaughter.

“When Eric saw that he was cheated of the battle he had craved, a fury seized him. He shouted hoarsely to his boat steerer, and the man swung them in alongside the whale. The great mother had not stirred, save for a trembling shudder of her whole bulk when the irons seized upon her. The calf was fighting to escape, but the mother’s great fin pinioned it against her side, soothingly, assuringly, as though she promised it should be safe there.

“Eric lifted his lance and pierced the mother, driving home the steel for six feet into the great body; and he withdrew it, and prodded the vitals of the whale again and again, with a desperate energy, p. 56pouring out the fire of his own strength in his efforts.

“It was like piercing butter with a hatpin; and this dull acquiescence on the creature’s part only whetted Eric’s blind rage. When at the last the great flukes lifted once, his heart leaped with the hope that at the end there might come the struggle and the opposition for which he hungered; but agony had lifted the flukes, and the bursting heart of the mother brought them gently down again, never even disturbing the little creature at her side.

“She died; a thrust killed the calf. The boat sheered out; and then the boat steerer shouted a warning from the stern.

“Eric whirled and saw a great bull whale just emerging from the depths; and the whale headed for them furiously.

“I do not say the creature was the dead cow’s mate. It would not be strange if this were so; but it need not be asserted. I do not say the bull attacked the boat. He was badly gallied, he was running blindly.

“But whatever the explanation, he charged them; and Eric shouted triumphantly at thought that here was the adversary he had desired.

“The boat steerer swung the boat about to meet the onrush; and Eric snatched a harpoon. They swerved out of the path of the bull. As he roared past them in a smother of foam, Eric sent the harpoon home.

“But next instant the smashing flukes struck them, and the boat’s whole bottom was driven away. Eric chopped the loose line in time to save them; and in ten seconds from the appearance of the bull, they were to their necks in water, the boat beneath them.

p. 57“The bull charged on and disappeared. I lowered and went after the men in the water; and we got them aboard. Eric was reacting from his fury now; he was shamed at what he had done; and he looked back once to the body of the cow, about which sharks were already fighting, with something like apology in his eyes.

“The men were talking. ‘Did ye see the cross on the bull’s head?’ the tub oarsman asked; the steerer assented.

“The others nodded; and Eric looked at me and said quietly: ‘The old bull was marked.’

“It was when we were all aboard again, and Eric had changed to dry garments, that Joan came up to where he stood with me. Her eyes were blazing; and little Jem, at her heels, was chuckling blackly.

“The big man, uneasy, shy, not knowing where to turn, saw little Jem beside him; and he turned to the boy and caught the lad under his arms, and swung him high in the air. ‘Up you go!’ he cried, trying to laugh.

“He meant only to start a romp—anything to divert the girl’s searing scorn; but the malignant spirit of little Jem converted the movement into black tragedy. The child screamed indignantly, and kicked down at Eric’s upturned face with his sound foot.

“Eric was standing a yard from the rail, his p. 58back to it. The kick in his face made him lose his balance, and he staggered backward, and before I could stir, with the boy extended above his head, he had fallen overboard.

“Joan screamed; and together we leaped to the rail. I reached for a coil of rope. The two had sunk in a smother of bubbles; and in the second that we waited for Eric to fight his way to the surface again, a sinister shadow shot like fire along the ship’s side, and I saw the flicker of a silver-white belly, and heard Joan scream again.

“The water turned crimson; and then Eric came to the surface with empty hands. He dove instantly, furiously; and I got a boat into the water. Eric broke to the surface again, his face convulsed with the anguish that tore him; and two of us grabbed him and dragged him, fighting, into the boat.

“‘Let go, let go,’ he screamed, and struck us back. ‘Let me go. I can get him.’

“He was mad; and we caught him, and he broke and dropped, sobbing, in the bottom of the boat. I saw that one of his arms was rasped raw by the shark’s rough skin.

“Joan met him like a fury when he stepped upon the deck again, and I thought she would strike him. He stood before her, drooping and crushed; and the girl caught herself. But I heard the word she said.

“‘Thrice murderer!’ she told him softly. ‘Thrice murderer! A mother and child—and now my baby! Oh curse you, curse you! May you be always accursed until you die!’

“She held him for a moment, and then turned away from the man; and Eric Scarf drooped sick p. 59and weak where he stood, until I dragged him below to tend his wounded arm.”

The old man paused, and stared into the fire; and when I had waited fruitlessly for another word from him, I asked:

He looked up at me quietly. “No,” he said. “No—that is not the whole of it.”

Still he did not continue, and so I prompted him. “You said the whale was seen four times,” I suggested.

He nodded; and so drifted into his story again. “Aye, four times,” he agreed. “The old bull with the cross upon his skull. Four times. I’ve but told the first.”

He puffed silently for a little, shifted his great bulk in the chair, rose and crossed to the window to look down toward the harbor, and returned at last to me.

“Joan kept to her cabin much, from that day,” he said. “She kept to her cabin; and Eric Scarf did his tasks and held aloof from her. We came smoothly northward, and presently were at our pier, unloading the casks that filled our holds. Eric had slowly recovered something of the old strength and power that moved him; and though he avoided the girl, and though I could see how he suffered and what agony he was enduring, he kept a steady face to the men, and drove them as he always drove.

“Cap’n Tobbey was a quiet, stern man; but he was just. He blamed Eric for taking out the boat, but he knew the other for what it was, an accident of Fate; and when time came for the next cruise, Eric was too good a man to stay ashore. He shipped as mate, and I was second mate again.

p. 60“This time, Joan stayed behind. She had had enough of the sea for a lifetime, she told me; and from a girl, she was become a woman. Lovely as ever, her laughter as sweet and crisp as a spring wind, yet there was a depth in her that had not been there before, and at times her eyes shrank as though they gazed upon awful, tragic happenings.

“She was on the pier the day we sailed; and I saw Eric Scarf watching her with the hopeless longing in his eyes that tears at the vitals of a man.

“There was a shadow over the mate from the beginning of that cruise. Any man could see it; and the fo’mast hands used to watch him, and whisper among themselves. Outwardly he was the same; strong and quick and proud, alive, alert, his body uplifted with the energy it housed. He trod the decks lightly, he moved with the quick precision of an animal; and he plunged into his work in a fashion that would have worn another man to threads.

“A sprinkling of our old crew was aboard; so Eric’s story was no secret. But it was never mentioned by him or in his presence. He seemed to find a joy in his toil that allowed him to forget; and the man’s eyes brightened and his cheeks set in their old firm, fine lines as we drove southward. There is no better index to a man than the cheeks of him. Flabbiness of body or soul shows quickest there, and there all other vices and all virtues first appear. Eric’s face was neither gaunt nor round, but it had a chiseled perfection of contour that was like a song.

“There is a deal of superstition that hangs about the sea; and a whaler has her share of it, and p. 61more. But it is never allowed to interfere with the work at hand. And so if the men wished Eric off the ship, they kept their wishes to themselves; and if they were reluctant to serve in his boat, they hid this reluctance. For Eric was a quick man, quick to anger, with a quick fist to him. In his place, I should have moved tremblingly, fearful of a blow from behind during the watch on deck at night. But Eric strode fearlessly about the ship; and none laid hand to him.

“The sea is a grim thing, and inscrutable. No man can look out across its smooth bosom day and day, and remember the vast multitude of lives which go their way beneath that smiling surface, without a sense of the mystery and wonder of it all. The sea in a storm may be terrible and appalling, when its broad expanse is cut up into myriad gulleys and mountains in which the ship is lost as in a labyrinth; but to me it has always been even more terrible and menacing when it is calm. In time of storm, its fury rages without curb; the worst is with you. But when the sea is quiet, all its energies hidden, it is like the smiling mask of Fate which conceals unguessed and unpredicted blows.

“Thus, when we sailed southward over smooth and smiling seas, I fell victim to unrest that harassed me. I rose and looked abroad each day with eyes that searched eagerly for a threat of the fate that seemed impending; and even as I watched the sea, in like manner did I watch Eric Scarf, to discover if I could what it was that hung so threateningly over the man’s smiling head.

“If Eric felt any uneasiness, he gave no sign at first. He was as he had always been, confident, and quick, and strong. But the day came when a p. 62hint was given us, just as the impalpable atmospheric changes reveal through the glass the approach of storm.

“We had sighted whales more than once, and made a fair beginning on the long task ahead of us; and then one day in the South Atlantic, the boats were lowered for a pod that lay far off to southward. Eric got fast, and the third mate likewise. But the whale I had chosen as my goal took alarm, and whirled toward us, and then fled before our irons could reach him.

“There had been time, however, for us to see upon his head a dull scar, in the form of a cross, and I heard a cry from Eric’s boat, that was just getting fast, and turned to see Eric staring toward the spot where the old bull had disappeared.

“Then I remembered what the men had said about the whale which had stove Eric’s boat after the kill on the other voyage; and when we were aboard again, the cutting-in done, and the tryworks boiling and smoking, I was not surprised that Eric came to me.

“‘Mark,’ he whispered huskily, ‘was there a cross on the bull that got away?’

“I nodded. ‘On his head.’ I said. ‘An old scar, gouged into the blubber.’

“I saw his jaw set hard. ‘It can’t be!’ he exclaimed, half to himself. I said nothing; and he looked at me a moment later, with an agony of doubt in his eyes.

“‘Well, what of it. Eric?’ I asked, knowing, but thinking that to talk might ease the man.

“He flushed and stammered like a child. ‘Her curse is on me,’ he declared. ‘The old bull is going to wait for me!’

“Eric looked forward where the men were working, and looked aft, and then out across the sea; and then he looked at me at last with an appeal in his eyes. ‘Are you calling me “murderer” as she did, Mark?’ he asked.

“I shook my head. ‘She’s but a girl,’ I told him. ‘There was no need of killing the cow. But what matter for that? And the other—was no one’s blame.’

“His hand gripped my arm till I winced. ‘You mean it?’ he begged, hungrily.

“I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Forget it all,’ I urged. ‘No harm will come.’

“‘It is not that I’m afraid,’ he told me swiftly; and I saw that I had roused him as I hoped to do.

“His eyes flamed. ‘I fear nothing, except myself,’ he exclaimed. ‘But I hear her word always; and I cannot bear it, Mark.’

“Before more could be said, Cap’n Tobbey came toward us; and Eric laughed as though at some jest of mine. His laughter was not a pleasant thing to hear, and I would have wished to reassure the man. But thereafter he gave me no further opportunity.

“I could see the thing was on his mind through the days that followed. He could not forget it; and he took to standing watch at the masthead p. 64when there was no need. I asked him once why he did this.

“He shook his head, and smiled grimly. ‘No fear,’ he said. ‘He’s about us.’

“And Eric was right; for the day we were finishing the trying out, the scarred bull was sighted again, this time so near the ship that his mark could be discerned through the glass as he rose to spout. Eric was aloft; and he tumbled down the rigging like a madman, and lowered; but there was a fog, and in the fog the bull was lost for that time.

“Eric was never a man to fear or avoid conflict, even with the forces of the universe itself; and after this third appearance of the scarred bull whale, he scarce slept at all, but held himself and his boat’s crew ready for battle the day long. He was aloft from dawn till dark, endlessly scouring the seas for a spout that would reveal the creature which personified to him the thing he was fighting. He became silent, thoughtful; and strength flowed into him and nerved him to a hard and efficient readiness. He was like an athlete in training for a contest, every nerve and muscle tuned.

“We sighted the scarred whale for the fourth time on a Sunday morning; a day when the sea was just rippled by the gentlest breezes, when the sun shone warmly and comfortingly upon the world, when the boats danced upon the waves with a soothing and caressing motion. The water was blue as turquoise, and the sky above it; and the two met at p. 65the horizon with the sea’s deeper blue below the sky’s, and the whitecaps gleaming like silver in the wind.

“It was not Eric who sighted the whale, but one of the men on the fore-t’gallant crosstrees; and his long ‘Blo-o-o-o-o-ow’ came droning down to us on the decks and snatched each one to his post like machinery. Cap’n Tobbey turned his glass on the distant spouts, and ordered the boats away; and Eric’s hard and seasoned men made his boat swing ahead of the others instantly, and steadily increase the lead.

“There was no way of knowing whether or no this was the old scarred bull; but his spout told us it was a right whale, and not a sperm whale. Nevertheless, either Eric knew it was his enemy he went to meet, or else he was eager to discover whether it was or no, for he drove his men unsparingly, and was more than a quarter of a mile ahead of us when he reached the monster, and ran alongside.

“Over the water came to us the sound of his shouted command: ‘Let ’im have it!’ And I saw the boat steerer, standing in the bow with his knee in the clumsy-cleat, put all the strength of back and arms into the stroke, and snatch the second iron and send that home even as the whale leaped forward.

“While Eric and the boat steerer were changing places, the great whale up-ended ponderously, his flukes lifting gently toward the sky full thirty feet clear of the water, and slid down out of sight. He had sounded; and I spurred my men to harder efforts so that we might be at hand to help if need arose.

p. 66“Ahead of us, the boat lay idle on the waves. I could see Eric in the bow, his hand on the line where it ran through the notch, bending to peer down into the depths; and I could see he was putting a strain upon the line, for the bow was down and almost dipping in the waves.

“Then suddenly the bow bobbed up, the strain relaxed; and Eric bent further over in an effort to pierce the depths below him. The whale was coming up; and if by chance he came up under the boat, the fight would be done, forthwith. Eric shouted a command; and the men began to haul in the line desperately, dropping it in a loose coil astern. The boat steerer leaned upon his long oar, alert, bending to hear the word from Eric, and himself looking overside for any sign of the monster who was rushing up from the depths toward them.

“Then a shout from Eric, the boat swung around as though on a pivot; and next instant the whale breached between his boat and mine.

“There is no more splendid sight in the world than this; to see the biggest creature that breathes flinging his four or five score tons clear out of the water to hang, a black bulk against the sky, for an instant before he falls resoundingly. Imagine a leaping trout, magnify the trout’s size a million-fold or more, and you have some faint notion of the monstrous majesty and grace of the breaching whale.

“I had seen whales breach before, sometimes with terror, sometimes with wonder at the beauty of the spectacle; but when this whale leaped clear into the sky and seemed to hang for an instant fair above us, a thrill of horror shot through me.

“For as he was in the air, fair for all to see, p. 67the scar upon his head was revealed; a scar like a sunken cross, mark of some ancient wound. It was the scarred bull to which Eric’s boat was fast.

“I looked toward him, and saw that Eric had seen the scar; but Eric loved battle. He shouted to his men, and even as the great whale fell into the water again, Eric’s men hauled in till they were alongside the monster, and Eric drove home his lance.

“The whale, at the prick of steel, redoubled the furious struggle of the breach; and he rolled away and away from the boat, upon the surface, in a smother of foam and spray. The men were forced to loose the line again to avoid capsizing; but Eric himself set his hand to it, and by his own strength held the nose of the boat so near the rolling whale that when the enormous creature straightened out at last to run, half a dozen pulls brought them again alongside.

“They were in some fashion safer there than elsewhere. The harpoons had struck well behind the fin, and the whale’s rolling had wrapped the line about him in such fashion that when the boat pulled alongside it lay safely behind the fin, and yet safely forward of the flukes. If the whale rolled toward them, they would be crushed beneath his bulk; but short of such a move, the monster could not shake them off.

“And Eric was working his lance like mad. I had never seen such frantic energy. He sent the six-foot steel to its length into the soft body again and again, not with a long shove, but with a single stabbing thrust to each attack. His target was the whale’s greatest girth, and the lower part of the body; and although the battle seemed an endless p. 68flurry and strife of bloody foam, it was only a matter of seconds before the whale’s labored spouting crimsoned—sure sign he had received a mortal wound.

“I caught the sound of an exultant shout from Eric, and his boat sheered away. The monster had suddenly halted in its flight; it lay momentarily motionless, as though testing its own strength against this attack which had pierced its vitals. Then in a desperate and panic stricken flurry it leaped forward and away, the boat, with line running free, trailing safely behind.

“They drove past where my boat lay; and Eric turned to look toward me. He was a heroic figure in the bow of the little craft, erect and tall, his bright hair and his naked torso crimson with the flood from the whale’s bloody spout. He was gleaming wet with spray and red foam; and he waved his long lance as he passed and shouted:

“Before I could reply, he was beyond the sound of my voice; and then the great beast whirled and came back toward us. He must have seen my boat and supposed it that of his tormentor; for he charged at us, and only the swiftest swerve took us out of his path in time. Beyond me, I saw him wallow over the third mate’s boat and on; and I hurried to pick up the men in the water.

“Save for their bruises and their drenching, they were uninjured. We dragged them aboard, set a waif in the boat, tied its oars to keep it afloat, and set out after Eric and the whale. The great creature was circling in its last flurry; and as we drew near, with a tremendous spasm it threw its mighty bulk in a swift, short circle, and was still.

p. 69“We drove ahead, toward Eric’s boat; and Eric’s countenance was burning with a splendid triumph. This last moment of victorious pride Fate allowed him.

“He was ahead; his boat ran alongside the huge carcass, and Eric bent over the bow with the short boat spade to cut a hole in the whale’s tail for towing it to the ship.

“The boat spade is a steel blade, razor sharp, spade-shaped, attached to a stout wooden handle. Eric leaned far out and drove it into the tough fiber of the tail.

“And then the right whale’s flukes whirled in a last, spasmodic struggle; up they whirled, and over, and down. They missed the boat by inches; but from Eric’s strong hands the boat spade was torn. It twisted in the air, its steel blade flashing crimson. Under the blow of the flukes it twisted and sang, and then chocked home. The steel struck Eric squarely in the face; and it split his skull as you split a walnut.”

The old captain leaned forward to knock the dottel from his pipe upon the andirons, and settled in his chair again. For a little time we sat without speaking; but I asked at last:

Cap’n Brackett’s grim old countenance softened. “Oh, aye,” he said. “She’d forgiven him before. She warned me when we started on the cruise to watch over him.” He filled and lighted his ancient pipe again, then softly finished: “She’s gone, long since. But our daughter looks very like her now.”

p. 70WHEN BREATHITT WENT TO BATTLE

As the Cumberland sun climbed over the eastern hills, bringing the rugged flush of morning to each crag and ridge and peak, a travel-worn rider, astride an even more worn mare, drew up at the stile in front of a four-room log cabin. On the rider’s smooth, strong features were marks of a sleepless night, emphasized by a tense foreboding. As he stopped, his mare heaved a shuddering sigh of exhaustion and lowered her head in weary relief; the man bent one booted leg over the pommel of his saddle, and with an expression of pity gazed at the cabin for some moments before he called.

“Hallo!” There was no response from within the chinked walls; only the snarl of a cur, that skulked near the rickety porch, and the lonesome tinkle of a cowbell from the barn lot.

Again, “Hallo!” This time, after half a minute, the heavy front door opened on its wooden hinges and a mountaineer, with untrimmed, p. 71grizzled mustache, stepped out into the morning sunshine.

“Wal, if hit ain’t Lawyer Todd—howdy!” The old man’s face glowed with cordiality as he approached the stile.

“Git off yer mare and come in, lawyer,” he invited. “We’ve jest ate, but Lizzie’ll have ye some breakfast in a jiffy. Leave yer critter right thar and come on in.”

“Thank you, Seth, but I reckon I won’t for a while.” Lawyer Todd tried to smile in answer to the welcome, but his eyes were grave.

He was a man of middle age and some little refinement of appearance, in spite of the mud that now besplotehed him. A native of the Kentucky Mountains, he had taken his degree at a college in the Blue Grass, but had returned to the hills to practice among his own people. He was one of them: he knew their ways, their faults, their virtues, their peculiarities, and of Seth Brannon he was particularly wise. Ever since hanging out his shingle at the county seat, Todd had been his legal adviser whenever Seth had seen fit to waive the local militant manner of settling disputes and rely upon the instruments of law and order. Between the two men there existed a feeling that was more than professional. Seth, while many years his senior, made Todd his confidant, looked up to him with the deference due superior wisdom, and knew that his trust was not misplaced. In return Todd gave sympathetic understanding to this primitive man of the hills, respected his traditions, and stood by him in time of trouble.

It was this bond between friend and friend, rather than between lawyer and client, that had p. 72drawn Todd over long, hard miles through the most isolated and inaccessible part of that Kentucky county which bears the title “Bloody.”

Todd did not dismount from his mare; and old Seth, squatting on the stile block, regarded him keenly with eyes much used to the analysis of their fellow-men.

“What’s on yer mind, lawyer?” he inquired. “’Pears like all ain’t good news ye’ve brung over the hills with ye.”

He took in at a glance the mud-caked legs and belly of the mare, and the blue clay drops that had sprayed and dried on the lawyer, from his leather boots to his gray slouch hat.

“Ye must ’a’ come a long piece, from the looks o’ ye,” Seth resumed with friendly concern. “Shorely, now, ye ain’t rid all the way from Jackson town?”

The lawyer reached to an inside pocket and drew out a yellow envelope, the flap of which had been torn open. With a slowness that was almost hesitancy, he handed the envelope to the old man.

“The operator at Jackson gave that to me, Seth,” said Todd. “He knew I sorta attended to matters there in town for you and that I’d see you got it. It came just after dark yesterday, and I’ve been riding ever since to bring it to you—and break the news.”

Seth scratched his mustache with a calloused forefinger, turning the yellow envelope over and over and looking at it with curiosity.

“What is hit?” he asked. “Ye know—ye know, lawyer, readin’ ain’t one o’ my strong p’ints, and p. 73these here printed things don’t mean nothin’ to me. What’s hit all about?”

“About Jim—my Jim?” The old man groped for a moment. “Why, lawyer, Jim knows his pa can’t neither read or write. What’d Jim send me a teleygram fer?”

“Jim didn’t send it. It came through the Canadian War Department, at Ottawa.” Todd braced himself in his saddle. “Seth, when Jim went away, did you ever reckon you mightn’t see him again?”

The old man’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t reckon much about hit a-tall,” he said. “Fact is, Jim went withouten my lief and agin my best jedgment.” He paused, but as the lawyer made no reply, went on:

“Ye see, Jim ’as plumb crazy to go to war, soon as he heard hit had broke loose over yan. But I says, says I, ‘Jim, this ain’t none o’ our war; hit’s a-happenin’ way outside o’ these mountings whar we ain’t got no business. I’m a ole man and I’ve come to love peace. Ten year ago, after we’d fought and fought and finally whopped the Allens, over on South Fork, I swore thar’d be no more war if I could help hit. And I’ve purty well kept my word. Now, Jim,’ says I, ‘this feller Keeser and his Germins ain’t hurt we’uns. I ain’t got nothin’ agin ’em. And, what’s more, I don’t want we or no other Brannon o’ the name to be startin’ trouble with sech people.’

“‘Pa,’ says Jim, ‘I ain’t a-goin’ to start trouble. Keeser’s already started hit. He and his Germins done sunk a lot o’ ships and kilt a whole mess o’ wimmen and chil’ren, some of ’em p. 74Amerikin wimmen and chil’ren too. The English and the French been a-fightin’ him over thar fer nigh on two year. Now hit looks like this country’s a-goin’ to take a hand. The army men at Washington says thar jest ain’t no way o’ our gittin’ ’round fightin’ Keeser; either we got to help lick him over yan in Eurip or he’ll lick us over here.’

“‘Then let him come on over and try hit,’ says I. ‘I ain’t shot skunks and Allens and wildcats all my life fer nothin’,’ says I. ‘The same ole rifle-gun my granddaddy brung up from North Calliney and kilt Injuns with ain’t so rusty and no ’count that I can’t shoot a few shoots at this Keeser feller and his Germins.

“‘But, Jim,’ I says, ‘Jim, ye know a mounting man fights best on his own ground. Hit ain’t in nature fer him to go scrappin’ on furren soil amongst furreners. Up a hillside, behind a bunch o’ laurel, is a heap better place fer a mounting man than in them trenches yer talkin’ about. Fust o’ all,’ says I, ‘I’m fer peace; but if ye’ve got to fight, then stay home and fight nigh yer own front door.’

“Them’s exactly the words I spoke to him, lawyer,” continued Seth, cramming a handful of tobacco into his mouth. “Wait till somebody’s hit ye, then hit back and hit back damn hard. But don’t go meddlin’ ’round in a country ye don’t know nothin’ about, ’mongst folks what ain’t no kin to ye. That’s what I says, jest about them very words.”

“And yet Jim went,” said Todd. “Those two years you gave him at Berea College, Seth, made Jim more thoughtful than most boys hereabouts. He read war, he studied war; and, impatient at the delay of his own government in getting into it, he p. 75went up to Canada, enlisted in her armies and shipped to France—”

“Yas, that ’as the way hit was,” assented the old man. “All his ma and me could do couldn’t keep that boy from goin’ oncet he’d sot his head on hit.

“That ’as ’most a year ago. Course we miss Jim and all that,” Seth added; “but even if he has gone to war agin’ Keeser and his Germins, the rest o’ us here ain’t bearin’ no grudge toward ’em so long as they leaves us in peace.”

“They aren’t leaving you in peace, Seth; that’s just it.” Todd watched him closely to see the effect of his words. “Already when Jim enlisted Keeser and his Germins’ had killed American citizens by the score. Since then they’ve killed other Americans; helpless, unoffending people who believed as you do that because they hadn’t harmed the Germans, the Germans wouldn’t harm them.

“You had some reason for opposing Jim’s enlistment. We weren’t at war with Germany then. He was under no personal or patriotic obligation to fight. He acted mostly from the urge of conscience, I know, and after much far-sighted deliberation. But now it’s different, Seth. Last week our men in Washington declared war on Germany. We’ve got to fight as a nation whether as individuals we want to fight or not. Otherwise your rifle-gun and mine, and all the rifle-guns in these mountains, won’t save our homes and our women and children once the Germans land in this country. Don’t you see how it is, Seth? Our boys have to go to war, to save from war those who are left behind. Don’t you feel differently now about Jim’s going the way he did?”

p. 76The old man shook his head stubbornly. “I tell ye, lawyer, hit ain’t any o’ our war. What happens outside o’ these hills don’t consarn me and my folks. ‘What happens amongst these hills we can take care of when hit comes. Let them as wants to fight, fight. We’uns don’t axe nothin’ o’ other folks and other folks ain’t got no business axein’ nothin’ o’ us. That’s whar hit stands with me, lawyer.”

“Listen, Seth.” Todd leaned toward him from his saddle. “You know, the people outside of Breathitt don’t think much of us who live here. Not only in other parts of Kentucky, but in all the other states and even abroad, they call us ‘Bloody.’ That’s because we’ve been a bit too handy with our guns. We’ve killed too many of our own folks. We haven’t paid much attention to the law. Now this war gives us a chance to show the outside world that there’s more good than bad in us; that we can leave off fighting each other and use our lead on the Germans.”

Todd leaned closer to the old man, enthusiasm in his voice. “Listen, Seth. The President wants volunteers for the army. He’s got to have soldiers, lots of them. And the best soldier material in the country is right up here in these hills. We men of Breathitt are born to the trigger. Most of us soldier in a manner all our lives. Now, I say, we’ve got to stop aiming our rifle-guns at each other and point ’em toward the enemy. I’ve been thinking about it considerably lately and I want your help in bringing this very thing to pass.

“You, Seth, have more influence with the people than any one man in this county. You’re connected by family to every big clan in Breathitt. When p. 77you say peace, they keep the peace; when you say war, they fight. For years now there’s been no general trouble. That’s because, as you declared, war don’t pay. And you’re right, indeed you are, where feud wars are concerned. We’ve had enough of them, God knows!”

Todd continued: “Seth, they’re framing a draft bill there in Washington. They’re going to make men join the army if they won’t join it voluntarily. Now our boys never had to be kicked into battle, Seth. They’ve got the good old Kentucky warrior blood in their veins; and the better the cause, the harder they fight. Let’s show the country that Breathitt isn’t as bad as printer’s ink has painted her. Let’s not wait for that draft bill. Tell your men, Seth, that this is the worst war and the best war that ever happened. Tell ’em it’s the most wicked war and the holiest war in which a Kentuckian was ever privileged to draw a bead. Say the word, old friend, and every son of Breathitt will rally to the flag, to wipe the stains from their own hills and help clean the world’s slate for the universal writing of the name Democracy!”

Again old Seth shook his head. He waved his hand with a gesture of finality, then brought his fist to his knee with a dull thud.

“Yer a mighty purty talker, lawyer, and I ’low ye means what ye says—but, I tells ye, I ain’t got no consarn in this here war. Keeser and his Germins ain’t done nothin’ to me and my folks. Them men o’ Breathitt who wants to fight, can fight. I won’t stop ’em. But, lawyer, I ain’t a-goin’ to call ’em to war till that feller Keeser makes the fust move agin one o’ us. That’s what I says to Jim and that’s what I’m a-sayin’ to ye,” he added defiantly.

p. 78Lawyer Todd said nothing. He knew the mettle of his people. He believed in them. He also knew that old Seth was a victim of isolation and the teachings of a primitive creed; that his opposition sprang from ignorance, not disloyalty. It was the inborn nature of a mountaineer to prefer battle among his own hills, whose every rock and peak and cove he had studied with an eye to offense and defense, rather than wage war in the enemy’s country where he was a stranger. Besides, as Seth himself had said, the Brannons and their kin had not yet smelled blood. “Keeser and his Germins” must first offer direct injury to one of them before they could feel the personal touch of war and answer the challenge from oversea.

With this realization Todd broke the silence in a firm voice, pointing to the yellow envelope in the old man’s hand.

Seth’s attitude of defiance relaxed. Taut cords stood out beneath the dry skin of his throat as the inner man gripped himself.

“Is Jim hurt?” There was a tremor of paternalism in the question. The yellow envelope fluttered to the ground near the mare’s feet.

Todd looked Seth steadily in the eyes. “Worse than hurt, old friend, yet better than hurt,” he replied. “Jim is dead.”

Not a cry, not a tear, not a groan, not even a quiver of the world-worn mouth and brow. Only an expression of incredulity that hardened into sternness.

“Dead?—dead! My Jim dead.” Then, after a while, “Hit’ll go plumb hard with his ma, her p. 79Jimmy dead.” The keen eyes widened and the wrinkled face was lifted to the hills.

Directly, in a calm, low voice: “Tell me, lawyer, who kilt him? How was he kilt, my Jim?”

“He was killed in action, Seth, killed by ‘Keeser and his Germins’ while bombing an enemy’s trench.”

“He wasn’t using it then.” Todd drew on his imagination. “But he sold out at a high figger, Seth, that boy of yours. A dozen Germans went down before they got him.”

The old man’s eyes flashed. “Ye say they did? Jim he kilt a dozen of ’em?” His friend nodded. “Lord!—now don’t that beat all!” Seth chuckled an unhealthy chuckle. “Kilt a dozen of ’em!”

“Wal, I reckon that settles hit. Yas, lawyer, I reckon that mighty nigh settles hit.” And with shoulders bent forward, his chin in his hand, the old man lapsed into lonely meditation.

Todd left him there, seated on the stile, and with a sigh of relief that his mission had been thus far accomplished, rode his mare around to the barn. The Breathitt country that day vibrated with a silent but compelling call. Bare-footed couriers, wizards of short cut and bypath, slipped through valley and over ridge, up rocky creek bed and down steep decline, bearing a message from their chief. The lesser clan heads received the message; and from beneath their clapboard roofs, they in turn sent forth couriers to their followers. Along the waters of Troublesome, Middle Fork, Quicksand p. 80and Kentucky River, the word flashed. A hushed suspense closed over the hills. Men greeted one another in undertones, sensing rather than speaking what each had in mind. Action was the necessity of the hour; swift, tense action that tarried neither to question nor to reason, but obeyed.

But little time elapsed after Lawyer Todd left old Seth at the stile, before the Brannons and their kinsmen began to gather at the cabin of their chief. They straggled in by ones and twos and threes, some mounted and some on foot. Among them were grandfathers, with stooped shoulders and snowy beards; others were mere boys.

Most of the men bore modern rifles and revolvers; a few had shotguns. One, on whom the hookworm had set its blight, had been able to muster only a pitchfork. Another was armed with a kitchen knife and a hickory club. Besides their weapons all the equipment the men carried was a bundle of food, done up in a greasy paper, consisting of chunks of corn bread, a bit of salt and several strips of bacon.

Some of the “neighbor wimmen” had come to Seth’s cabin to tender their services and sympathies to the bereaved mother. Old Seth himself sat alone on the edge of the weather-warped porch, brooding. His rifle lay across his knees, and while one hairy hand stroked the polished stock, his eyes were fastened on the horizon above the eastern hills. The only hint of emotion in his face was the dumbness of an emotion too deep for expression.

The men stood about the yard in little groups. Out in the barn lot several of the younger men pitched horseshoes. Others played mumble-peg near the stile block, or lounged against the rail p. 81fence, whittling. The patriarchs of the clan squatted at a respectful distance from their chief, waiting to be called to council.

And upon them all poured the warming rays of the afternoon sun. The pine-fringed mountains, green with the fresh, soft green of spring, closed in grim but kindly embrace about the little army in the valley below. A dove cooed plaintively from a near-by hollow; beneath the cabin porch the cur whined and howled with a sense of approaching crisis.

After a while old Seth arose, steadying himself against the corner of the porch. And silently his followers gathered about him.

“Boys,” he said, “I reckon ye all know why I sent fer ye. Jim’s been kilt. Him that was o’ my flesh and blood, and o’ yer flesh and blood, is dead. Keeser and his Germins kilt him, boys. Nothin’ on this airth that me or ye can do will bring him back to life.

“When Jim went to war, he went withouten my lief. I’d fought a lot in my time and I wanted him to keep outen sech trouble. But he went; he got the notion he ought to go, and all I could say wouldn’t stop him. Jim says that Keeser and his Germins ’as killin’ wimmen and chil’ren over yan. He says this country’d soon be at war and that we folks o’ Breathitt ought to git ready and fight same as the rest o’ the people. I studied on hit a heap then—and today I’ve studied on hit some more.

“As Jim ’lowed hit’d be, boys, this here country’s at war. I don’t understand all about hit myself, about this de-mocracy we’re a-fightin’ fer or what we’re goin’ to do with the thing after we gits hit. Lawyer Todd says hit’s jest another name p. 82fer freedom and liberty. Maybe hit is. Anyway, boys, since I’ve thought hit over, thar ain’t been a war yet when us fellers o’ the hills ain’t took a hand. Some fought fer the Union, some fer the South. Some fought in Cuby, and some o’ our kin helped whop them sassy niggers in the Fillerpines.

“Whenever we’ve fought, boys, we’ve had a reason fer hit, a mighty good reason. Do ye remember back thar, several year ago, when Bulger Allen plugged Hal Brannon in the heart as Hal ’as comin’ home from meetin’ with his gal? Do ye recollect how hit riled us and how we got our rifle-guns and went after them Allens? They’d kilt one o’ our folks, they’d broke the peace. But afore we got through with ’em, they seen hit ’as healthiest to leave our folks alone and keep their lead to themselves!”

“Boys, Jim’s been kilt. Yesterd’y we weren’t holdin’ nothin’ agin’ Keeser and his Germins. They hadn’t hurt none o’ we’uns. What devilment they’d done, they’d done outsider these hills whar we ain’t got no concarn. But now hit’s different. Hit’s jest another case o’ them Allens, boys. Hit means we got to draw blood fer blood. Had Jim been one o’ ye or yer sons, I’d say the same thing. A Brannon’s life has been took: ye and me and all our folks has got to take lives to pay fer hissen. That’s the way we do hit up here in these mountings. That’s the way we got to do hit with Keeser and his Germins.”

Lawyer Todd, standing on the edge of the company, frowned and bit his lip. He had been listening to the speech. Inwardly he had rejoiced. But now he felt a pang of disappointment. Seth, he p. 83feared, was about to overshoot the mark in his newly aroused enthusiasm. He was reckoning on personal vengeance against “Keeser and his Germins,” something that could not be but which would be hard for him to realize.

Todd, trying to attract as little notice as possible, edged through the crowd until he stood at the old chief’s elbow. As he paused in his delivery, the lawyer caught his attention.

“Seth,” he began in an undertone, “Seth, it doesn’t pay to be too hasty about this thing you’re doing. You know, those people at Washington don’t believe in fighting exactly the way we do down here. They go about it different. It’s the young men who are sent to war. The government takes only those who are in their prime, and it’s the government that picks out the guns they’ll shoot and the clothes they’ll wear and tells ’em how to act and what to do. Don’t misunderstand me, Seth. It’s all right for you to want to go to Europe and whip ‘Keeser and his Germins,’ but Seth, you just naturally can’t go.”

“Can’t go?” he repeated aloud. “Ye mean to say I’m too old to go?” There was wrath in the tone. Those near by moved closer, listening. “Why, lawyer, I’m as young in feelin’s as any boy here. I can tromp as fer, shoot as straight and stand as much as any sodjer the gover’nent’s got.”

“Perhaps so,” replied Todd; “that all may be very true. But it’s only the young fellows they want. Lead your men down to Jackson, let the recruiting officers there pick those who are fit: then you and the rest come back here to your farms, raise more crops, pray for them that’s gone, and be p. 84good citizens. That’s your part in the war, old friend.”

“I’ll be damned if hit is!” Seth threw up his grizzled head in anger. “I can fight as well as the best of ’em. I reckon I’m an Amerikin too. Hit’s my country and my war and my Jim what’s been kilt. Won’t they let a pa fight them as murdered his son? Won’t they let him shoot them as shot him? By Gawd! o’ course they will, lawyer, and nothin’ in all creation can make me stay home!”

Todd stepped back. He saw the futility of further argument. He even doubted the wisdom of his speaking as much as he had.

Seth wrestled with his emotions for some moments in silence. Then the passion left his wrinkled features. He was thoughtful, debating with himself. Finally, his selfcontrol regained, he turned to the waiting multitude before him.

“Maybe Lawyer Todd’s right, boys,” he said with sudden frankness. “Maybe hit’s so that we can’t all go to war agin’ them as kilt our Jim.” He flashed a friendly glance of reassurance over the heads of his followers to where the lawyer stood. “Hit’s different outsider these hills ’an hit is here. We ain’t the only ones a-fightin’ Keeser and his Germins. The whole nation’s a-got hits dander up. Lawyer Todd says that afore the break o’ another spring thar’ll be more’n a million sodjers ’long side o’ us, ready to whop them Germins. I reckon I spoke kinda hasty jest now. We can’t have hit all our way. We’ll jest have to fit in with the rest wharever we can. Hit may be a close fit and hit may pinch at times, boys, but hit’s best. Lawyer Todd and them army men knows. We’ll try and make up our minds to do what they ’lows is fer the good o’ all o’ us.

p. 85“So we’ll go down to Jackson town, to that re-cruitin’ office, and axe them sodjer fellers thar to git us to Eurip. They’re showin’ others the way and I reckon they’ll show us. Some o’ us won’t come back, boys, like Jim won’t come back. Some o’ us is liable to lose a arm or a leg. But remember this, boys, wharever ye go or whoever ye’re fightin’, that ye’re men o’ Breathitt. Remember ve’re not only goin’ to kill Germins but to kill the bad name that the world ’as give us. Me and Lawyer Todd stands together on that. We’re goin’ to stop wastin’ powder on our own folks. We’re goin’ to show them people in the Blue Grass and all over the country, that the men o’ these mountings is men no different from them when hit comes to shoulderin’ a rifle-gun and pertectin’ their homes and wimmen and chil’ren. We’re goin’ to make Breathitt stand fer somethin’ else besides Breathitt blood.”

Old Seth picked up his rifle from where he had leaned it against the porch wall. His hand was steady; he pressed the gun over his heart as if to breathe into its lifeless mechanism a part of his own warrior spirit.

“Boys, time’s up,” he said. “War’s on. Jim’s body over yan is callin’ us to come. Hit’s a-callin’ us men o’ the hills, us men o’ Breathitt. We’re a-goin’”—he raised his voice. “Wars on, I say, boys, war’s on; and Keeser and his Germins is goin’ to catch hell—Breathitt hell—and hell a-plenty!”

As their chief concluded a wild yell burst from ten score mountain throats, a weird and ringing yell that surged through the neighboring valleys, beat against the stolid walls of rock and pine, and p. 86bounded upward and beyond, the answer of the Breathitt folk to humanity’s call to arms.

Lawyer Todd, a smile lifting the weariness from his face, sat his mare and watched the departure of the little army. There was no saying of farewells to the women and children; there were no handclasps or tears. Old Seth, astride a long-eared mule, led the way. The others straggled after him in irregular order. Those who had mounts rode them; the rest followed on foot. With their packs of food slung over their shoulders, their guns in the crook of their arms, the men filed out of the cabin yard and through the valley toward a distant gap in the hills.

“My people, my people!” softly exclaimed Todd, as he moved after them. “Kentuckians all, Americans all, this day you give the lie to the slander put upon your mountain race. My people, my noble people!”

Dry-eyed women, shading their brows with toil-scarred hands, lingered at their cabin doors, their children clustered about them, and watched their men go by. Occasionally one of them waved, and an answering salute came from among the irregular ranks.

Beyond the western ridges the sun dropped into a saffron sky, crowning with a halo of gold the reborn feudland, touching with mellow light the crags and peaks that stood out proudly in the dusk. High above the misty valleys a bald eagle circled, forward, backward, forward, backward, over the country of warrior clans; while through the distant gap marched mountain men, men of soul and heart and brawn.

p. 87THE FORGIVER

Religion, said the mining man, sometimes puts me in mind of one of those new blasting powders; there’s no just telling when it’ll go off or whom it’ll blow up.

I was thinking then of Radway and Billsky: “Bad” Radway, him that beat up Ellis at Borromeo and shot Fargue O’Leary. You will have heard of him. Every one was hearing of him at one time, and then all the talk kind of faded out. By and by Radway himself faded out. It was Billsky that faded him.

Billsky was a little, serious, hairy fellow, not much higher than Radway’s elbow; a good little fellow, that never gave any trouble to any one. He always seemed, in a meek sort of way, puzzled over existence in general and his own share in it in particular. Men liked him. He was awful kindhearted, but he’d the same sense of humor as an Apache. Primitive, that’s what he was. He was part Russian, and he’d a primitive sort of name that no one ever tried to pronounce. Billsky came near enough.

He scarcely ever came in Rad’s way, though he moved with the same crowd. Rad was in the center, you see, Billsky just wanderin’ on the outskirts. They got mixed up pretty close, though, later.

It began with a girl, of course, a girl at p. 88Borromeo. No need for names. She was a nice girl, and a nice-lookin’ girl, just one of many, thank God. No one so much as guessed Billsky was sweet on her till she went away suddenly and was seen no more, and her folks moved away. It was put down to Rad, and he didn’t deny it; sort o’ smiled and looked knowin’. You know the kind. Then Billsky heard of it. He was working up at the Joyeux then, for that was before the irrigation was put through, and it was all cattle. He sent a message through to Radway. “I’m coming down to kill you,” said the message, “soon as I can get my time. Don’t go away.”

Well, that was Billsky all over, and most men thought it was a great joke. Radway did. “What does the little rat take me for?” he said. “I guess he’s in no hurry. I’ll have some time to wait.” Most men thought so, too, but not all.

Meanwhile, Billsky stuck to his job till he could quit without giving inconvenience. Then he got his time. He sunk every dollar of his pay in a fine pony, a quick goer. And down he came the eighty miles to Borromeo, like a fire in grass.

The betting was all on Rad, of course. It was said he thought Billsky too good a joke to shoot; he’d just beat him up a bit if he was troublesome, and let him go.

Twenty miles out of Borromeo, Billsky had to stop at a preacher’s. And there he got religion.

Yes, it’s a fact; he got it overnight. What he told the preacher, or the preacher said to him, I don’t know. I don’t begin to know. But Billsky went off afoot into the desert, five miles maybe; and it is pretty much of a desert round there. He had nothing with him but the gun he was going to p. 89shoot Radway with, and a Bible. He laid them both under a sagebush, and all night he knelt in front of them, and waited for the Lord to begin on him. There isn’t much in the desert at night, you know, but stars; and a sky back of ’em that makes even the planets look cheap. The Lord must have had His way with Billsky, without fear or favor, for at dawn he came staggering back to the preacher, drenched with sweat and dew. He had only the Bible with him.

“I believe,” he said to the preacher, “and as I hope for forgiveness, so I forgive the man it was in my heart to kill. Tell him so from me,” he said; “but it’s laid on me,” said Billsky, “that I’ll never save my soul till I tell him so myself. So tell him, too, to wait for me, for I’m a-coming to forgive him.” Then he went down in a heap at the preacher’s feet.

That old man was a real Christian, and he put Billsky to bed and looked after him like a father. He’d never had an out-and-out hot-on-the-spot convert like that before, and he was so worked up and excited over it that he saddled his old horse and rode into Borromeo himself to give Radway the message of forgiveness.

I was in Duluth’s, with some of the other fellows, looking at some new saddles he had in; and Rad was there, too, and there was a good deal of talk going on of one kind and another. Some one must have told the old preacher where Rad was, for he pulled up his old white nag outside Duluth’s, and “Mr. Radway!” he called, in a high voice, “Mr. Radway! I have a message for you.”

“Hello!” said Rad, winking at his cronies,—I wasn’t one,—“Is Billsky coming with his gun? I must get ready to hide.” And there was laughing.

p. 90Sitting his old horse straight as an Indian, the old preacher raised his head and took his hat off. His white hair shone in the sun. There seemed to be more than sun shining on his face. “Mr. Radway,” says he, “the message I bring is one of forgiveness. You have nothing to fear from Billsky. He forgives you. And I was to tell you that he will never rest until he himself can assure you of that forgiveness. And may the Lord have mercy on you,” said the old man, and put on his hat and rode away. I give you my word, I never heard Duluth’s so quiet! There wasn’t a sound till Radway caught his breath and began to curse.

Funny what’ll get a man’s nerve, eh? It sent Rad quite wild to think Billsky wanted to forgive him!

Billsky was sick at the preacher’s some time. He came into Borromeo looking queerer and hairier than ever, and simply eaten alive with the longin’ to forgive Rad. “’Tisn’t him I’m thinking of,” he explained in his careful way, “he’ll get what’s coming to him, anyway; it’s me,” he said. “How’m I to save my soul if I don’t forgive him?”

“Well, you can’t forgive him just yet,” said the man he was talking to, sort of soothing. “He ain’t here. He’s on a new job: foreman at the Llindura, and went out last week.”

“Oh!” said Billsky. He looked all around him, kind of taken aback and hurt. “Oh! Why’d he do that?”

“He didn’t do it because he was afraid of you, old sport,” said the other man, laughing fit to hurt himself, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Billsky looked more hurt than ever. He’d big collie-dog eyes in his furry face, and now they p. 91fairly filled with tears. “Why should I think that?” he said earnestly. “I only want to forgive him. I only want to tell him I forgive him.” And he went away, all puzzled at the contrariety of things in general.

He kept pretty small and quiet about Borromeo for a few days; and then I saw him looking awful pleased with himself. “Gray Thomas,” he told me, “he’s going out to the Llindura with some mules, and he’ll take me along. So now I’ll be able to forgive Radway,” he said, “and get it off my mind.”

He went out to the Llindura with the mules. When he got there, he found Rad had been sent to Sageville with a bunch of calves the day before.

He stayed a week at the Llindura, almost too worried to earn his keep, waiting for Radway. Radway didn’t come. At the end of the week, he lit out for Sageville. Halfway there, he met the rest of Rad’s outfit, coming back. “Rad’s been bit with the mining fever,” they told Billsky, “and he’s off into the Altanero country with a man he met in Sageville. The boss’ll be mad with him.” Billsky looked more grieved than ever.

Well, how should he? But I believe he did. You see, Billsky’s forgiveness had got on his nerves.

It was a close call in Sageville that Radway’d get forgiven in spite of himself. He actually rode out one end of the town with his new partner as Billsky came in at the other.

The fellows laughed at Billsky; but they liked him; and maybe they began to wonder. Anyway, Billsky stayed in Sageville a week, selling his pony p. 92and getting an outfit together. When they asked him what he wanted a prospectin’ outfit for, he just looked at them in a surprised, hurt sort of way, and said, “Why, to go after Rad and forgive him, of course. What’d you think?” Pretty soon, they stopped laughing. It was the look on Billsky’s face stopped them. You know how queer brown and yellow faces look to us? That’s because the expression never changes. Billsky began to look queer, like a Chink or an Indian; he’d just one expression in those days, stamped on his hairy face as if he’d been branded with it.

He got two burros and an outfit of sorts, and off he went at the end of the week, trailing Radway into the Altanero. Three days before he went, a mule wagon pulled out for Seear; it overtook Radway and his partner, and the driver told him his forgiver was following on. So, you see, Rad knew.

Have you ever seen the opening of the Altanero: the Gates of the Altanero? There’s desert, and there’s hills, and there’s cañons; and there’s the Altanero. This side the Gates, you’re still somebody, with work to do, and money to get, and girls to kiss: anything, if you go find it. Other side the Gates, you’re nobody, nothing. You just go out. Yes, you just go out. It’s like dying while you’re alive. You don’t count at all; and quite often you die dead.

Have you ever seen the Gates? You go on and on in the heat, away from Sageville, and Seear, and everything you know. They lie flat behind you, lost in the heat. You don’t see ’em if you turn and look. You don’t see anything. Even the sage thins out and goes. It’s all dust. Then ahead, ever so far, you see something gold. It rises higher, little p. 93by little,—oh so slow! and you see it’s rocks, great golden rocks. They lift, and lift, and lift. One day you find they’re behind you as well as in front: nothing but golden rocks; unless it’s red rocks or green rocks or rocks like clear black glass. I’ve known some queer moments, but there’s nothing so queer as when it first comes home to you that, for miles and miles in every direction, there’s just nothing but the rocks—like a world rough-cut from precious stones and left to die.

There’s few wells in the Altanero: few that are known. You travel by, and accordin’ to, the wells. Radway struck off into the hills from the Seaar trail, making for the first well. A week later, there was Billsky following over the same ground. Each night he’d camp by one of Radway’s cold fires; and, each night, he’d kneel in the ashes and pray. Sometimes he’d pray an hour, or two hours, or three, under the tremendous stars; but it was always that he might catch up with Rad quick, and forgive him, and get it off his mind. He wasn’t worrying. He was just eager. He knew he was bound to come across Rad sooner or later in the Altanero. Then he’d sleep, and eat, and off he’d go, singing hymns to the burros: “Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” most likely.

Once, in the dead ashes, he found a broke-off saucepan handle. He was so pleased he carted it along with him, like a mascot. It seemed to put him in touch with Radway: to bring the happy moment o’ forgiveness nearer.

The Altanero’s a bad country to travel in if you’ve anything on your nerves. I passed through a few miles of it once when I had something on p. 94mine: a sick child two hundred miles away; and I tell you, by the third day I was seein’ the kid everywhere. But Radway—I can’t just explain Radway. I wonder if he was seein’ the girl that started it.

Rad and company had used considerable of the water in that hole. It had shrunk, and there in the margin, baked hard and white like clay, were footprints of men and burros. Billsky picked out Rad’s footprints and patted ’em, he was so pleased. He rested by the water a few hours, and freshened up his burros. Then he went on.

Between the first water-hole and the second the country opens up. It isn’t just a huddle of rocks. It’s mesas rising from a dead level of dust like the worn foundations of towers and cathedrals and cities, banded in rose and violet and gold. You could no more climb most of ’em than you could climb the outside of a skyscraper. But Billsky found one he could climb, and up he went. He’d seen some sort of dry, grassy stuff at the top, and he wanted it for Sarah, one of the burros that was ailing. He found more than the grass on top. He found a grave. Didn’t know whose, of course; nobody knows, nor ever will. He gave the grass to Sarah; but next day she died. Billsky was terrible hurt and grieved, he was always so careful of beasts. He never realized that Sarah was just beat out: couldn’t stand the pace.

He rested up a bit, being worried over his burro; and took out the lost time in prayer. Then p. 95on he went, at that terrible pace, overhauling Rad by the mile, achin’ to forgive him. It’s a long stretch to the third hole. Billsky gained two days on it. I can’t guess how. He told me he took short cuts through the cañons, and that they always turned out all right; and that he sang “Hold the Fort, for I Am Coming,” right along.

He found the third hole fouled and shrunk. In a stretch of mud, Rad had written with a stick, “If you follow me any further, I will shoot you on sight.” How did he know Billsky was so near? Maybe he’d seen his fire the night before. Billsky read the writing, and was dreadful hurt and grieved. “He doesn’t understand,” he said, “that I’m going to forgive him. It’s what I’m follerin’ him for.” He prayed half the night, and went on quicker than ever next day.

Few have ever been so far into the Altanero as the fourth hole. It’s hard to find. Long before Billsky made it, he saw a speck in the sky; it was a great bird, sailing round in little, slow circles. Under it was the fourth water-hole.

It was quite a pool when Billsky came to it. There were bushes round it, and fibrous grass. There were three burros feeding on the bushes, and a small tent pitched. A man came out of the tent, and when he saw Billsky he held up his hands.

“Don’t shoot,” he said, “I’m not Radway. You’ve no quarrel with me.”

“Nor with him,” said Billsky. “I’ve come to forgive him. Where is he?”

“Gone,” said the man, “gone mad, I guess. He’s pushed on alone. Day before yesterday I took sick. We was to rest up here, and then cast round careful, always within reach o’ this water. p. 96This morning he went out and climbed them rocks there. Then he came back, and said he must go on, he couldn’t wait. I went to stop him, and he laid me out. See here.” The man was most cryin’; he turned his face, and Billsky saw a great black swelling on his jaw. “He went on,” he said, “as if the devil was after him. And the devil’s you!”

Billsky was the meekest little hairy man; and now he too was fit to cry. “He don’t know me,” he said, very sad, “but it’ll be all right. . . . What’s on there?” he said, pointing beyond.

“God knows, who made it,” said the man, “out of hell’s leftovers. But no one else does, for no one’s ever been there.”

“It’ll be all right,” said Billsky again. “I’ll go on after him, and forgive him, and bring him back.”

He started out to do it, taking one of Rad’s burros, which were fresher than his; and bound he’d come up with Rad this time.

I don’t rightly know what happened there, beyond the last water. One thing, I never been there. I gather Billsky just pushed on as usual, following Rad’s tracks. He followed ’em easy: the only footsteps within a hundred miles or so! As he went he sang “Glory for Me,” because he was going to be able to forgive Rad at last.

The big bird in the sky, he swung off from the water-hole and followed Billsky. There was just them two moving things for him to see: Radway on ahead, mad to get away from Billsky, and old Billsky, mad to forgive him, and singing the glory song.

Billsky couldn’t tell me much about this part of it. He just went on, and on, and on. p. 97Sometimes, he said, there were stars. The place was so still he began to think he could hear ’em shine: a sort of fizzing, like an arc-light, which, of course, he knew to be foolishness. Sometimes there was just the sun, a great fire, like as if it were fastened to the earth and burning all the life out of it. There were the rocks, of course, but he didn’t remember them much: only one great black cleft, and a glimmer in the walls of it. The glimmer was gold-veined turquoise, just sticking out o’ that cliff so you could have pried it loose with a toothpick. Billsky couldn’t tell you where it was if you paid him. He wasn’t thinking of anything but forgiving Rad.

Then, with a noise, he says, like a roll of rifle-fire, that big bird dropped out of heaven like a stone, and shot past him, and settled just ahead. There was a dead burro there, and an empty water can. But Radway, he’d gone on. Billsky went after him, singing powerful; but his voice didn’t make much noise.

Then there was a little crack ahead. Something sang past Billsky, and flipped a tiny flake off of the side of the cañon. Billsky stopped and looked at the flake lying at his feet, just as pretty as a pink rose-leaf. He knew a bullet had chipped it off, and that he’d come within shooting length of Radway. He let out a yell of joy. “It’s me, Rad!” he yelled. “I’m comin’ to forgive you!” But Radway didn’t stop. He went on, as if he was mad; and behind him came the man that was killin’ him: the man that only wanted to forgive him.

There were more shots. Billsky said Rad fired at him all that afternoon, but owing to the refraction, he wasn’t hit once. Besides, Rad was p. 98breaking up. Once your nerve goes, you break up quick in the Altanero.

You know evening on the Altanero? The sun’s down on the edge of things, as big as a burning house. All the rocks turn clear as glass for a minute. It’s as if the light went clean through them, and came out colored with their colors: rose, violet, gold. The air you breathe glows. The rosy-red cañon Billsky was in ended sudden in a wall that hit the sky. The sunset touched it, and it became like a veil, says Billsky, a blood-red curtain hung from earth to heaven. At the foot of it lay Bad Radway.

Billsky ran at him, trying to yell. He had his water flask ready. All day he’d been saving water to give to Radway, but he was too late. Rad just looked at him; and all that had been inside him: all the remorse, the guilt, the black fear, the unknown damage of the soul that first drove him to be scared of Billsky, came out in that look.

It struck Billsky to the heart. “Rad, Rad,” he said, “don’t you be scared o’ me! I forgive you, Rad!” he said.

Billsky had done his part, but he was all broke up. He got back to the water-hole somehow, after burying Rad at the foot of the cliff. He and the other man that had been Rad’s partner lit out for home right away. They’d had enough of the Altanero.

When I last saw Billsky, he was terrible hurt and grieved because the other man held him to blame for what had happened to Radway. “He seems to think,” said Billsky to me, “that I done p. 99something to him! Me that follered him all that way just to forgive him! He seems to think, that guy does, that I done something!”

Then, in a puzzled, exasperated kind of way, he laughed. “But come to think of it,” said Billsky, “it was funny.”

Well, as I said before, religion’s a queer thing to handle; but I don’t see anything funny in it.

p. 100TOLD TO PARSON

A little girl came rushing into the gate of the vicarage at Postbridge, Dartmoor, and it chanced that she met the minister himself as he bent in his garden and scattered lime around upspringing seeds.

“These slugs would try the patience of a saint,” he said, hearing footsteps, and not looking up. “They have eaten off nearly all my young larkspurs. How can one fight them?”

“Please, sir, mother sent me, an’ I’ve runned a’most all the way from our cottage wi’out stopping once. ’Tis old Mr. Mundy, please. He’m dying—so he told mother when her fetched him his milk this morning—an’ he says he’ve got something very special to tell anybody as’ll care to come an’ listen to it. But nobody don’t want to hear his secrets in the village; so mother said ’twas your job, please, an’ sent me for your honor.”

“My job—yes, so it is, little maid. I’ll come at once. An’ they’d better send for the doctor. It isn’t his regular visiting day until Thursday, but probably it’s his job, too.”

“Mother axed the old man that; an’ he said as he didn’t want no doctor, nor his traade [medicine] neither. He says h’m nearly a hundred years old, an’ he won’t be messed about with at his time of life, but just die easy an’ comfortable.”

p. 101In twenty minutes the clergyman had walked a mile and crossed a strip of the wilderness that stretched round about the little hamlet on Dartmoor where he labored. A single cottage separated from the rest by wide tracts of furze and heather stood here, and near it lay a neglected garden. But “Gaffer” Mundy had long ceased to fight the moor or care for his plot of land. His patch of the reclaimed earth returned fast to primitive savagery. Brake fern sprouted in the potato bed; rush, heather and briar choked the currant bushes; fearless rabbits nibbled every green thing.

“Come in, whoever you may be,” said an ancient voice. So the visitor obeyed and entered, to find the sufferer, fully dressed, sitting by a fire of peat. Noah Mundy was once very tall, but now his height had vanished and he had been long bent under his burden of years. A bald, yellow skull rose above his countenance, and infinite age marked his face. As the earth through centuries of cooling has wrinkled into mountains and flattened into ocean beds between them, so these aged features, stamped and torn with the fret and fever of long life, had become as a book whereon time had written many things for those who could read them. Very weak was the man, and very thin. He was toothless and almost hairless; the scanty beard that fell from his chin was white, while his mustache had long been dyed with snuff to a lively yellow. His eyes remained alive, though one was filmed over with an opaline haze. But from the other he saw clearly enough for all his needs. He made it a boast that he could not write, and he could not read. There was no book in his house.

“’Tis you, eh? I could have wished for a man p. 102out of your trade, but it won’t matter. I’ve got a thing worth telling; but mark this, I don’t care a button what you think of it, an’ I don’t want none of your bunkum an’ lies after I have told it. Sit down in that thicky chair an’ smoke your pipe an’ keep cool. Ban’t no use getting excited now, for what I be going to tell ’e happened more’n sixty years ago—afore you was born or thought about.”

“Bah! I’ve smoked and chewed an’ snuffed for more’n half a century. I’m baccy through and through—soaked in it, as you might say. An’ as for smoke, if what you tell to church be true, I shall have smoke, an’ fire too, afore long. But hell’s only a joke to frighten females. I don’t set no store by it.”

“Better leave that, Mr. Mundy. If you really believe your end is near, let us be serious. Yes, I’ll smoke my pipe. And you must feel very, very sure, that what you tell me is absolutely sacred, unless you wish it otherwise.”

“Nought sacred about it, I reckon—all t’ other way. An’ as for telling, you can go an’ shout it from top of Bellever Tor you’m minded to. I don’t care a farden curse who knows it now. Wait till I’m out of it; then do as you please.”

He drank a little milk, remained silent a moment with his eyes upon the fire, and presently began to tell his life’s strange tale.

“Me an’ my brother was the only children our parents ever had; an’ my brother was five years older’n me. My father, Jonas Mundy, got money through a will, an’ he brought it to Dartymoor, like a fool, an’ rented a bit of moor from the Duchy of Cornwall, an’ built a farm upon it, an’ p. 103set to work to reclaim the land. At first he prospered, an’ Aller Bottom Farm, as my father called it, was a promising place, so long as sweat of man poured out there without ceasing. You can see the ruins of it yet, for when Jonas Mundy died an’ it falled to me, I left it an’ comed up here; an the chap as took it off my hands—he went bankrupt inside three year. ’Tis all falled to pieces now, for none tried again.

“But that’s to overrun the matter. When I was fifteen an’ my brother, John James, was twenty, us both failed in love with the same maid. You stare; but though fifteen in years, I was twenty-five in understanding, an’ a very oncoming youth where women were concerned. Nelly Baker had turned seventeen, an’ more than once I told her that though a boy of fifteen couldn’t wed a maid of her age without making folks laugh, even if he could get a parson to hitch them, yet a chap of three-an’-twenty might very properly take a girl of five-an’-twenty without the deed calling for any question. An’ her loved me truly enough; for though you only see a worn-out scarecrow afore you now, yet seventy year agone I filled the eye of more maidens than one, and was a bowerly youth to look upon—tall, straight, tough, wi’ hair so black as a crow.

“John James he never knowed that I cared a button for Nelly. I never showed it to a living soul but her by word or look; an’ she kept quiet—for fear of being laughed at, no doubt. Her folks were dead on the match with John James, an’ he pressed her so hard that she’d have took him but for me. He was a pretty fellow too—the Mundys were very personable as a family. Quite different, though, from me. Fair polled, wi’ flaxen hair, an p. 104terrible strong was John James, an’ the best wrastler on Dartymoor in them days.

“Me an’ her met by appointment a week afore she’d got to give him a final ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I mind it very well to this hour; an’ yet ’tis seventy-odd years agone. On Hartland Tor us sat in the heather unseen, an’ I put my arms around her an’ loved her, an’ promised to make her a happy woman. Then I told her what she’d got to do. First I made her prick her finger wi’ a thorn of the furze, an’ draw blood, an’ swear afore the Living God she’d marry me as soon as I could make her mistress of a farm.

“She was for joking about the matter at first, but I soon forced her to grow serious. She done what I told her, an’ since she believed in the Living God, I reckoned her oath would bind her fast enough. As for me, I laughed out of sight, for I never believed in nothing but myself—not even when I was a boy under twenty years old. Next I bade her fall out with John James. I put words in her mouth to say to him. ‘I know the fashion of man he be—short an’ fiery in his temper,’ I told her. ‘Be hot an’ quick with him. Tell him he’s not your sort, an’ never will be—quarrel with his color, if you like. Tell him he’m too pink an’ white for ’e. Say ’tis enough that your own eyes be blue, an’ that you’d never wed a blue-eyed man. Make him angry—you ban’t a woman if you don’t know how to do that. Then the rest be easy enough. He’ll flare an’ flae like a tar barrel on Guy Fawkes Night. But he’ll trouble you no more, for he’m so proud as Satan.’

“Nelly Baker took in all I said; an’ inside a week she’d dropped my brother. But ’twas what p. 105he done after that startled folks, for without a word to any living soul, he vanished, like the dew of the morning, four-an’-twenty hours after she’d flinged him over. I was the last that seed him. We were working together out ’pon the land; an’ he was sour an’ crusty wi’ his trouble, an’ hadn’t a word to fling at me. Dimpsy light fell, an’ I went in a tool shed to don my jacket an’ go home. ’Twas autumn, an’ us had been spreading manure upon the meadow.

“‘You go to hell,’ he answered. ‘I’ll come when I’ve a mind to, an’ maybe I won’t come at all!’

“So home I walked wi’out another word; an’ he never comed; an’ nobody ever heard a whisper about him again from that day to this. For a soldier he went, ’twas thought; but the after history of un never reached nobody at Postbridge; an’ whether he was shot or whether he gathered glory in foreign parts none ’pon Dartymoor can tell you.

“A nine days’ wonder it was, an’ it killed my mother; for John James was the apple of her eye. Her never cared a button for me, ’cause I was the living likeness of her brother—my uncle, Silas Bond. They sent him to Botany Bay for burning down wheat stacks. A bad lot he was, no doubt; an’ a fool to boot, which is worse. For he got catched an’ punished. An’ he deserved all he got—for letting ’em catch him.

“With John James out of the way, I comed to be a bit more important in the house, an’ when my mother died, father got to trust me with his money. I was old for my years, you see. As for Nelly, she kept so true to me as the bird to her nest—for p. 106five years; an’ then I’d got to be twenty, an’ had saved over three hundred pound for her; an’ she was twenty-two. A good many chaps wanted to marry her; but she kept our secret close, an’ said ‘nay’ to some very snug men, an’ just waited for me an’ Aller Bottom Farm.

“Then, when I’d reckoned to name the day an’ take her so soon as I comed of age, Oliver Honeywell turned up from down country an’ rented that old tenement farm what be called Merripit. So good land as any ’pon all Dartymoor goes with it. An’ he comed wi’ a flourish of trumpets an’ plenty of money. He was going to larn us all how to farm, an’ how to make money ’pon weekdays, an’ how to get to heaven Sundays.

“Rot the devil! I see him now—a smug, sleek, fat, handsome, prosperous man, with the insolence of a spoilt cat! He’d preach in the open air of a Sunday, for there was no parson nor church here in them days. Strong as a horse,—a, very practical man,—always right. Did plenty of good, as the saying goes, an’ went about like a procession, as if he expected angels from heaven to be waiting for him at every street corner with a golden crown. His right hand was generous, but he took very good care his left hand knowed it. He didn’t do his good in secret, nor yet hide his light under a bushel.

“He was a black-haired man, wi’ scholarship an’ money behind him. He knew the better-most folk. They called upon him, I believe, an’ axed him to their houses, it was said. He hunted, and paid money to help three different packs o’ hounds. An old mother kept house for him. He tried to patronize the whole of Postbridge an’ play the squire an’ vicar rolled into one. Men as owed him p. 107nought an’ thanked him for nought pulled their hair to him. But there be some fools who will always touch their hats to a pair o’ horses. There comed to be an idea in people’s minds that Honeywell was a Godsend, though if you axed them why, they generally couldn’t tell you.

“At least she said so; though Heaven knows that the pompous fool, for all his fine linen, weren’t a patch on what I was at twenty-one. Anyway, he comed courting her, for ’twas not known yet that me an’ Nelly was more’n friends; an’ then when he heard how we had been secretly tokened for no less than six years, he comed to see me with a long-winded lie in his mouth. An’ the lie was larded wi’ texts from scripture. Nelly Baker had misunderstood her feelings about me, he said; her had never knowed what true love was till she met him; an’ he hoped I’d behave as honestly as he had—an’ all the rest of it. In fact, she’d throwed me over for him an’ his money an’ his high position; an’ he comed to let me down gently with bits from the Bible. As for her, she always lusted after money and property.

“Us fought hand to hand, for I flew at him, man, like a dog, an’ I’d have strangled him an’ tored the liver out of him, but some chaps heard him howling an’ runned along, an’ pulled me off his throat in time.

“He didn’t have the law of me; but Nelly Baker kept out of my way afterwards, like as if I was the plague; an’ then six months passed an’ they was axed out in marriage so grand as you please at Widecombe Church.

“I only seed her once more; but after lying in p. 108wait for her, weeks an’ weeks, like a fox for a rabbit, it chanced at last that I met her one evening going home across the moor above Aller Bottom Farm ’pon the edge of the last of our fields. Then us had a bit of a tell. ’Twas only a fortnight afore she was going to marry Mr. Oliver Honeywell.

“I axed her to change her mind; I spoke to her so gentle as a dove croons; but she was ice all through—cold an’ hard an’ wicked to me. Then I growed savage. I noticed how mincing her’d growed in her speech since Honeywell had took her up. She was changed from a good Devon maid into a town miss, full o’ airs an’ graces that made me sick to see. He’d poisoned her.

“‘Do try an’ be sensible,’ she said. ‘We were silly children all them years, you know, Mr. Mundy. You’ll find somebody much better suited to you than I am—really you will. Have you ever thought of Mary Reep, now? She’s prettier than I am—I am sure she is.’

“Her named the darter of William Reep, a common laborer as worked on Honeywell’s farm at ten shilling a week. The devil in me broke loose, an’ quite right too.

“‘We’ve gone up in the world of late then? ’Twas always your hope and prayer to come by a bit of property. But ’tis a coorious thing,’ I said. ‘Do you know that you’m standing just where my brother, John James, stood last time ever he was seed by mortal eyes?’

“‘What’s that to me?’ she said. ‘Let me go by, please, Mr. Mundy. I’m late, as it is.’

“‘He was never seed again,’ I told her. ‘’Tis a coorious thing to me, as you be stand’—on the same spot at the same time—just as he did, in the p. 109first shadow of night. His going, you see, made me my father’s heir, an’ rich enough to give you a good home some day.’

“I went home presently; but from that hour Nelly Baker was seen no more. None ever knowed I’d been the last to speak with her; an’ none ever pitied me. But there was a rare fuss made over Oliver Honeywell. He wore black for her; an’ lived a bachelor for five year. Then he married a widow; but not till his mother died.

The minister tapped his pipe on the hob, and knocked the ashes out. He cleared his throat and spoke. He had learned nothing that was new to him.

“It is a strange story indeed, Mr. Mundy, and I am interested to have heard it from your own lips. Rumor has not lied, for once. The tale, as you tell it, is substantially the same that has been handed down in this village for two generations. But no one knows that you were the last to see Nelly Baker. Did you ever guess what happened?”

“No—I didn’t guess, because I knowed very well without guessing,” he said. “All the same I should have thought that you, with your mighty fine knowledge of human nature, would have guessed very quick. ’Twas I killed my brother—broke in the back of his head wi’ a pickax when he was down on one knee tying his bootlace. An’ me only fifteen year old! An’ I killed Nelly p. 110Baker—how, it don’t matter. You’ll find the dust of ’em side by side in one of them old ‘money pits’ ’pon Bellever Tor. ’Tis a place that looks due east, an’ there’s a ring of stones a hundred yards away from it. The ‘old men’ buried their dead there once, I’ve heard tell. Break down a gert flat slab o’ granite alongside a white thorn tree, an’ you’ll find what’s left of ’em in a deep hole behind. So she never comed by any property after all.”

“Good God! After all these years! Man, man, make your peace! Confess your awful crime!” cried the clergyman.

“None of that—none of that rot! I’d do the same this minute; an’ if there was anything that comed after—if I meet that damned witch in hell tomorrow I’d kill her over again, if her still had a body I could shake the life out of. Now get you gone, an’ let me pass in peace.”

The reverend gentleman departed at his best speed, but presently returned, bringing soups and cordials. With him there came a cottage woman who performed services for the sick. But when Mrs. Badger saw Noah Mundy, she knew that little remained to do.

“He’s gone,” she said, “soft an’ sweet as a baby falls to sleep. Some soap an’ water an’ a coffin be all he wants now, your honor; not this here beautiful broth, nor brandy neither. So you had best go back along, Sir, an’ send Old Mother Dawe up to help me, if you please.”

p. 111IRON

The child Cecily waited until her brother had made a bridge from a fallen bough, and then clasping her adorably grubby hands about his neck allowed him to carry her across the stream.

A dragon-fly hovered above the water and then darted away, and Cecily with a vague idea of following it chose a sunken path that almost traced the brook in its course. It was a silent little stream running through the sleepy meadows, and where it widened among the pond lilies it almost stopped. Here and there it eddied self-consciously about the yellow flowers and further on it almost rippled in shy haste. And in the golden afternoon Cecily knew that the boy, so clever at building bridges, so capable in the midst of barbed wire, and above all, so kind to her, was wonderful beyond all telling.

When three tiny aeroplanes flew above the trenches, it reminded the boy of the dragon-flies over the brook at home, and once when he crawled through the mud and helped cut away some barbed wire, the barbed wire made him think of a bit of the brook which ran through the pasture. He remembered the wire had made a breakwater of drifting leaves and that Cecily had thrown stones at the leaves until they had slowly floated away in a p. 112great clump. And because he imagined himself a victim of unmanly sentiment, he detested these memories; so that after a while they returned no more.

At the training camp he had learned, or thought he had learned, the trick of withdrawing a bayonet after a supposedly unparried lunge. But here as he slipped in the wet snow trying to release the driven bayonet, the thing caught and tore and ripped the flesh. And to keep from falling he crushed and mangled the face beneath him with his heel. . .

Cecily in the twilight pressed her face against the window pane. The gaunt branch of a tree waved and pointed across the snow, but the little frozen stream was hidden away.

p. 113THE PERFECT INTERVAL

The sound of the telephone bell brought the tuner’s mild blue eyes from his plate.

“How extraordinary that you can name the pitch of a sound offhand!” exclaimed the professor, eyeing him with interest.

“All in the way of business,” replied the tuner placidly. “No, thank you, ma’arm, no cream on the pudding. I never paint the lily, as father used to say. . . . I’d not have been tuning pianos all over the world with a ‘come again’ always behind me if I hadn’t had something of an ear, would I, now?”

“But accurate to such a degree! I thought one tuned by chords and melodies and—and that sort of thing.”

“Chords! Melodies!” repeated the tuner with professional scorn. “Of course some do muddle along that way, but there’s nothing in it. The octave, there’s the interval to give the test to a man’s ear.”

“You’re Greek in your preferences,” commented the professor with a smile. “The Greeks, you know, knew nothing of harmony as we understand it. Their only interval was the octave—they called it magadizing.”

“Well now, to think of it!” said the tuner. “I p. 114wish I’d known. There was a Greek sailor on the Silvershell, and I might have had a chat with him about his music.”

“I was referring to the ancient Greeks,” the professor explained. “I am not familiar with modern Greek music, but I imagine it is very much like modern music everywhere.”

“Of course,” agreed the tuner cynically. “Comic operas, chords that give all ten fingers something to do—that’s music as they write it now. And I’m not saying that it hasn’t its place,” he went on. “It’s human, at least. Professionally, I admire the octave, but when I sit down in the evening for a bit of a rest and me daughter Nora plays ‘Vesper Chimes,’ the way those chords pile up on each other don’t hurt me the way it would some. After all, perfection’s apt to be a bit bleak, isn’t it? There was Cartwright, for instance. The octave came to be the only perfect interval for him—poor Cartwright!”

“Haven’t I ever told you about Cartwright? Hm! Well!” He pushed his chair back a little from the table, fixed his eyes thoughtfully on the antics of a pair of orioles building a nest outside the window, and meditated for a moment. We were too wise to break the silence, for we knew that the tuner was digging up from the storehouse of a rich memory some fresh chapter in the Odyssey of his wanderings. After a little he began his tale.

What the professor here said about the Greeks and their octaves set me thinking about Cartwright. p. 115I haven’t often spoken of him, for there’s not much to tell that most people would understand. Molly, now, she always speaks of him as that poor crazy Mr. Cartwright. The perfect interval is nonsense, Molly says. Red Wing’s good enough for her. . . but I’d better begin at the beginning.

It was the time Molly and I were taking our wedding trip on the tramp schooner Silvershell, and we were cruising about the Pacific after copra and vanilla and all those cargoes that sound so romantic when one’s young. One of the ports we were bound for was a place called Taku, down in the Dangerous Archipelago. The captain warned us that it would be a bad trip.

“But you ought to make your fortune there,” he says, “for I’ll lay a wager you’re the first tuner that’s ever visited the place. Whether you get home to spend your money or not, that’s another matter. That’s on the knees of the gods,” says the captain, who was an Oxford man and had picked up some of his expressions there.

When we got in among the islands I saw what he meant. Coral they were, and reefs above water and below. Molly and I slept in our life preservers night after night, and daytime we could scarcely go down to meals for wondering how we’d get through that boiling sea of breakers and hidden peaks of coral. We’d some narrow shaves, too, but we made Taku, and anchored one evening in a lagoon that looked as if it might have been painted on a colored calendar, palms and parrots and native huts and all.

The Silvershell was to be in port some time, and the captain told us to look about as much as we liked.

p. 116“There’s an organ up at the mission,” he says. “It’s got asthma or something. If you can cure it, I’ll gladly foot the bill. I’m a church-going man when I’m ashore,” says the captain, who liked his joke, “but that organ puts me clean off religion.”

Well, I made a good job of the organ, and very grateful the ladies were for it, too. Then I went up to the British commissioner’s, where I was told there was a piano needing attention. Davidson, the commissioner, was an uncommonly decent chap, and he put me in the way of two or three more odd bits of tuning and repairing, besides having his own instrument put into shape. The missionary ladies had suggested that Molly and I stay with them while the Silvershell was in port, so I could put in a tidy bit of work in a day. But there were only twenty white families in the place, and I’d about gone through the work when one afternoon Davidson stopped me as I was going back to the mission, and asked me to step up to the house with him, as a friend of his wanted to talk with me about rather a large job of repairing he wished done.

The friend was Cartwright. I shall never forget that first sight of him, not to my dying day. He was standing in the big music room where I’d been working for Davidson two or three days before, and as we came in he turned and gave us such a look!

“Oh, it’s you!” he said, as if he’d expected something terrible to come in the door. And then, as Davidson introduced us, he nodded in an offhand sort of way. He was the only man I’ve ever called beautiful. Beautiful was the only word to describe him. “Golden lads,”—I once heard an p. 117actor spout about them at a play, and now, when I remember that expression, I think of Cartwright. He was a golden lad, for all his haunted, unhappy face.

“I’ve a piano at home that wants looking after,” he says to me after a moment. “Rather a large job, but if you are willing to go back with me in the morning I’ll make it worth your while.”

“If it isn’t too far away,” I said. “I’m only stopping here while the Silvershell is in port.”

“Not so far,” says Cartwright. “I could have you back here in three or four days. And I’ll make it worth your while.” In spite of his off-handedness, it was plain he was keen on having me come.

Of course I said I’d go, and then Cartwright nodded and said something about my being at the wharf about five, and left us, just like that.

“About everything, I fancy,” Davidson answers gruffly. “It hasn’t been touched in ten years.”

“Ten years!” I said. “He’s no business having a piano if he cares no more for it than that.”

“He cared too much for it, perhaps,” Davidson said in a peculiar tone. He took out his pipe and fussed with it, then he went on. “Perhaps I ought to tell you. He hasn’t touched the piano since the night his wife drowned herself. . . . I was there at the time. Cartwright and Charlotte had been singing together.”

“His cousin, Sir John Brooke’s daughter. Sir John is my chief, you know. They are expected back from England almost any day now.”

Davidson’s face had gone quite red at the p. 118mention of the girl’s name, and all at once I guessed why he had been so keen about having his piano in shape. I wondered if it was for this Charlotte’s sake that Cartwright, too, was preparing.

“Cartwright’s wife was the daughter of old Miakela, the native chief,” was the surprising information Davidson offered me next. “She had been educated at a convent in Manila, and she was very beautiful in a cold, foreign way. I think, though, it was her voice that first attracted Cartwright. It was perfect; it made other quite nice voices sound coarse and shrill. Cartwright had come out to Taku to visit his uncle, and he met the girl here the evening she came back from Manila. The next day he married her—rode over the mountains to ask her father’s permission. That old savage—fancy! There was a huge row with Sir John, and Cartwright took the girl and went to live on a little atoll about forty miles from here. . . . Miss Charlotte hadn’t come out from school in England then. She came back the next year. . . That’s how it happened.”

As a matter of fact he really hadn’t told me how it happened at all, but he began to talk of other things, and after a bit I said good-night, and went back to tell Molly about my new job.

I wish you could have seen the lagoon the next morning when I went down to meet Cartwright. The old coral wharf was flushed with pink that shaded into mauve below the water, and the mauve went amethyst, and then violet blue out where the Silvershell slept at her anchor in the middle of the lagoon. And still! Not a ripple anywhere until a high-prowed native canoe slipped out from a pool of shadow under the palms along the shore, p. 119cutting through the glassy water like a boat in a dream. As she neared the wharf the sun jumped up from the sea, and Cartwright, all in white, stood up in the stern and shaded his eyes with his hand. He was a picture, his haunted beauty above the bronzed backs of the rowers.

He apologized for bringing me out so early, then seemed to forget all about me and sat silent, his eyes on the horizon line. Not that I minded. I wanted to be let alone, so I could look about me as we slipped along over a sea that seemed to have no end.

Once outside the lagoon, the men bent to their paddles with a will, breaking into a melody that reminded me of some hymn tune. They gave it a foreign twist by ending each line on the octave.

“What’s that?” asked Cartwright, jerking his head round. I repeated what I’d said. He glared at me wildly, then seemed to pull himself together, and muttered some sort of reply.

“Well, if a simple speech has that effect on you, my lad, I’ll sit silent,” I said to myself, and silent I did sit the rest of the trip.

About the middle of the morning a bunch of what looked like feather clusters rose out of the sea in front of us. Pretty soon I could see a pinky ridge below, then a line of white. The men put up a brown sail, and in another hour we slid between two lines of breakers into the tiniest lagoon I ever saw, lying in the arms of a crescent-shaped atoll. The whole thing could not have been more than four or five miles long and fifty feet high at the ridge. There was a group of native huts on the beach and a rambling house above, set in a grove p. 120of breadfruit and citron and scarlet flame trees. The rest of the island was bare except for a brush of pandanus along the crest and a group of coconut palms on the point, their trunks leaning seaward, as if they were looking for something on the horizon. A lonely spot, yet with a sharp, gemlike beauty of its own.

“Won’t you come up and rest a bit?” Cartwright asked. “You had an early start this morning.”

I said I’d rather go right to work. I hadn’t forgotten the way he glared at me in the boat, and I wasn’t going to put myself in the way of another look like that.

“Right, then; I’ll show you the piano,” he says. But he didn’t move, only stood staring at me with the look of a small boy that had got himself into some trouble, and was wondering if I could help him out.

Suddenly he started off almost on a run, and led me around the shore to the point below the coconut palms, where a pavilion stood in a thick clump of trees. The place looked as if it hadn’t been visited for years. The path was choked with undergrowth, and the doorway was almost hidden by twisted ropes of lianas, growing down serpent fashion from the branches overhead.

“A sweet place to keep a piano,” I thought to myself. I could hardly believe it was the piano he was bringing me to. But as we reached the door I saw it in its wrapping of tarpaulin, half hid under forest rubbish that had filtered through the broken thatch of the roof. As I lifted one corner of the cover, something jumped up with a rush of wings and went screaming past my head. It gave me a proper fright.

p. 121“Just a parrot,” Cartwright said. “You’ve upset her nest, you see. Be careful when you lift the lid. There may be centipedes inside.”

“If you’ll clear the live stock off the outside, I’ll see to the inside,” I said. “I should think a cheaper piano would have done the parrots to nest in, sir.

“It seems odd to you,” he said meekly, wrinkling his forehead a little. “I wish I could explain—”

He caught himself up, and I answered never a word, but began examining the piano. It was a Broadwood grand, but the state it was in! I’d hard work not to give him a further piece of my mind.

For three days I worked at the poor thing. Hammers eaten off by the white ants, wires that the sea rust had done for, cracked keys, nothing really in shape but the sounding board. And all the time I was working the parrots kept screaming over my head, the trades blew through the torn thatch of palms, the surf beat on the pink and purple reefs beyond the point, and I kept thinking what a queer start it all was and how much I’d have to tell Molly when I got back.

Now and again Cartwright would stop a few minutes in the doorway and make jerky conversation, eyeing the piano like a starving man the while. He stopped quite a time the third morning. I was busy tuning and hadn’t much to say, but gradually he came nearer.

“I mustn’t touch it, I mustn’t touch it,” he says p. 122to himself, but all the time he was coming closer, as if something was pulling him on. He put out his hand and struck B flat octave.

I explained that the string had broken twice, and I hadn’t got around to putting another in.

“Broken!” he says wildly. “She’s not going to have it there. And now I’ll not get the sound out of my head again!”

I suppose he saw something in my face that made him recollect himself. It was pitiful to see him pull himself together.

“Do your best with it, old chap,” he says hurriedly. “I’m depending on you. My uncle and cousin are to be back from England soon. I—I want everything right when my cousin Charlotte comes.”

That evening, as we were smoking, he began to talk of his cousin again. She’d stayed with his people while she was going to school, he told me, and she and Cartwright had been great friends.

“She was comforting,” he said. “She made one feel happy and—and normal.” Then he said, in a tone that sounded as if he expected me to contradict him: “She had a good ear for music, too. Not perfect, of course. . . . Did you ever know any one with an ear so perfect that only the eighth interval satisfied them?”

“One or two,” I said, wondering what he was driving at now. “They were cranks, though. One should love music in reason, in my opinion.”

“In reason, that’s it,” Cartwright repeated in a low tone. “My cousin loved it in reason. I couldn’t. Perfection—I was tortured with the idea.”

“I’ve never been able to care for things in reason. I wanted perfection. Music, love, I longed to lose myself in them, but couldn’t, because always something jarred, and then I grew cold. My cousin Charlotte used to laugh at me. She had a sweet voice. Not perfect, though, and sometimes it would irritate me to madness to hear the flaws that most people didn’t even notice. And yet even at sixteen Charlotte was dearer to me than any other creature on earth.

“Then I came out to Taku, and I met Lulukuila. She was beautiful beyond anything I had ever dreamed. She made other women look clumsy beside her. She stayed overnight at my uncle’s, and next day an escort came from the old chief, her father—six savages in pandanus kilts and necklaces. Those creatures came to take the very flower of womanhood back to uncivilized surroundings. I can’t tell you how horrible it seemed to me. And so I married her.”

Cartwright jumped up, and began walking up and down. After a while he switched off on another tack.

“Her voice was as perfect as her face,” he said, “and her sense of pitch was absolute. Those first days we used to go out to the point where the pavilion stands, and sit looking out over the reefs, and I thought I’d found happiness at last. I liked to hear her answer a certain note that the sea sounds in the reefs yonder when the tide is right. She would take up the note an octave higher, and it was thrilling, the perfection of her pitch. I sent home for the piano, imagining that it would be a bond between us. I thought I’d teach her the songs Charlotte and I used to sing together.

p. 124“But she hated the piano,” Cartwright brought out in a muffled voice. “I suppose I was rather a fool over it at first. I was so hungry for familiar music. Lulukuila couldn’t bear the music I’d grown up with. It brought out alien traits in her, gusts of passion, fits of moodiness. Octaves, those she’d listen to. Once when I filled in an octave she jumped up and caught my hands. I remember yet how she looked.

“‘You are drawn by the many voices,’ she said. ‘There should, be only one for you.’

“She went off to the pavilion then, and when I went to find her she was singing, following that sound the surf made on the reefs. The perfection of her pitch made me shiver. I began to hate it then. I saw that Lulukuila was going to destroy my pleasure in the music I had loved. She was robbing me—”

I don’t believe Cartwright was talking to any one in particular by this time. His voice dropped, and I missed a lot till I heard him mention his cousin. He stopped then, and looked at me for the first time.

“My uncle threw me over when I married Lulukuila,” he said, “but when my cousin Charlotte came out from England she made her father come over with her. She brought Davidson too—good sort, Davidson.

“I must have been homesick, for the sight of them seemed to wake me from a nightmare. I remember we were very jolly at dinner. Afterward Charlotte and I sang. I was thinking how good it was to hear the music of home again, when I caught sight of Lulukuila’s face in a shaft of light that reached out to where the rest were p. 125sitting. Her face was white, and her teeth were biting her lip.

“Charlotte stopped playing just then, and asked me why I had broken into the octave. The chord, she said, was so much prettier. I couldn’t tell her that it was Lulukuila’s interval haunting me. I hadn’t even known I was singing an octave,” Cartwright added with a sudden laugh. Then he went on.

“We didn’t sing any more, but went out to join the others. Lulukuila wasn’t there. I was just asking Davidson where she had gone, when I heard a splash down by the lagoon. All in a flash I remembered how her face had looked in the lamplight, and I started off down the path. . . . I got there too late.”

After a while he began muttering in a disconnected sort of way. “She had her way. I’ve never touched the piano since. Surely I have the right now, though, now Charlotte’s coming back—a little happiness.”

“That’s the thing to think of now, sir,” I says, wondering if I should call his man or leave him to talk himself out. “You weren’t to blame for what happened. Think of your cousin now.”

“My cousin, yes,” Cartwright murmured. He pulled himself up with a sharp breath.

“I’m afraid I’ve been talking an uncommon lot,” he said in his ordinary tone. “It’s late. You must be wanting to turn in.”

We commented on the sultriness of the night as we parted. The stars were hidden in a sort of murk, and the air had grown so still that the beetles bumping against the banana leaves overhead startled one like the crack of artillery.

“It’s fallen uncommonly fast,” Simmons said to me. “Just as it did before the hurricane five years ago.

“Not to speak of,” Simmons said. “Some of the native huts were swept away when the water backed up into the lagoon, but the people had time to get up here. There’s no saying what might have happened if the water had come up two feet higher.”

“I hope there isn’t going to be a hurricane this time,” I said, thinking of Molly.

It took more than a falling barometer to put me off sleep those days, and I was off sounder than usual that night. I waked at last in a bedlam of sound, wailing of wind, cracking of branches, and the thunder of surf from the barrier reef.

“It’s the hurricane that owl Simmons was wishing on us,” I thought. I struck a match to find my clothes, but a gust of wind puffed it out. I was just trying for the third time, when Simmons came in, carrying one of the two ship’s lanterns Cartwright kept by the outer door.

Simmons shook his head. “I’m afraid he’s gone down to the pavilion. He began to worry about the piano. I see the other lantern’s gone. I must go after him.”

p. 127“I’ll come with you, then,” I said. “Just hold the light while I find my clothes.”

Ordinarily that Yorkshire face of Simmons had no more expression than a granite slab, but he looked human enough now. If he cared for any earthly creature it was Cartwright. I’d not been in the house three days without finding that out.

I had a start as we passed through the big room, for the floor was covered with figures stretched out like corpses on the mats. “From the huts on the beach,” Simmons explained. “That’s what makes me think it’s going to be a bad storm.”

He braced himself to hold the door open for me, and added in a sudden shout as the roar of the storm came about us: “A little harder than last time, and the pavilion would go.”

The path to the pavilion ran just above the coral shingle along the foot of the ridge. Ordinarily it was ten feet above high tide, but as we struggled on, hugging the bank to keep from being blown flat by the wind, I could catch a glimpse of creaming, sullen-looking water not two yards away. Slipping up quietly it was, and the soundlessness of its rising was more uncanny than all the bustle and roar on the reefs outside.

We had a struggle to get on, and Simmons hung on to me to keep me from being blown into the lagoon. I began to wish I hadn’t come, and I thought of the peaceful mission house in Taku and of Molly.

“Mr. Cartwright’s there,” Simmons says suddenly in my ear. “I see his light. Hang tight. The wind’s worse out here.”

And it was. An awful clap came, driving us to our knees. I saw a huge bulk crash down between us and the pavilion. The light disappeared.

p. 128“The breadfruit tree,” said Simmons, in a hoarse voice. He clawed his way over the fallen branches and I managed to follow, shivering to think of what a misstep would do for me. At last we made out Cartwright struggling in the wreckage brought down by the fallen tree.

“You, Simmons?” he cried. “Quick! Give a hand with this piano. We must get it to higher ground.”

His voice sounded sane enough, but it was the speech of a crazy man. The only path up the ridge was a mere goat trail, fully exposed to the wind. And Cartwright was suggesting our carrying the piano up that! Simmons jerked his lantern up to Cartwright’s face. There was wildness with a vengeance. But my word! How beautiful he looked with his fair, tossed hair, and his eyes purple black with excitement.

“It’s you we’ve come for, sir,” Simmons says to him. “The water’s backing up fast. There’s no time to lose.”

“We must save the piano first,” Cartwright says insistently. A lull had fallen, and his voice sounded very clear. Simmons made a desperate gesture.

“If that wind comes up again we’ll have to scramble to save our skins,” I shouted. “It isn’t humanly possible for us to move the piano. Come, sir, while there’s time!”

“And desert it again?” he asks with a strange little smile. “You’re asking too much of me, old chap. What about Charlotte?”

“She won’t care a hang about the piano!” I could have stamped my foot at him. “It’s you p. 129she’ll be worrying about. Don’t be an ass.” That shows how beyond myself I was, that I could speak to him that way. A long, ominous roll shook the silence.

“By Jove, you’re right!” Cartwright exclaims, throwing back his head. His voice was boyish and energetic. “Come on, we must make a dash for it.” And jerking up the lantern he fairly herded us through the tangle to the cliff.

There the gale broke loose on us again. We lay flat on our faces, clinging for dear life to the stems of the stout little pandanus palms. It was like a beast, that wind. It sucked the breath from our mouths, it pounded us and shrieked at us and mocked us till we were half dead from the sheer, cruel force of it. We could scarcely think. Once I had a vision of those huddled figures on the mats, and wondered if the house was still standing, and once I thought of Molly, and hoped she was saying a prayer for me. Then all thought was wiped out as, with a shaking of the very cliff, the surf came racing into the lagoon, sending the spray up fifty feet, and drenching us where we lay.

“The piano!” Cartwright shouted, struggling to get up. Simmons hauled him down, crying to him that it was no use to think of the piano. Cartwright staved quiet a moment till another of those uncanny silences fell.

“Now we can go down,” Cartwright said pleadingly. “I can’t lose my chance of happiness again. The piano—”

The words died on his lips. Through the thunder of the surf came a single long-drawn note, clear and unearthly sweet.

p. 130“B flat,” I said, scarcely knowing that I spoke. Cartwright gave a wild laugh.

Well, I can only tell you what happened next, and you may believe it or not. From below us there came another note, making a perfect octave. Never before or since have I heard anything so exquisite or so horrible. Then there was a hideous discord—and silence.

“Lulukuila!” Cartwright cried. “She is taking it from me—my only chance of happiness—”

We tried to follow him, but the wind caught us again at the edge of the ridge. I’d have been over and lost if it hadn’t been for Simmons. I think I must have fainted from the shock of it. There’s a blank about there, though the rest of the night seemed centuries long.

The wind stopped at sunrise, and we made our way home along the ridge, looking down on a beach swept clean of every human mark, pavilion, grove, native huts and all. The house was still standing, but in a wreck of fallen branches and torn lianas. Scared servants and ashen-faced women and children came out to meet us, and began asking for their master. Simmons, granite faced as ever, did not answer them, but pushed on down to the beach.

Cartwright had come home ahead of us. He was lying on the shore, unscarred except for a faint streak of blue across one temple. He looked beautiful as some sleeping creature of the sea. The wreck of the piano was just above him. Simmons’ composure gave way when he saw that.

“You’ve broken the thing he loved, and you’ve p. 131killed him, too. I hope you’re satisfied at last!” he snarled, shaking his fist at the lagoon. I wondered if he was talking to Lulukuila. It was a terrifying outburst—from a man like Simmons.

Next morning they came over from Taku to look for us. The sea was smiling as ever, and the little launch came dancing over the rose and amethyst water as if there never had been a storm to ruffle it. I caught sight of Molly first, then I noticed another woman, sitting between her and Davidson. As she leaned forward to search the shore I was startled with the likeness of her face to Cartwright’s. Yet there was a difference. Her beauty was gracious and human, and—well, comfortable is the only word I can think of for it.

As they came near the beach she saw just Simmons and me and the staring natives. She cried out sharply and swayed a little. I saw Davidson put his arm out as if he would shield her from a blow. Faithful fellow, Davidson, and he got his reward at last.

It was Cartwright’s Charlotte, and Cartwright was not there to meet her. Lulukuila had seen to that.

p. 132THE ARCHBISHOP OF RHEIMS

It was the Feast of the Assumption, and the archbishop, as he left his palace and stepped into the summer sunlight, breathed a prayer of thanksgiving for the brilliance that glowed about him. For, during the mass which was about to be celebrated in the great cathedral, the passion of his life, one of the most impressive moments occurred when the sun shot its rays with pure and dazzling radiance for the first time into the middle of the apse. With exact calculation the architect had arranged that this took place on the fête day of St. Remi, the patron saint of Rheims, and when the day was overcast or rain obscured the sun it seemed to the archbishop that the Almighty was expressing His displeasure of some negligence or wrongful act on the part of the guardian of this, to him, most precious and wonderful trust in the world.

But today the sun’s effulgence surpassed in warmth and splendor that of any August fifteenth in the archbishop’s memory, and brought into his heart an intense calm and peace which even the knowledge that German guns were despoiling Belgium, not many leagues away, could not entirely dispel. Nevertheless, the remembrance cast a shadow over the spirituality of his broad brow, and his lips moved in silent supplication for the suffering inhabitants, and that the onward march of the invaders would be stayed before their presence desecrated the sacred soil of France.

p. 133In rapt contemplation he stood, kindliness and benevolence radiating from his mild face, crowned with its silver halo of hair. His large, gentle eyes wandered over the massive pile raising its lofty steeples in eloquent testimony to the omnipotence of God; its slender spires, pointed portals, and lancet windows indicating the heights to which the thoughts and lives of men must reach before perfection can be attained.

When the archbishop emerged from the sacristy at the end of the long procession of choir, acolytes and coped priests, and entered the cathedral, the voice of the mighty organ was rolling through the edifice in rushing waves of melody, which ebbed and flowed in and out among the great columns in a wealth of harmonics, whose exquisite beauty, as they broke around him, caused a band to tighten about the old man’s throat.

The crossing was filled with a throng of devout worshippers whose faces wore a look of expectancy, for France, la belle France, was threatened by a danger greater than even the oldest among them could recall. War had always been a horror, but today it transcended, in the vague reports that reached them from stricken Belgium, the worst the most imaginative of them could conceive, and the thought haunted them, in spite of their faith that the Blessed Virgin would not permit such a calamity to befall France, that notwithstanding their entreaties, the hand of the Hun might descend on her as it had on her equally innocent and unprovoking neighbor.

The procession wound slowly to its place in the choir, and the organ broke into the great, swelling chords of Gounod’s mass, Mors et Vita. The p. 134music, inspired by the sublime grandeur of the sanctuary where it had partly been composed, proclaimed an unshakable faith in the majesty and power of the Almighty, whose protecting arm stands between His children and harm. Gradually the tense look of alarm on the faces of the congregation changed to the serenity of souls in the presence of God.

The organ’s voice subsided to a breath, wafted in and out among the incense-filled recesses of the cathedral like the rustling of angels’ wings, and the deep-toned peal of the great cathedral bell rang through the tense stillness. All at once a shaft of pure radiance shot into the center of the apse from the Angel’s Spire. Straight as a dart it descended until it found the jeweled arms of the cross. Here it rested, throwing out myriad rays of effulgence, as if through them the Spirit of the Founder of their faith was renewing His promises of salvation to His flock.

A breathless hush rested on the congregation until, in an ecstasy of triumph, the organ burst once more into a pæan of praise. The procession receded into the remote spaces of the cathedral, and the worshippers passed out into the sunlit square. As they walked by the statue of Joan of Arc, who sits on her charger before the cathedral, many paused and spoke in low, reverent tones of the sacrifice she had made for France, and wondered if the same spirit of loyalty would spring into life if the land of their adoration stood in need of defense.

Through the great western rose window of the cathedral the sun was casting quivering masses of rubies, topazes, emeralds, sapphires and amethysts p. 135to the floor below, where they lay in gorgeous profusion, melting one into the other in extravagant richness of beauty.

An old man stood in contemplation of the splendor of that mighty work of the ages which for a century and a half had been the especial care of his forefathers, and to which end, with reverent preparation, each succeeding generation of his family had been trained. To the old vitrier the windows in the sacred structure were not only a holy trust, but a prized heritage, each separate particle to be watched and studied, as a mother guards its offspring from possible injury, and passed on to posterity in as perfect a condition as it was received.

So deep was his absorption in the magnificence of the spectacle before him that he did not notice the approaching step of the archbishop. The ecclesiastic laid his hand on Monneuze’s shoulder.

“Exquisite, is it not, mon vieux?” he asked in his resonant voice. “I have never seen the colors more superb than they are this afternoon.”

The old glass-maker started, and turned toward him. The expression of ecstatic wonder still lingered on his lined face, from which, behind his heavy glasses, peered eyes round and childlike in their unquestioning trust.

“The beauty of it passes belief, Monseigneur,” he murmured fervently. “Oh, that I knew the art of reproducing those marvelous colors! It is the sorrow of my life that, try as I may, I can never duplicate the depth, the richness—” he shook his head dejectedly, and fixed his eyes once more on the flaming window.

“Ah, Jean,” answered the archbishop a little p. 136sadly. “So it is with all of us; no matter how hard we strive, we never reach the goal to which we are pressing. Our attainments are ever a disappointment to us. We can only labor on, and live in the hope that on the Last Day, when we see our endeavors through the eyes of the Blessed Redeemer, we may find that His estimate of them, graded on the knowledge of our limitations, will be higher than ours. It may be that our efforts and the sincerity of our motives will be judged instead of the results we were able to achieve. We must remember that no man can do bigger things than his capacity allows.”

The vitrier did not reply. His eyes wavered from the magnificence above him to the spiritualized countenance at his side. It surprised him that the archbishop, renowned alike for his piety and good works, should speak so slightingly of his life.

The ecclesiastic had turned and was gazing at the representation of the Almighty on the great rose window of the south transept. Something of the sublimity of the conception and execution of the masterpiece was reflected on his face, over which still hovered an expression of humility. His eyes left the window and swept up the vast stretches of the cathedral, over mighty pillars, great misty aisles, glorious choir, its beauty half shrouded in the encroaching shadows, until they reached the very penetralia of the Lady Chapel.

“Ah, Jean,” he went on in a deep, vibrant voice, “great is God’s goodness that He has seen fit to confide this marvelous structure to our keeping. May we so live that, when we are called to give an accounting of our stewardship, we may hear the wondrous words: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant!’”

p. 137The lips of the aged vitrier moved in a murmured “Amen,” and they watched in silence the sun, as it threw its dying rays through the window to their feet. They fell in a great splash of red, like blood, on the pavement, and a shudder shook the archbishop’s frame. He passed his hand over his forehead, and the shadow that had clouded his face in the morning settled once more on it. Bidding the old glass-painter good night, he moved up the dusky nave.

Days and weeks slipped by, and the gray waves of the invaders rolled nearer to Rheims. Notwithstanding the heroic, almost superhuman, efforts of her sons, the vandals swept across her borders into France, ravishing, desecrating, destroying in a frenzy of frightfulness so terrible that the world, shocked beyond belief, stood aghast and incredulous at the reports that reached it.

The archbishop of Rheims, with others who believed that there was good in the worst of men, at first resolutely declined to credit the rumors that reached him. But when, at last, driven before the attacking force, the refugees, with terror-stricken faces, came breathlessly into the city, the mothers clutching their babies to their breasts, with little tots scarce able to toddle clinging to their skirts and, throwing themselves on his mercy, recounted with white lips, in a dull monotone, the horrors that had befallen them and theirs, the hopeful trust in the old priest’s face turned into a crushed look of sadness as the knowledge came home to him that his faith in man was an illusion of which, at the end of his life, he was to be bereaved.

He lent such aid as lay in his power to the stricken peasants, and when the wounded, friend p. 138and foe, were brought in and, overflowing hospital and private dwelling, still clamored for succor, he threw open the great sanctuary to the Germans with the thought that here they would at least be safe from the shells that were beginning to fall on the outlying districts of the city.

Then one night, when the foreboding chill of autumn had replaced summer’s golden warmth, the archbishop was awakened by a noise, apparently in his bedroom, which shook the house to its foundations. He rose hurriedly and, going to the window, saw that the east was ablaze with light. Although the dawn was approaching, he realized that the refulgence that flared across the horizon was man-made, for the rumble of mighty guns which, when he had retired the night before, had been louder and more resonant than before, had risen to a threatening roar that forced a sickening sense of impotence upon him.

Startled by the sudden proximity of the enemy, the archbishop dressed hurriedly and made his way to the Square, already half filled with people. An old woman approached him and, with blanched face, asked whether he thought the city would be shelled and destroyed, as were the Belgian towns. He shook his head despairingly, and his lips framed the words:

As she turned away he prayed fervently that, even though the pillaging hordes might, in their fury against the inhabitants, devastate the city, the fact that they claimed the same God as their Savior to whose glory the cathedral had been erected would prove its safeguard and protection. But, even as he prayed, a great bomb blazed a trail p. 139through the gray light, and hurled itself on the roof of the sacred edifice. It exploded with concentrated fury, tearing off great pieces of the roof and casting them at his feet.

“They’ve found the range!” excitedly exclaimed a man who stood near the archbishop. “Can it be possible that they intend to destroy the cathedral?”

The archbishop was staring with incredulous eyes at the gaping wound the shot had made.

“No,” he declared firmly, without removing his eyes. “It is not possible. This injury is an unfortunate mistake. Sacred edifices are protected by human and moral laws, and, besides, the Cathedral of Rheims, because of its perfection, belongs to all time and all peoples. No one destroys his own heritage.”

Nevertheless, the remembrance of the destruction of Louvain and the desecration of many churches by the Germans since their treacherous entrance into Belgium, when they cast aside men’s faith in their honor, seared itself across his mind. Their acts had disproved their vaunted belief in God which, had it existed, would have shown itself in a reverent solicitude for His dwelling place.

The words had hardly left his lips when a shower of explosives fell on and about the massive structure, hewing out huge lumps of the masonry, which descended in a deluge of stone on the roofs of the adjacent houses.

A glare of light flared behind the great rose-window, throwing for the last time a blaze of glory into the horror-stricken faces below; then it burst into a thousand fragments that shivered to pieces on the pavement of the Square.

Surrounded by the gleaming bits of imprisoned p. 140sunshine, Jean Monneuze gazed with wide, unbelieving eyes at the yawning space in the façade. The thought took shape in his mind that this act of profanation could not be true, that it must be some hideous nightmare at which he would scoff in the morning, and he prayed aloud that the awakening would be soon, that he might be relieved of the torture he was undergoing. A voice at his elbow roused him.

The old vitrier turned quickly, the fury of a mother for her ravished young in his working face. “Amen!” he exclaimed harshly.

A group of people near him parted, and out of it Jean saw the archbishop slowly advance. The look of intense suffering on his face had driven away the peace that formerly rested there, but his countenance was untinged by venom or desire for revenge. His sunken eyes met the glass-maker’s, and Jean, a sob clutching at his throat, fell on his knees and began gathering up the gems of shattered glass that lay at his feet. He rose as the archbishop reached him, and held out the fragments to him. For a moment they gazed into each other’s eyes without speaking, then a wistful little smile flitted across the archbishop’s face.

“The Lord hath given—the Lord hath taken away.” There was a pause while he waited for the response; but the old vitrier’s chin had sunk on his breast, and his eyes, swimming with tears, were fastened on the gleaming bits of glass. Once more the archbishop’s voice fell on his ears:

“Blessed be the name of the Lord.” There was an accent of surprised reproach in the patient p. 141tones, but only pity shone on the gentle countenance as he noted the quivering face of the old man who, turning abruptly away, disappeared into the crowd.

“The wounded!” he exclaimed. “They will perish if they remain where they are!”

“Let ’em!” retorted a thick-set ouvrier. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers. “They deserve to die, and they’re not fit to live!” He turned brusquely away, and stared with sullen eyes at the smoking roof from which jets of flame were spurting.

A look of anguish crept over the archbishop’s face. Could it be that his flock had caught so little of the spirit of his teaching that, when it was put to the test, it collapsed as the mighty edifice was crumbling under the demolishing shells? If this were so, it explained the destruction of the cathedral as the retribution for the failure of his ministry. His life work, as well as his life trust, was disintegrating before his eyes. Even Jean Monneuze, the spirituality of whose life, in daily contact with the inspiring sanctuary they both adored, had faltered under the supreme test, and if Jean, for whom he would have vouched under all circumstances, would succumb, how could he expect that the others, with so incomparably less sustaining spiritual strength in their lives, would respond to the call. The bitterness of Gethsemane fell on him, and his face, lighted by the glare from the burning structure, was drawn with pain.

p. 142A shell hurtled through the air, and fell against the portal. Rending from its place the head of the Angel with the Smile, it flung it into the Square. Angry mutterings rose from the crowd as the ouvrier picked up the head and held it aloft for every one to see.

The archbishop stepped up on the base of the pedestal of the statue to the Maid of Orleans. He raised his hand impressively.

“My children,” he began in a voice tremulous with emotion. “The Master admonishes us to love our enemies, to do good to them that hate us, to pray for them that despitefully use us and persecute us. If we do good only to those who love us, how much better are we than the heathen? Did you not see that, despite its destruction, the Angel of Rheims smiled on?” He spread out his arms in an agony of entreaty. “Oh my children,” he pleaded, “do not fail me now!”

The rays of the rising sun shone on his face and illumined it with unearthly radiance. The people stood spellbound before him.

Once more he raised his hand and, pointing to the burning cathedral, cried in a resonant voice that rang like a clarion:

Still that tense silence hung over the motionless throng which the crackling of the flames, and the moaning and singing of death as it whistled through the air, only served to accentuate.

The old vitrier elbowed his way through the crowd and, laying his hand on the base of the statue, said in a clear, loud voice:

In the uncertain light the two old men stood p. 143scanning the quivering, upturned faces. Then a sudden change swept over the mass.

“Au secours! Au secours!” The voice of the crowd rose as from one man in a cry, increasing in volume with each repetition until, in the archbishop’s ears, it sounded like a shout of victory. The men turned, and surged toward the entrance of the cathedral.

The archbishop’s face went white, and he grasped the spurred foot of the Maid for support. He closed his eyes, and his lips moved spasmodically. Then they parted in a smile of such celestial beauty that the old vitrier, standing at his feet, averted his eye as though unable to bear the sight.

The large central door of the cathedral swung open, and four men, carrying a litter on which lay a gray, motionless form, emerged. They were followed by others in what seemed an endless procession, gently bearing their burdens through the showers of flying pieces of granite statuary and structure stone which the shells were cleaving from the façade.

The flames that were devouring the roof rose in a dull roar; a great bomb crashed through the hallowed walls, and fell on the palace, where it exploded with terrific force.

The archbishop looked silently at the ruin of his home, then he concentrated his attention on the stream of wounded still flowing from the mutilated pile, and directed and guided the movements of the rescuers. When the last of the sufferers had been removed to a place of safety, he stepped down from the pedestal and, entering a little house on the other side of the Square, mounted the stairs until he reached a small room which faced the east.

p. 144He entered and, softly closing the door, walked to the window, from which the glass had fallen. Kneeling down in the chill morning air he gazed out at the blackened, smoking husk, his soul in his eyes, as one kneels by the bedside of all that life holds dear, waiting with bated breath for the final dissolution of soul from body with the dull knowledge that, with the passing of that spirit, the light of the world is extinguished.

Still he watches, noting day by day the destruction by wanton shells of one of man’s most glorious tributes to God, ever with the patient look of suffering on his face, as though the prayer from ceaseless repetition had crystallized on his brain:

p. 145THE TRAWNBEIGHS

The Trawnbeighs were the sort of people who “dressed for dinner” even when, as sometimes happened, they had no dinner in the house to dress for. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the Trawnbeighs were English. Indeed, on looking back, I often feel that to my first apparently flippant statement it is unnecessary to add anything. For to one who knew Mr. and Mrs. Trawnbeigh, Edwina, Violet, Maud and Cyril, it was the first and last word on them; their alpha and omega, together with all that went between. Not that the statement is flippant, far from it. There is in it a seriousness, a profundity, an immense philosophic import. At times it has almost moved me to lift my hat, very much as one does for reason of state, or religion, or death.

This, let me hasten to explain, is not at all the way I feel when I put on evening clothes myself, which I do at least twice out of my every three hundred and sixty-five opportunities. No born American could feel that way about his own dress coat. He sometimes thinks he does; he often—and isn’t it boresome?—pretends he does. But he really doesn’t. As a matter of unimportant fact, the born American may have “dressed” every evening of his grown up life. But if he found himself on an isolated, played out Mexican coffee and vanilla finca, with a wife, four children, a tiled roof that p. 146leaked whenever there was a norther, an unveiled sala, through the bamboo partitions of which a cold, wet wind howled sometimes for a week at a time, with no money, no capacity for making any, no prospects and no cook—under these depressing circumstances it is impossible to conceive of an American dressing for dinner every night at a quarter before seven in any spirit but one of ghastly humor.

With the Trawnbeighs’ performance of this sacred rite, however, irony and humor had nothing to do. The Trawnbeighs had a robust sense of fun (so, I feel sure, have pumpkins and turnips and the larger varieties of the nutritious potato family), but humor, when they didn’t recognize it, bewildered them, and it always struck them as just a trifle underbred, when they did.

Trawnbeigh had come over to Mexico—“come out from England,” he would have expressed it—as a kind of secretary to his cousin, Sir Somebody Something, who was building a harbor or a railway or a canal (I don’t believe Trawnbeigh himself ever knew just what it was) for a British company down in the hot country.

Mrs. Trawnbeigh, with her young, was to follow on the next steamer a month later; and as she was in mid-ocean when Sir Somebody suddenly died of yellow fever, she did not learn of this inopportune event until it was too late to turn back. Still, I doubt whether she would have turned back if she could. For, as Trawnbeigh once explained to me, at a time when they literally hadn’t enough to eat (a hailstorm had not only destroyed his coffee crop but had frozen the roots of most of his trees, and the price of vanilla had fallen from ten cents a p. 147bean to three and a half), leaving England at all had necessitated “burning their bridges behind them.” He did not tell me the nature of their bridges nor whether they had made much of a blaze. In fact, that one, vague, inflammatory allusion was the nearest approach to a personal confidence Trawnbeigh was ever known to make in all his fifteen years of Mexican life.

The situation, when he met Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the children on the dock at Vera Cruz, was extremely dreary, and at the end of a month it had grown much worse, although the Trawnbeighs apparently didn’t think so. They even spoke and wrote as if their affairs were looking up a bit. For, after a few weeks of visiting among kindly compatriots at Vera Cruz and Rebozo, Mrs. Trawnbeigh became cook for some English engineers (there were seven of them) in a sizzling, mosquitoey, feverish mudhole on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

The Trawnbeighs didn’t call it cook! Neither did the seven engineers. I don’t believe the engineers even thought of it as cook. What Mrs. Trawnbeigh thought of it will never be known. How could they, when that lady, after feeding the four little Trawnbeighs (or rather the four young Trawnbeighs; they had never been little) a meal I think they called “the nursery tea,” managed every afternoon, within the next two hours, first, to create out of nothing a perfectly edible dinner for nine persons, and, secondly, to receive them all at seven forty-five, in a red-striped, lemon satin ball gown (it looked like poisonous wall paper), eleven silver bangles, a cameo necklace, with an ostrich tip sprouting from the top of her head?

p. 148Trawnbeigh, too, was in evening clothes; and they didn’t call it cooking; they spoke of it as “looking after the mess” or “keeping an eye on the young chaps’ livers.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Trawnbeigh, daughter of the late, the Honorable Cyril Cosby Godolphin Dundas and the late Clare Walpurga Emmeline Moate, cooked—and cooked hard—for almost a year; at the end of which time she was stricken with what she was pleased to refer to as “a bad go of fevah.”

Fortunately they were spared having to pass around the hat, although it would have amounted to that if Trawnbeigh hadn’t, after the pleasant English fashion, “come into some money.” In the United States, people know to a cent what they may expect to inherit; and then they sometimes don’t get it. But in England there seems to be an endless succession of retired and unmarried army officers who die every little while in Jermyn Street and leave two thousand pounds to a distant relative they have never met. Something like this happened to Trawnbeigh, and on the prospect of his legacy he was able to pull out of the Tehuantepec mudhole and restore his wife to her usual state of health in the pure and bracing air of Rebozo.

Various things can be done with two thousand pounds, but just what shall be done ought to depend very largely on whether they happen to be one’s first two thousand or one’s last. Trawnbeigh, however, invested his (“interred” would be a more accurate term) quite as if they never would be missed. The disposition to be a country gentleman was in Trawnbeigh’s blood. Indeed, the first impression one received from the family was that everything they did was in their blood. It never p. 149seemed to me that Trawnbeigh had immediately sunk the whole of his little fortune in the old, small, and dilapidated coffee finca so much because he was dazzled by the glittering financial future the shameless owner (another Englishman, by the way) predicted for him, as because to own an estate and live on it was, so to speak, his natural element.

He had tried, while Mrs. Trawnbeigh was cooking on the Isthmus, to get something to do. But there was really nothing in Mexico he could do. He was splendidly strong, and, in the United States, he very cheerfully and with no loss of self-respect or point of view would have temporarily shoveled wheat or coal, or driven a team, or worked on the street force, as many another Englishman of noble lineage has done before and since, but in the tropics an Anglo-Saxon cannot be a day laborer. He can’t because he can’t.

There was in Mexico no clerical position open to Trawnbeigh, because he did not know Spanish. It is significant that after fifteen consecutive years of residence in the country none of the Trawnbeighs knew Spanish. To be, somehow and somewhere, an English country gentleman of a well-known, slightly old-fashioned type was as much Trawnbeigh’s destiny as it is the destiny of, say, a polar bear to be a polar bear, or a camel to be a camel. As soon as he got his two thousand pounds he became one.

When I first met them all he had been one for about ten years. I had recently settled in Trawnbeigh’s neighborhood, which in Mexico means that my ranch was a hard day-and-a-half ride from his, over roads that are not roads but merely ditches full of liquefied mud on the level stretches, and p. 150ditches full of assorted bowlders on the ascents. So, although we looked neighborly on a small map, I might not have had the joy of meeting the Trawnbeighs for years if my mule hadn’t gone lame one day when I was making the interminable trip to Rebozo.

Trawnbeigh’s place was seven miles from the main road, and as I happened to be near the parting of the ways when the off hind leg of Catalina began to limp, I decided to leave her with my mozo at an Indian village until a pack train should pass by (there is always some one in a pack train who can remove a bad shoe), while I proceeded on the mozo’s mule to the Trawnbeighs’. My usual stopping place for the night was five miles farther on, and the Indian village was—well, it was an Indian village.

He put me up not only that night, but as my mozo didn’t appear until late the next afternoon, a second night as well. And when I at last rode away, it was with the feeling of having learned from the Trawnbeighs a great lesson.

In the first place they couldn’t have expected me; they couldn’t possibly have expected any one. And it was a hot afternoon. But as it was the hour at which people at “home” dropped in for tea, Mrs. Trawnbeigh and her three plain, heavy looking daughters were perfectly prepared to dispense hospitality to any number of mythical friends.

They had on hideous, but distinctly “dressy” dresses of amazingly stamped materials known, I believe, as “summer silks,” and they were all four tightly laced. Current fashion in Paris, London and New York by no means insisted on small, smooth, round waists, but the Trawnbeigh women p. 151had them, because (as it gradually dawned on me) to have had any other kind would have been a concession to anatomy and the weather. To anything so compressible as one’s anatomy, or as vulgarly impartial as the weather, the Trawnbeighs simply did not concede. I never could get over the feeling that they all secretly regarded weather in general as a kind of popular institution, of vital importance only to the middle class.

Cyril, an extremely beautiful young person of twenty-two, who had been playing tennis (by himself) on the asoleadero, was in “flannels,” and Trawnbeigh admirably looked the part in gray, middle-aged riding things, although, as I discovered before leaving, their stable at the time consisted of one senile burro with ingrowing hoofs.

From the first, it all seemed too flawless to be true. I had never visited in England, but I doubt if there is another country whose literature gives one as definite and lasting an impression of its home life. Perhaps this is because the life of families of the class to which the Trawnbeighs belonged proceeds in England by such a series of definite and traditional episodes.

In a household like theirs, the unexpected must have a devil of a time in finding a chance to happen. For, during my visit, absolutely nothing happened that I hadn’t long since chuckled over when making the acquaintance of Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope; not to mention Ouida (it was Cyril, of course, who from time to time struck the Ouida note), and the more laborious performances of Mrs. Humphry Ward. They all of them did at every tick of the clock precisely what they ought to have done. They were a p. 152page, the least bit crumpled, torn from “Half Hours With the Best Authors,” and cast, dear Heaven! upon a hillside in darkest Mexico.

Of course we had tea in the garden. There wasn’t any garden, but we nevertheless had tea in it. The house would have been cooler, less glaring, and free from the venomous little rodadoras that stung the backs of my hands full of microscopic polka dots; but we all strolled out to a spot some fifty yards away where a bench, half a dozen shaky, home made chairs and a rustic table were most imperfectly shaded by three tattered banana trees.

“We love to drink tea in the dingle-dangle,” Mrs. Trawnbeigh explained. How the tea tray itself got to the dingle-dangle I have only a general suspicion, for when we arrived it was already there, equipped with caddy, cozy, a plate of buttered toast, a pot of strawberry jam and all the rest of it. But, try as I might, I simply could not rid myself of the feeling that at least two footmen had arranged it all and then discreetly retired; a feeling that also sought to account for the tray’s subsequent removal, which took place while Trawnbeigh, Cyril, Edwina and I walked over to inspect the asoleadero and washing tanks. I wanted to look back; but something (the fear, perhaps, of being turned into a pillar of salt) restrained me.

With most English speaking persons in that part of the world, conversation has to do with coffee, coffee and—coffee. The Trawnbeighs, however, scarcely touched on the insistent topic. While we sat on the low wall of the dilapidated little asoleadero, we discussed pheasant shooting, and the best places for haberdashery and “Gladstone p. 153Bags.” Cyril, as if it were but a matter of inclination, said he thought he might go over for the shooting that year; a cousin had asked him “to make a seventh.” I never found out what this meant, and didn’t have the nerve to ask.

To which her brother replied, as if she had shown a distressing ignorance of some fundamental date in history, like 1066 or 1215: “Bertie always shoots the twelfth.”

The best place for haberdashery, in Mr. Trawnbeigh’s opinion, was “the Stores.” But Cyril preferred a small shop in Bond Street, maintaining firmly, but with good humor, that it was not merely, as “the pater” insisted, because the fellow charged more, but because one didn’t “run the risk of seeing some beastly bounder in a cravat uncommonly like one’s own.” Trawnbeigh, as a sedate parent bordering on middle age, felt obliged to stand up for the more economical “Stores,” but it was evident that he really admired Cyril’s exclusive principles and approved of them. Edwina cut short the argument with an abrupt question.

“I say,” she inquired anxiously, “has the dressing bell gone yet?” The dressing bell hadn’t gone, but it soon went, for Mr. Trawnbeigh, after looking at his watch, bustled off to the house and rang it himself. Then we withdrew to our respective apartments to dress for dinner.

“I’ve put you in the north wing, old man; there’s always a breeze in the wing,” my host declared as he ushered me into a bamboo shed they used apparently for storing corn and iron implements of an agricultural nature. But there was p. 154also in the room a recently made up cot with real sheets, a tin bath tub, hot and cold water in two earthenware jars, and an empty packing case upholstered in oilcloth. When Trawnbeigh spoke of this last as a “wash-hand-stand,” I knew I had indeed strayed from life into the realms of mid-Victorian romance.

The breeze Trawnbeigh had referred to developed in the violent Mexican way, while I was enjoying the bath tub, into an unmistakable norther. Water fell on the roof like so much lead, and then sprang off (some of it did) in thick, round streams from the tin spouts; the wind screamed in and out of the tiles overhead, and through the north wing’s blurred window the writhing banana trees of the dingle-dangle looked like strange things one sees in an aquarium.

As soon as I could get into my clothes again—a bath was as far as I was able to live up to the Trawnbeigh ideal—I went into the sala, where the dinner table was already set with a really heartrending attempt at splendor. I have said that nothing happened with which I had not a sort of literary acquaintance; but I was wrong. While I was standing there wondering how the Trawnbeighs had been able all those years to “keep it up,” a window in the next room blew open with a bang. I ran in to shut it; but before I reached it, I stopped short and, as hastily and quietly as I could, tiptoed back to the “wing.” For the next room was the kitchen, and at one end of it Trawnbeigh, in a shabby but perfectly fitting dress coat, his trousers rolled up half way to his knees, was patiently holding an umbrella over his wife’s sacred dinner gown, while she—be-bangled, p. 155be-cameoed, be-plumed, and stripped to the buff—masterfully cooked our dinner on the brassero.

To me it was all extremely wonderful, and the wonder of it did not lessen during the five years in which, on my way to and from Rebozo, I stopped over at the Trawnbeighs’ several times a year. For, although I knew that they were often financially all but down and out, the endless red tape of their daily life never struck me as being merely a pathetic bluff. Their rising bells and dressing bells, their apparent dependence on all sorts of pleasant accessories that simply did not exist, their occupations (I mean those on which I did not have to turn a tactful back, such as botanizing, crewel work, painting horrible water colors and composing long lists of British sounding things to be “sent out from the Stores”), the informality with which we waited on ourselves at luncheon and the stately, punctilious manner in which we did precisely the same thing at dinner, the preordained hour at which Mrs. Trawnbeigh and the girls each took a bedroom candle and said good night, leaving Trawnbeigh, Cyril and me to smoke a pipe and “do a whisky peg” (Trawnbeigh had spent some years in India), the whole inflexibly insular scheme of their existence was more, infinitely more, than a bluff. It was a placid, tenacious clinging to the straw of their ideal in a great, deep sea of poverty, discomfort and desolation.

And it had its reward, for after fourteen years of Mexican life, Cyril was almost exactly what he would have been had he never seen the place; and Cyril was the Trawnbeighs’ one asset of immense value. He was most agreeable to look at, he was both related to and connected with many of the p. 156most historical sounding ladies and gentlemen in England, and he had just the limited, selfish, amiable outlook on the world in general that was sure (granting the other things) to impress Miss Irene Slapp, of Pittsburgh, as the height of both breeding and distinction.

Irene Slapp had beauty and distinction of her own. Somehow, although they all needed the money, I don’t believe Cyril would have married her if she hadn’t. Anyhow, one evening in the City of Mexico he took her in to dinner at the British Legation, where he had been asked to dine as a matter of course, and before the second entrée Miss Slapp was slightly in love with him and very deeply in love with the scheme of life, the standard, the ideal, or whatever you choose to call it, he had inherited and had been brought up, under staggering difficulties, to represent.

“The young beggar has made a pot of money in the States,” Trawnbeigh gravely informed me after Cyril had spent seven weeks in Pittsburgh—whither he had been persuaded to journey on the Slapps’s private train.

“And, you know, I’ve decided to sell the old place,” he casually remarked a month or so later. “Yes, yes,” he went on, “the young people are beginning to leave us” (I hadn’t noticed any signs of impending flight on the part of Edwina, Violet and Maud). “Mrs. Trawnbeigh and I want to end our days at home. Slapp believes there’s gold on the place—or would it be petroleum? He’s welcome to it. After all, I’ve never been fearfully keen on business.”

And I rode away pondering, as I always did, on the great lesson of the Trawnbeighs.

p. 157THE LIFE BELT

Out of doors, darkness and sleet; within the cottage parlor, a grand fire and a good supper, the latter, however, no longer in evidence.

Four people sat round the hearth: a woman not so old in years as aged in looks by what the war had done to her; a burly, bearded, middle-aged man, her brother; a young, rather stern-visaged fellow, the last of her sons; and a girl of twenty or so, with a sedate mouth and bright eyes, her daughter-in-law to be. The two men were obviously seafarers. As a matter of fact, the uncle was skipper of an ancient tramp which had somehow survived those three years of perilous passages; the nephew, a fisherman before war, afterwards and until recently in the patrol service, was now mate on the same old ship, though he had still to make his first trip on her.

Said Mrs. Cathles, breaking silence, to her brother: “Did ye see any U-boats comin’ home, Alick?” Possibly she spoke then just to interrupt her own thoughts, for it was not like her to introduce such a subject.

The skipper was busy charging his pipe. “Is it U-boats ye’re askin’ about, Maggie?” he said slowly, in his loud voice. “I’m tellin’ ye, on that last home’ard trip, the peeriscopes was like a forest!”

David Cathles winked to his sweetheart; then p. 158perceiving that the answer had scared his mother, he said:

“Come, come, Uncle! Surely ’twasn’t quite so bad as that. ‘A forest’ is a bit thick, isn’t it?”

“Well, there was room for the Hesperus to get through, I’ll allow,” the skipper said, striking a match extracted from his vest pocket, “otherwise I wouldn’t be settin’ here tellin’ the blessed truth every time.” He lay back and puffed complacently, staring at the fire.

“Never you mind him, Mother,” said the young man. “’Tis me he’s seekin’ to terrify: he’d just as soon I didn’t sail wi’ him, after all; ’fraid o’ me learnin’ what a poor skipper he is!”

Now David ought to have known better. People who are good at giving chaff are seldom good at taking it. The girl, however, was quick to note the stiffening of the burly figure.

“Captain Whinn,” she remarked promptly, but without haste, “ye must be a terrible brave man to ha’ come through all ye ha’ come through, since the war started.”

“Not at all, my dear,” was the modest reply; “I’m no braver’n several cases I’ve heard on.”

David, who had seen his own blunder, was grateful to Esther for the diversion, and sought to carry it further.

“Well, Uncle Whinn,” he said respectfully, “I think we’d all like to hear what yourself considers the pluckiest bit o’ work done by a chap in the Merchant Service durin’ the—”

“Haven’t done it yet.” With a wooden expression of countenance, the skipper continued to stare at the fire.

Mrs. Cathles spoke. “Ah, David, ’tis little use p. 159tryin’ to pick the bravest when all is so brave. But I do think none will ever do braver’n what that fishin’ skipper did—him we was hearin’ about yesterday.”

“What was it?” the girl inquired, with a veiled glance of indignation at Captain Whinn, who appeared quite uninterested, if not actually bored.

“You tell it, David,” said the mother. “Big moniments ha’ been put up for less.”

“’Twas something like this,” he began. “They had hauled the nets and was makin’ for port in the early mornin’, in hazy weather, when a U-boat comes up almost alongside. I reckon they was scared, for at that time fishin’ boats was bein’ sunk right and left. Then the commander comes on deck and asks, in first-class English, which o’ the seven was skipper. And the skipper he holds up his hand like as if he was a little boy in the school. ‘All right,’ says the ’Un, ‘I guess you can navigate hereabouts—eh?’ The skipper answers slow that he has been navigatin’ thereabouts ’most all his life. ‘Very well,’ says the ’Un, ‘there’s a way you can save your boat, and the lives o’ them six fine men, and your own.’ He waits for a little while; then he says: ‘This is the way. You come on board here, and take this ship past the defenses and into —. That’s all. I give you three minutes to make up your mind.’

“’Tis said the skipper looked like a dyin’ man then, and all the time one o’ the U-boat’s guns was trained on the fishin’ boat. ‘Time’s up,’ says the ’Un; ‘which is it to be?’ And the skipper says: ‘I’ll do what ye want.’ I never heard what his p. 160mates said; and I should think their thoughts was sort o’ mixed. But they puts him on board the U-boat and clears out, as he told them to do; and the last they see of him was him standin’ betwixt two ’Uns, each wi’ a revolver handy. And then him and the ’Uns goes below, and so does the U-boat.”

“Wait a bit,” said David. “Can’t ye see that he saved the lives o’ his mates?”

“Ay, he did that—and her commander, too! Oh, he took her in right enough—safe into the big steel net! . . . They found him there wi’ the dead ’Uns, later on—only he had been murdered.”

Mrs. Cathles turned to her brother, who had not altered his attitude, though he had let his pipe go out.

“’Twasn’t so bad,” he said softly, “’twasn’t so bad, Maggie. Ha’ ye any matches?”

On the way she broke a silence by remarking: “David, I wish ye wasn’t sailin’ wi’ that man.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be sayin’ that, Esther,” said David. “I allow I can’t make anything o’ Uncle Whinn nowadays, but the war has turned many a man queerish. Still, I never heard him so boastful-like afore tonight—”

p. 161“‘’Twasn’t so bad,’” she quoted resentfully, “‘’twasn’t so bad!’—and it the bravest thing a human man could do? Oh, David, I do wish ye wasn’t sailin’ wi’ him, though he is your uncle. He’s a coward—that’s what he is, I’m sure.”

“I wouldn’t be sayin’ that, neither,” the young man gently protested. “He’s maybe feared—I surely doubt he is—but that’s not the same as bein’ a coward—not by a long chalk.”

“But I s’pose life’s sweet even when a man’s oldish. As for bein’ feared—out yonder wi’ the patrol, I was seldom anything else,” said David quietly.

“I’m feared now; I’ll be feared all this comin’ trip. Uncle Whinn has got more to be feared o’ ’n me.

“Well, if a U-boat gets the better o’ the old Hesperus—and she hasn’t got a gun yet—’tis ten to one the ’Uns make a prisoner o’ Uncle Whinn. ’Tisn’t cheerful to ha’ that on your mind all the time—is it now, Esther?”

“I grant ye that, David,” she said, with unexpected compunction. “Only he shouldn’t be so big about hisself and so small about the pluck o’ other men. I’d ha’ said he was feared o’ the very sea itself.”

“A common complaint, my dear! But now ye ha’ touched on a thing which is maybe only too true, for I could ’most allow my uncle is feared o’ death in the water—not that his fear is aught to be ashamed on.”

“Uncle Whinn used to be modest enough, and careless enough, too, about what happened to him,” said David. “But when I was on board wi’ him, this mornin’, I see a thing so queer and strange, it makes me creep yet.”

“And ’twas only a simple matter, after all,” he proceeded. “’Twas all about a life belt hangin’ above his bunk, in the chart room, where he berths nowadays. ’Twas an ordinary, everyday life belt, but all the time we was settin’ there smokin’ an’ chattin’, I noticed he never hardly took his eyes off o’ it. And at last I gets up and goes over, just to see if there was anything extra about it. Well, he was after me like a tiger! ‘Don’t ye put finger on that, my lad!’ he says, not so much as if he was angered as feared. And then he draws me back to the table, and says, as if he was a bit ’shamed o’ hisself: ‘Ye’ll excuse me, David, but I can’t bear to see that there life belt touched. T’other day, I was as near as near to killin’ the cook—the poor sinner said it needed dustin’. ’Tis my foolishness, no doubt, but we’ve all got our fancies, and I don’t want the belt to be missin’ or unhandy when the time comes. So there it hangs, an’ I’ll thank ye for your word, here and now, David, that ye won’t never touch it.’ Of course I give him my word, but wi’ no great feelin’ o’ pleasure. . . . What do ye think about it, Esther?”

“’Tis terrible that a great big man should be so feared. Now I’m sort o’ sorry for him. I daresay he needs ye badly on his ship, and so I’ll say no more about it, David.”

“Ye always see things right, once ye let your p. 163kind heart go,” he said tenderly. “And I can’t think that Uncle Whinn’ll play the coward if ever he’s really up against it. . . . And now, what about us two gettin’ married on my next leave?”

The Hesperus sailed a couple of days later. The outward voyage was completed without mishap or adventure, and she was within a day’s run of the home port when her end came.

After a brief but havoc-working bombardment, her helpless skipper gave orders to abandon ship, and signaled the enemy accordingly. There were two lifeboats,—the third had been smashed,—and in the natural course of things David would have been in charge of one of them. But Captain Whinn decreed otherwise.

“I want ye wi’ me,” he said to his nephew, as they came down from the tottering bridge. “Cast off!” he bawled at the boat whose crew included the second mate.

When they emerged, a couple of minutes later, he was wearing the belt, and his countenance was pale. But the young man’s was ghastly.

Now there were blurs of smoke on the horizon. Captain Whinn indicated them, remarking:

The blurs had evidently been observed from the U-boat also, for a “Hurry up!” came in the form of a shell aimed just high enough to clear the deck.

Skipper and mate went down the ladder, and the boat was cast off. At a safe distance, the rowers, at a sign from the skipper, lay on their oars. Speedily the U-boat put her victim into a sinking p. 164condition. During the operation Whinn neither moved nor spoke; seemingly he did not hear the several remarks softly addressed to him by his nephew. His face was set; all the skin blemishes stood out against the tan of many years, upon which had come a grayish pallor; there was moisture on his brow.

Then through the slightly ruffled sea the U-boat, her gunners’ job over, moved toward them. A hail came from the commander, a tall young man with an unslept, nervous look on his thin face.

None of the boat’s crew moved, but all at once the elderly cook broke forth in a voice of grievous exasperation:

“Godalmighty, Cap’n, whatever made ye put on your best duds? Why the hell didn’t ye get into some old slops?—an’ then I could ha’ passed for ye easy!”

The glimmer of a smile appeared in the skipper’s eyes, and his mouth quivered pathetically just for an instant. Then he said briefly:

“Maybe they would take me instead,” said David, but again his uncle seemed not to have heard.

Whinn did not speak again until he was standing on the submarine’s deck. Then steadily he addressed his nephew:

Then he was hurried below, and almost before p. 165the Hesperus’ boat was clear, the great engine of destruction began to submerge.

David sat with his face bowed in his hands, and now and then a shudder went through him.

Two nights later he was back in his mother’s house, seated with Esther at the parlor fire, which burned as grandly as on that night a month ago. Mrs. Cathles had gone to the kitchen to make the supper.

There had been a long silence. Suddenly David’s clasp of the girl’s hand tightened almost painfully.

“Esther, I don’t know what to do. . . . Ye see, when I was telling you an’ mother about Uncle Whinn, I kept back something—a lot. I couldn’t think how to tell the whole tale—to mother, anyway.”

“Ay, dreadful—in a way. Well, I’ll try and tell yourself now, an’ then, perhaps— ’Sh! I bear her comin’! ’Twill have to wait.”

Mrs. Cathles came in, but without the expected laden tray. She crossed to her accustomed place and seated herself. Presently she looked over at her son.

“David, I was thinkin’ just now, and it came on me that ye hadn’t told me everything about your uncle, my own brother, Alick. Now, dearie, ye must not keep aught back. ’Tis my right to know, and I can bear a lot nowadays.” She wetted her lips. “David, tell me true, what happened to my brother when they got him on board the U-boat. Did they—shoot him?”

p. 166“No, Mother”—David cleared his throat—“‘’twas far finer’n that! . . . Ah, well, now I’ll tell everything. ’Twas this way. You—we’ll never see Uncle Whinn again, Mother, but he was a great man. He stepped on board that U-boat as brave as a lion, and when the ’Un commander spoke to him, polite enough, too—he looked at him as if he was dirt. And then he give me the messages I ha’ told ye. And then they took him below. And then the U-boat started for to dive— Now don’t ye be too upset, Mother.”

“Well, then, the U-boat, as I was tellin’ ye, started for to dive. . . . But she wasn’t half under when—when she blowed up—all to smash—exploded into little bits, it seemed—our boat was near to bein’ swamped.” David ceased abruptly.

In the silence the girl rose and went to the woman, and put her arm about the bent shoulders.

David spoke again, in little more than a whisper. “’Tis not all told; and now comes the worst—and the best, too. . . . When all was over on the old Hesperus, and we was makin’ ready to leave her, Uncle Whinn draws me into the chartroom. Without sayin’ anything he takes off his old coat and cap and puts on split new ones. After that, he takes down the life belt that hung above his bunk, and puts it on very careful. Then, at last, he speaks to me. ‘David,’ he says, ‘they’re nailin’ us skippers in these times, so maybe you and me shan’t meet again.’ And he holds out his hand. Hardly knowin’ what to say, I says: ‘Even if they do take ye prisoner, the war won’t last for ever and ever, and maybe ye’ll escape afore long.’ He shakes his head, smilin’ a little. ‘If they takes p. 167me, they takes the consequences, and so does I.’ And then he tells me his secret— God! to think o’ the man’s pluck!”

“My Uncle Whinn says to me: ‘My lad, I thought to tell nobody, but ’twould be too lonesome-like for me to go like that. But ye needn’t make a story about it. . . . This here life belt,’ says he, ‘was my own idea. ’Tisn’t made o’ corks. T’is made o’ high, powerful explosive—enough to wreck a battleship. And all I ha’ got to do is just to pull this little bit o’ string.’ . . .”

p. 168AMINA

Waldo, brought face to face with the actuality of the unbelievable—as he himself would have worded it—was completely dazed. In silence he suffered the consul to lead him from the tepid gloom of the interior, through the ruinous doorway, out into the hot, stunning brilliance of the desert landscape. Hassan followed, with never a look behind him. Without any word he had taken Waldo’s gun from his nerveless hand and carried it, with his own and the consul’s.

The consul strode across the gravelly sand, some fifty paces from the southwest corner of the tomb, to a bit of not wholly ruined wall from which there was a clear view of the doorway side of the tomb and of the side with the larger crevice.

“There seemed to be sixteen or eighteen,” Waldo reasserted. Hassan smiled and grunted. The consul took from him two guns, handed Waldo his, and they walked around the tomb to a point p. 169about equally distant from the opposite corner. There was another bit of ruin, and in front of it, on the side toward the tomb, was a block of stone mostly in the shadow of the wall.

“Convenient,” said the consul. “Sit on that stone and lean against the wall; make yourself comfortable. You are a bit shaken, but you will be all right in a moment. You should have something to eat, but we have nothing. Anyhow, take a good swallow of this.”

“Hassan will bring you his water bottle before he goes,” the consul went on; “drink plenty, for you must stay here for some time. And now, pay attention to me. We must extirpate these vermin. The male, I judge, is absent. If he had been anywhere about, you would not now be alive. The young cannot be as many as you say, but, I take it, we have to deal with ten, a full litter. We must smoke them out. Hassan will go back to camp after fuel and the guard. Meanwhile, you and I must see that none escape.”

He took Waldo’s gun, opened the breech, shut it, examined the magazine and handed it back to him.

“Now watch me closely,” he said. He paced off, looking to his left past the tomb. Presently he stopped and gathered several stones together.

The consul came back, passed on in the same line, looking to his right past the tomb, and presently, at a similar distance, put up another tiny cairn, shouted again and was again answered. Again he returned.

“It is important,” warned the consul. “I am going back to where I left Hassan, to watch there while he is gone. You will watch here. You may pace as often as you like to either of those stone heaps. From either you can see me on my beat. Do not diverge from the line from one to the other. For as soon as Hassan is out of sight I shall shoot any moving thing I see nearer. Sit here till you see me set up similar limits for my sentry-go on the farther side, then shoot any moving thing not on my line of patrol. Keep a lookout all around you. There is one chance in a million that the male might return in daylight—mostly they are nocturnal, but this lair is evidently exceptional. Keep a bright lookout.

“And now listen to me. You must not feel any foolish sentimentalism about any fancied resemblance of these vermin to human beings. Shoot, and shoot to kill. Not only is it our duty, in general, to abolish them, but it will be very dangerous for us if we do not. There is little or no solidarity in Mohammedan communities, but on the comparatively few points upon which public opinion exists it acts with amazing promptitude and vigor. One matter as to which there is no disagreement is that it is incumbent upon every man to assist in eradicating these creatures. The good old Biblical custom of stoning to death is the mode of lynching indigenous hereabouts. These modern Asiatics are quite capable of applying it to any one believed derelict against any of these inimical monsters. If we let one escape and the rumor of it gets about, p. 171we may precipitate an outburst of racial prejudice difficult to cope with. Shoot, I say, without hesitation or mercy.”

“I don’t care whether you understand or not,” said the consul. “I want you to act. Shoot if needful, and shoot straight.” And he tramped off.

Hassan presently appeared, and Waldo drank from his water bottle as nearly all of its contents as Hassan would permit. After his departure Waldo’s first alertness soon gave place to mere endurance of the monotony of watching and the intensity of the heat. His discomfort became suffering, and what with the fury of the dry glare, the pangs of thirst and his bewilderment of mind, Waldo was moving in a waking dream by the time Hassan returned with two donkeys and a mule laden with brushwood. Behind the beasts straggled the guard.

Waldo’s trance became a nightmare when the smoke took effect and the battle began. He was, however, not only not required to join in the killing, but was enjoined to keep back. He did keep very much in the background, seeing only so much of the slaughter as his curiosity would not let him refrain from viewing. Yet he felt all a murderer as he gazed at the ten small carcasses laid out arow, and the memory of his vigil and its end, indeed of the whole day, though it was the day of his most marvelous adventure, remains to him as the broken recollections of a phantasmagoria.

On the morning of his memorable peril Waldo had waked early. The experiences of his p. 172sea-voyage, the sights at Gibraltar, at Port Said, in the canal, at Suez, at Aden, at Muscat, and at Basrah had formed an altogether inadequate transition from the decorous regularity of house and school-life in New England to the breathless wonder of the desert immensities.

Everything seemed unreal, and yet the reality of its strangeness so besieged him that he could not feel at home in it, he could not sleep heavily in a tent. After composing himself to sleep, he lay long conscious and awakened early, as on this morning, just at the beginning of the false-dawn.

The consul was fast asleep, snoring loudly. Waldo dressed quietly and went out; mechanically, without any purpose or forethought, taking his gun. Outside he found Hassan, seated, his gun across his knees, his head sunk forward, as fast asleep as the consul. Ali and Ibrahim had left the camp the day before for supplies. Waldo was the only waking creature about; for the guards, camped some little distance off, were but logs about the ashes of their fire.

When he had begun camp life he had expected to find the consul, that combination of sportsman, explorer and archæologist, a particularly easy-going guardian. He had looked forward to absolutely untrammeled liberty in the spacious expanse of the limitless wastes. The reality he had found exactly the reverse of his preconceptions. The consul’s first injunction was:

“Never let yourself get out of sight of me or of Hassan unless he or I send you off with Ali or Ibrahim. Let nothing tempt you to roam about alone. Even a ramble is dangerous. You might lose sight of the camp before you knew it.”

p. 173At first Waldo acquiesced, later he protested. “I have a good pocket compass. I know how to use it. I never lost my way in the Maine woods.”

Yet before long Waldo noticed that the few Kourds they encountered seemed simple-hearted, peaceful folk. No semblance of danger or even of adventure had appeared. Their armed guard of a dozen greasy tatterdemalions had passed their time in uneasy loafing.

Likewise Waldo noticed that the consul seemed indifferent to the ruins they passed by or encamped among, that his feeling for sites and topography was cooler than lukewarm, that he showed no ardor in the pursuit of the scanty and uninteresting game. He had picked up enough of several dialects to hear repeated conversations about “them.” “Have you heard of any about here?” “Has one been killed?” “Any traces of them in this district?” And such queries he could make out in the various talks with the natives they met; as to what “they” were he received no enlightenment.

Then he had questioned Hassan as to why he was so restricted in his movements. Hassan spoke some English and regaled him with tales of Afrits, ghouls, specters and other uncanny legendary presences; of the jinn of the waste, appearing in human shape, talking all languages, ever on the alert to ensnare infidels; of the woman whose feet turned the wrong way at the ankles, luring the unwary to a pool and there drowning her victims; of the malignant ghosts of dead brigands, more terrible than their living fellows; of the spirit in the shape of a wild ass, or of a gazelle, enticing its pursuers p. 174to the brink of a precipice and itself seeming to run ahead upon an expanse of sand, a mere mirage, dissolving as the victim passed the brink and fell to death; of the sprite in the semblance of a hare feigning a limp, or of a ground-bird feigning a broken wing, drawing its pursuer after it till he met death in an unseen pit or well-shaft.

Ali and Ibrahim spoke no English. As far as Waldo could understand their long harangues, they told similar stories or hinted at dangers equally vague and imaginary. These childish bogy-tales merely whetted Waldo’s craving for independence.

Now, as he sat on a rock, longing to enjoy the perfect sky, the clear, early air, the wide, lonely landscape, along with the sense of having it to himself, it seemed to him that the consul was merely innately cautious, over-cautious. There was no danger. He would have a fine, leisurely stroll, kill something perhaps, and certainly be back in camp before the sun grew hot. He stood up.

Some hours later he was seated on a fallen coping-stone in the shadow of a ruined tomb. All the country they had been traversing is full of tombs and remains of tombs, prehistoric, Bactrian, old Persian, Parthian, Sassanian, or Mohammedan, scattered everywhere in groups or solitary. Vanished utterly are the faintest traces of the cities, towns, and villages, ephemeral houses or temporary huts, in which had lived the countless generations of mourners who had reared these tombs.

The tombs, built more durably than mere dwellings of the living, remained. Complete or ruinous, or reduced to mere fragments, they were everywhere. In that district they were all of one type. p. 175Each was domed and below was square, its one door facing eastward and opening into a larger empty room, behind which were the mortuary chambers.

In the shadow of such a tomb Waldo sat. He had shot nothing, had lost his way, had no idea of the direction of the camp, was tired, warm and thirsty. He had forgotten his water bottle.

He swept his gaze over the vast, desolate prospect, the unvaried turquoise of the sky arched above the rolling desert. Far reddish hills along the skyline hooped in the less distant brown hillocks which, without diversifying it, hummocked the yellow landscape. Sand and rocks with a lean, starved bush or two made up the nearer view, broken here and there by dazzling white or streaked, grayish, crumbling ruins. The sun had not been long above the horizon, yet the whole surface of the desert was quivering with heat.

As Waldo sat viewing the outlook a woman came round the corner tomb. All the village women Waldo had seen had worn yashmaks or some other form of face-covering or veil. This woman was bareheaded and unveiled. She wore some sort of yellowish-brown garment which enveloped her from neck to ankles, showing no waist line. Her feet, in defiance of the blistering sands, were bare.

At sight of Waldo she stopped and stared at him as he at her. He remarked the un-European posture of her feet, not at all turned out, but with the inner lines parallel. She wore no anklets, he observed, no bracelets, no necklace or earrings. Her bare arms he thought the most muscular he had ever seen on a human being. Her nails were pointed and long, both on her hands and her feet. Her p. 176hair was black, short and tousled, yet she did not look wild or uncomely. Her eyes smiled and her lips had the effect of smiling, though they did not part ever so little, not showing at all the teeth behind them.

“I do speak English,” said the woman, and Waldo noticed that as she spoke, her lips did not perceptibly open. “What does the gentleman want?”

“You speak English!” Waldo exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “What luck! Where did you learn it?”

“At the mission school,” she replied, an amused smile playing about the corners of her rather wide, unopening mouth. “What can be done for you?” She spoke with scarcely any foreign accent, but very slowly and with a sort of growl running along from syllable to syllable.

“Is the gentleman living in a brown tent, shaped like half a melon?” she inquired, the queer, rumbling note drawling from one word to the next, her lips barely separated.

“I could guide the gentleman that way,” she droned; “but it is far, and there is no water on that side.”

“If you mean cow’s milk, we have none. But we have goat’s milk. There is to drink where I dwell,” she said, sing-songing the words. “It is not far. It is the other way.”

p. 177She began to walk, Waldo, his gun under his arm, beside her. She trod noiselessly and fast. Waldo could scarcely keep up with her. As they walked he often fell behind and noted how her swathing garments clung to a lithe, shapely back, neat waist and firm hips. Each time he hurried and caught up with her, he scanned her with intermittent glances, puzzled that her waist, so well-marked at the spine, showed no particular definition in front; that the outline of her from neck to knees, perfectly shapeless under her wrappings, was without any waist-line or suggestion of firmness or undulation. Likewise he remarked the amused flicker in her eyes and the compressed line of her red, her too red, lips.

“The Free-folk do not submit to baptism,” she stated simply, but with rather more of the droning growl between her words.

He felt a queer shiver as he watched the scarcely moved lips through which the syllables edged their way.

She shot one baleful glance at him. Waldo p. 178remembered that he had to do with an Asiatic. He recalled the three permitted questions.

“From the foolish tales of the believers,” she sneered. “The Free-folk know nothing of such follies.” The unvarying shutness of her speaking lips, the drawly burr between the syllables, struck him all the more as her lips curled but did not open.

“How is it that you learned my language at the mission school and are not a Christian?”

“They teach all at the mission school,” she said, “and the maidens of the Free-folk are like the other maidens they teach, though the Free-folk when grown are not as town-dwellers are. Therefore they taught me as any townbred girl, not knowing me for what I am.”

“I have the gift of tongues,” she uttered enigmatically, with an odd note of triumph burring the words through her unmoving lips.

Waldo felt a horrid shudder all over him, not only at her uncanny words, but also from mere faintness.

“It is there,” she said, pointing to the doorway of a large tomb just before them.

The wholly open arch admitted them into a fairly spacious interior, cool with the abiding p. 179temperaturc of thick masonry. There was no rubbish on the floor. Waldo, relieved to escape the blistering glare outside, seated himself on a block of stone midway between the door and the inner partition-wall, resting his gun-butt on the floor. For the moment he was blinded by the change from the insistent brilliance of the desert morning to the blurred gray light of the interior.

When his sight cleared he looked about and remarked, opposite the door, the ragged hole which laid open the desecrated mausoleum. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he was so startled that he stood up. It seemed to him that from its four corners the room swarmed with naked children. To his inexperienced conjecture they seemed about two years old, but they moved with the assurance of boys of eight or ten.

“All mine,” she replied, a curious suppressed boisterousness in her demeanor.

“There certainly are a dozen,” he maintained, spinning round as they danced and scampered about.

“But they are all of one age,” Waldo exclaimed, his tongue dry against the roof of his mouth.

She laughed, an unpleasant, mocking laugh, clapping her hands. She was between him and the doorway, and as most of the light came from it he could not see her lips.

Waldo was confuted and sat down again. The children circulated around him, chattering, laughing, giggling, snickering, making noises indicative of glee.

“Please get me something cool to drink,” said Waldo, and his tongue was not only dry but big in his mouth.

Waldo began to feel uneasy. The children pranced around him, jabbering strange, guttural noises, licking their lips, pointing at him, their eyes fixed on him, with now and then a glance at their mother.

The woman stood silent, her arms hanging at her sides, and it seemed to Waldo she was shorter than she had been.

The sunlight struck upon her back and made a sort of halo about her hips. She seemed still shorter than before. There was a something furtive in her bearing, and the little ones sniggered evilly.

At that instant two rifle shots rang out almost as one. The woman fell face downward on the floor. The babies shrieked in a shrill chorus. Then she leapt up from all fours with an explosive suddenness, staggered in a hurled, lurching rush toward the hole in the wall, and, with a frightful yell, threw up her arms and whirled backward to p. 181the ground, doubled and contorted like a dying fish, stiffened, shuddered and was still. Waldo, his horrified eyes fixed on her face, even in his amazement noted that her lips did not open.

The children, squealing faint cries of dismay, scrambled through the hole in the inner wall, vanishing into the inky void beyond. The last had hardly gone when the consul appeared in the doorway, his smoking gun in his hand.

“Not a second too soon, my boy,” he ejaculated. “She was just going to spring.”

“Good and dead,” he commented. “What luck! Generally it takes three or four bullets to finish one. I’ve known one with two bullets through her lungs to kill a man.”

He knelt down and pulled open the full, close lips, disclosing not human teeth, but small incisors, cusped grinders, wide-spaced, and long, keen, overlapping canines, like those of a greyhound: a fierce, deadly, carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative.

Waldo felt a qualm, yet the face and form still swayed his horrified sympathy for their humanness.

“Do you shoot women because they have long teeth?” Waldo insisted, revolted at the horrid death he had watched.

“You are hard to convince,” said the consul sternly. “Do you call that a woman?”

Waldo sickened all over. What he saw was not the front of a woman, but the body of a female animal, old and flaccid—mother of a pack.

“I thought they did not exist,” Waldo babbled. “I thought they were mythical; I thought there were none.”

“I can very well believe that there are none in Rhode Island,” the consul said gravely. “This is in Persia, and Persia is in Asia.”

p. 183THE SILVER RING

Calderon stopped abruptly in the middle of that long road across the moor. Something had caught his eye as he walked—the slightest possible glitter at the side of the road, where the heavy sunlight was making even the stones throw tiny, dense shadows. He went back a step, intent upon discovering what it was that had disturbed his casual glance. There, half raised by a small mound of hardened dust, was a ring, a plain silver ring, the sight of which struck him as a dagger might have done. As he picked it gently from the roadway, and dusted it with his handkerchief, his fingers trembled. It was his wife’s ring. He had given it to her before their marriage, a memento of an exquisitely happy day. All the time they had been together she had worn it constantly: there had never been a time when she had not borne it upon her finger. The ring was full of memories for him—of memories that were painful now in their happiness because they belonged to a broken time. And these memories pressed upon his heart, stabbing him, as he stood thoughtfully in the roadway among the purple heather, gazing at the ring. His face had grown quite gray and hard, and his eyes were troubled.

For a moment he could do nothing but gaze at the ring, busy with his urgent thoughts. He could not yet wonder how the ring had come there, upon p. 184this lonely road from dale to dale. Behind him the road was white, narrowing through the heather, unshadowed by any tree. To right and left of him the moor stretched in purple masses until it darkened at the sky line. In front, the road began already to decline for the steep descent into Wensleydale. The grass could be seen ahead of him; and beyond it, far in the burning mist of the late afternoon, he saw gleaming, like quicksilver, a sheet of water. The wind came at that great height in powerful gusts, freshening the air, pressing warmly against his face and hands as pleasantly as water presses against the swimmer. No other person was in sight upon the moor: he was alone, with Evelyn’s ring in his hand, and poignant memories assailing him.

Calderon’s love for his wife had been as intense and as true as any love could be. Her love for him, more capricious, more ardent, had been as great. Yet in the fifth year of their marriage, such was the conflict of two strong personalities, they had quarreled vehemently, and had parted. Both had independent means, and both had many activities. Calderon had been working very hard for two years since the quarrel, and they had not met. The two or three letters exchanged early in their estrangement had never suggested a continued correspondence; and although he knew that his wife had been living in the eastern counties, Calderon had now no idea at all of her whereabouts. How strange that he should find upon this lonely road that precious ring! Engraved within it he read: “Evelyn: Maurice”—the inscription she had desired. Calderon sighed, slipping the ring into his pocket, and thoughtfully continuing upon p. 185his way. Was Evelyn before him, or behind him? Who could tell? They had never been together to Yorkshire. He most go as a blind man.

Then the question came to him: if they met, what had he to say to her? He knew no more of his journey down into Wensleydale, for the passionate unreasonings that overwhelmed him.

And then, when he was arrived in the little village to which the road over the moor leads, he again hesitated. So much depended upon his action. He must find Evelyn this evening, for his return to London was urgent. Already the shadows were growing long, and the evening was heavy. Which way should he go? Upon his choice might depend the whole course of his future life. For a few moments he halted, irresolute. Then he went slowly forward to the first inn he saw, his fingers playing in his waistcoat pocket with the little ring that had suddenly plunged him into the past. He thought it certain that the loss of it was accidental. She would not have kept the ring for so long, and she could not have brought it with her to Yorkshire, if she had intended to throw it away forever. And yet how came it upon the moorland road?

Calderon stopped outside the comfortable inn. It attracted him; but, as though he had put some kind of reliance upon telepathy, he felt sure that Evelyn was not there. Should he enter, make inquiry? No; he knew she was not there. His steps led him forward. As if he were trying to follow some invisible thread, he went onward, pausing no more, through the village, over to the other side of the dale, marveling at the heavy outline of Mount Caburn, silhouetted against the sky. He p. 186found himself upon a good road, with hedges on both sides. It was an adventure. He was following the bidding of his instinct. He did not really believe in it, Calderon told himself; it was too silly. There would be a disappointment, a sense of having been “sold”; and the morning would find him unsatisfied, with his single opportunity gone. Yet even while his thoughts poured doubt upon his action he was pursuing his way at a regular pace. How curious it was! It was as though there were two Calderons—one brain, the other overmastering instinct.

“You’ll see,” he warned himself. “Nothing will happen. You’ll have an uncomfortable night, and a trudge back in the morning. It’s no good. No good!”

Yet he continued upon his way beside the silent hedges, his knapsack upon his shoulder, his arms swinging, and the silver ring hidden in his waistcoat pocket.

It was quite dark when he reached Bainbridge. He knew well the aspect of the open common, because he had passed through it a dozen years before, and the place is unforgettable. There was a large green, he remembered, and the houses hedged the green, as they did at East Witton. He smiled at the memory and at the comparison. Yorkshire held such variety of scene, from east to west, that he could pick from among old associations a pleasant thought of every part of it. And here at Bainbridge he knew there was an old inn, quiet and spacious, where he might find Evelyn. She was not one to seek the smaller inns such as he would himself have chosen: she would endure the discomforts of loquacious companionship rather p. 187than those of primitive bathing arrangements. Had it not, then, been instinct which had led him here? Had it perhaps been a subconscious guessing at her inclinations? Calderon could not discuss that now. He was here; it was too late to go farther; he must endure whatever disappointment might be in store for him.

A bedroom was available; he was supplied with hot water, and he groomed himself as well as his small store of belongings allowed. Whimsically he foresaw a number of women in semi-evening dress, one or two men in suitably dark clothes, himself the only palpable “tourist.” There would be a solitary meal, as dinner time was past; and he would then seek among the company the owner of the silver ring. Calderon found himself laughing rather excitedly, even trembling slightly. Well, he would see what happened. He ventured down the stairs, nervously grinning at the thought that Evelyn might appear from any one of the doors along that silent passage.

When he reached the foot of the stairs he went instinctively to the door, to watch the two or three faint, sudden lights that started across the green out of a general blackness. It was a very dark night; clouds had come swiftly from the southwest, and the sky was entirely hidden. There was a wind, and he thought that as soon as it dropped the rain might begin to patter.

And then, while he was thus prophesying the weather, Calderon was held to the spot by a new sensation. Within, from some room which he had not entered, came an unknown voice, singing. The voice was sweet, but he did not listen; only the air that was sung made him follow the voice, words p. 188forming in his mind, as though he were himself singing:

Surely he was dreaming! He could not move. The clouds hurried; the darkness enwrapped him. He could not smile at a coincidence, because he could not believe that the song was really being sung. It was too much for him to take in. If Evelyn were there, what could she be feeling, thinking? Calderon was a very honest man, and was considered generally a very cool, unsentimental one; but he was easily moved by the one love of his life. Evelyn was the only woman for him; they were parted; he had found a ring which held just such associations, “memories of the past,” as the song pictured. The ring was more than a ring. It was not merely an ornament; it was the material sign of their love. Calderon was deeply stirred.

Even as he stood there, not daring to move, he felt that he was not alone. Another figure, a woman’s, stood in the doorway. He could see her light dress, the whiteness of her neck; and he found himself breathless, suffocated by the sudden dénouement to his dream.

There was a quick recoil. For a moment it seemed to Calderon that everything was lost, and that he was alone. Then the woman in the doorway stood quite still, breathing quickly, half hidden from him by the doorpost, her face wholly invisible in the murk of the night.

“I didn’t see anybody,” she said unsteadily. p. 189“Who are you?” It seemed an unfamiliar voice, rather strangled and more than a little scared.

“Ah! You’re not Evelyn!” Calderon cried. Still he could not see her: only the whiteness glimmered before him. “I’m— My name’s Calderon. I beg your pardon. I thought it was my wife.”

“Calderon!” said the voice; and it seemed to him that it was suddenly filled with a new warmth, as of gayety. Then: “How funny!” said the unknown. He seemed to see her head quickly lowered and averted. Was she smiling? Who could have told, in that foglike darkness? It was as much as he could do to see that she was still before him. But funny? What did that mean?

“Funny?” he exclaimed eagerly. “Is—” He pulled himself up. Here was a complication! If he asked any question, might he not make a new difficulty? He could not ask whether Evelyn was here. He could guess how quickly a story would run through a mischievous party of tourists, unrestrained by any real understanding of the situation, and bent upon canvassing among themselves, merely to beguile gaps in a mealtime conversation, the history of an unhappy marriage. He could not expose Evelyn to such a company. So he went no further with his speech.

“Perhaps you’ve heard—” said the voice. “Perhaps you’ve heard of Alice Bradshaw.” She was quite recovered from her shock, and was ready, it appeared to Calderon, to hold him flirtatiously in the doorway. “I’ve known Evelyn for some time—two years.”

“I’ve got an idea—” hesitated Calderon, racking his brains and lying. It was getting worse and worse! How could he go on without showing how p. 190little he knew about Evelyn’s recent movements? He frowned, and smiled nervously on the darkness. He was rather glad of the darkness. “I—it’s possible—”

“But not probable!” said the laughing voice. “Don’t pretend to remember me, if you don’t!”

“Honest man!” said the voice. Something made him move forward quickly. The figure disappeared. Calderon, putting his hand instinctively forward to stop her, allowed the little ring to jerk from it.

He was down upon his knees, fumbling on the ground. A match flickered on his fingers. He looked quickly up, hoping to see the unknown’s face; but the match was blown out instantly by the strong wind that was pressing and fluttering about him as he knelt.

“What have you dropped?” asked the voice. The mysterious one had reappeared in the doorway.

He struck another match, and groped about. It was unavailing. The match went out, and beyond a sudden glimpse of the trodden earth he had seen nothing.

“It’s really your fault,” Calderon said to the unknown, “for starting away.”

“A silver—” There was a moment’s startled pause. “Did you hear the song just now?”

p. 191“Yes—Ah!” With the third match he had detected the ring. “Good!”

“Is it your ring?” asked the voice. “I mean . . . Evelyn . . . wears one, doesn’t she?”

Calderon checked himself again. He was rubbing the ring with his handkerchief, in case it had been dirtied.

“How did you know we were here?” said the voice, in a tone of piquant curiosity.

“Then—!” cried Calderon, feeling his face get very hot. He could have shouted at this confirmation of his most rosy hopes. It was with a terrible effort that be restrained himself. “Oh,” he said vaguely, “one does know.” He heard a real laugh this time, but smothered, as though the unknown were holding a handkerchief to her mouth.

“How do you know that Evelyn didn’t tell me?” he parried. He felt it was a master stroke. “You don’t seem to have exhausted the possibilities.”

“No, of course. She might have,” admitted the mysterious voice. There was the tiniest silence. “But I don’t think she did. Of course, I don’t know.”

“Oh!” cried the voice, shaking with amusement. “Don’t you know that? Hasn’t she told you that? It’s too bad to keep it from you!”

“She tells me very little about herself—very little,” he explained ingeniously. “You’ll have noticed that she doesn’t think of herself at all.”

“Yes. You see . . . it’s an odd thing,” he went on, “and one doesn’t talk about it. But you see I’m in love with her.”

There was another pause. A significant pause. “I think you’re very forgiving,” at last said a muffled voice. “I—”

“What I should like to know,” Calderon answered, as if weighing his words, “is whether she’s also very forgiving.”

“Oh, Maurice, you’re crushing me!” cried the unknown suddenly. “There . . . Alice has finished singing. She’ll be coming. . . . Give me my ring. . . . Oh, my dear; of course I do!”

The ring was restored, to rest in its old position until memory’s course should be run.

p. 193THE SURGEON

“You fellows outside the medical profession have absolutely no conception of the terrors confronting a prominent physician and of the traps and snares and pitfalls laid for him at every turn.”

The great surgeon lolled back in his chair, and, raising a glass of champagne in those delicately formed, yet steel-strong fingers that had resolved the intricacies of life and death for many a sufferer, he gazed thoughtfully at the whirling torrent of tiny bubbles and then touched it lightly to his lips. It was one of those rare times when the wheel of Fate had brought together a group of men united by the strongest bond that friendship can tie, the bond of the college life and love of auld lang syne. It was heart to heart here, even as it had been with us a quarter century before, ere we had parted to go our several ways in the broad fields of life.

Of us all, Harrington had become the one pre-eminently famous, and his remark came in reply to a bit of the congratulatory flattery that only the intimacy of the college chum dare venture with impunity.

“What do you mean, Harrington?” asked Dalbey, the banker. “Perplexities of diagnosis, the nervous strain of responsibility, and the like?”

“I think I can say without conceit,” replied the surgeon, “that diagnosis has become with me almost p. 194an intuition. In that field I have absolute confidence in myself. As for nerves, I haven’t any. I can cut within the fiftieth of an inch of certain death as coolly as you pare your nail. No; I mean deliberate wickedness, malice, blackmail. We are never free from this danger. Let me give you an instance, if it won’t bore you.”

There was a chorus of calls, “Go on, go on,” and Jenkins cried, “Never heard it!” for which he was promptly squelched.

It was just two years ago (Harrington began), and my five gray hairs date from that night. I was sitting in my office just after my evening office hour had ended, and I was pretty well tired out. The bell rang furiously, and I heard the attendant saying that my hour was over and that I could see no one. There was some very vigorous insistence, and I caught the words “urgent,” “imperative,” and a few more equally significant, so I called to the man that I would see the belated visitor. He entered quickly. He was evidently a man of wealth and breeding, and as evidently laboring under great excitement.

In the next second I found myself looking into the muzzle of a revolver. They say that when a man is in imminent danger, the mental strain is relieved automatically by trivialities of thought; and, do you know, the first thing that flamed p. 195through my head was, “How many turns does the rifling take in a barrel of that length?”

“I have come to kill you,” said my visitor in a tone as cold as camphor ice, yet with a dignified courtesy I could not but admire. Was I face to face with a crank? This question I decided in the negative, and the situation became so much the more—piquant, shall I say? Well, I can say it now, at least. Perspective adds piquancy, very often.

“Sir,” I said as quietly-as most men could when a very earnest gentleman has the drop on them, “sir, there is certainly some mistake here.”

It may have been an inane remark; but at least he didn’t pull the trigger, and that gained time.

“You have me at a decided disadvantage,” I continued, “and as any movement of attack or alarm on my part would precipitate fatalities, may I request that before you kill me, you at least tell me why you propose to do so. I make this request because, as a physician, I can see that you are perfectly sane and not the crank I at first thought you.”

I was regaining my nerve, you see; if there is one thing in this world to give a man nerve and coolness, it’s to put it right up to him to avoid the next one. At any rate, the fairness of my request must have appealed to my visitor, for he said, “Certainly I will tell you, doctor. That is only just. I kill you because you performed a critical operation on my wife, and she is dying.”

“This is all a fearful error,” I exclaimed eagerly. “I do not even know you, have never seen you p. 196nor your wife, much less operated upon her. Surgeons of my standing in the profession—I say this advisedly, sir—usually know whom they treat.”

“Usually they do, I grant you,” he assented, but he emphasized the wrong word quite unpleasantly. “This has been an exception,” he added.

I thought very bard for a minute. What kind of a predicament was this? I then said to him, “This is a serious and vital matter, sir, for both of us. Any mistake could not fail to have momentous consequences. Suppose you take me to confront your wife. It is probably a case of mistaken identity, and when she sees me, she will most certainly be able readily to rectify this awful blunder. And so sure am I of the result that I pledge you my word to accompany you without violence or outcry.”

His carriage was waiting at the door. Evidently he had been desperate when he came, and fully prepared to face the consequences of his desperation. We drove together to his home.

In my complete certainty of my position I feasted my eyes on the luxurious furnishings, the costly rugs—I’m a lover of rugs, you know, and a bit of a connoisseur—and the exquisite p. 197bric-a-brac and paintings. Moreover, I now knew with whom I was dealing, though that fact I concealed.

We went up to the sickroom. A beautiful woman, desperately ill and pale as death itself, lay motionless upon the pillows. As we softly entered the room, she turned her eyes toward us, too weak to move her head.

The eyes were dull and listless, but when their glance fell on me, they literally flashed fire and a hard, determined look came into them.

“Dear,” said her husband, bending tenderly down to her, “who did you say performed that operation?”

My heart just at that moment went as cold as a snowball. I saw myself ruined, broken on the wheel of Fate. The death phase of the situation didn’t matter. Worst of all, I now saw the motive. She was shielding some bungler, near, or more probably dear, to her—I was the victim selected by mere horrible chance.

I crossed softly to the bed. “Madam,” I said to her as gently as my tumult of feeling would permit, “I implore you to tell the truth. Did I perform this operation?”

I was helpless; it was a fine illustration of the terrible power of the lie as a weapon against right and honor.

“I assure you, before God,” I declared, turning to the husband, “that I was not the p. 198operating surgeon in this case. You know, possibly, my reputation for professional skill. Will you then permit me to take your wife’s temperature and to make a very brief examination with a view to determining the probable effect of her condition upon her rational faculties?”

To my delight, he consented. With careful formality I prepared a thermometer, taking and noting the temperature both at mouth and armpit. The woman exhibited none of the repulsion she ought to have shown, by all principles of psychology, to being examined by the author of her misfortune.

I then seated myself by the bed and felt the pulse. Taking my watch and detaching it from the chain, I placed it on the white cover of the bed beside her, where she could not fail to hear the ticking. I lifted her hands and applied my finger tips lightly to the arterial beat at the wrist. I looked her steadily in the eyes, and apparently gave the most minute attention to the really faint beating of her pulse.

“Madam,” I said after a long wait, “it is my solemn and painful duty to inform you that you have but fifteen minutes to live. My whole professional life is at stake here. Ruin, disgrace, and even death stare me in the face as a result of what you may say. But I do not urge this upon you. I urge you merely for God’s sake to tell the truth.”

I had expected that. My bit of work in experimental psychology was just beginning. I kept perfectly silent, my fingers still resting upon the patient’s wrist. The tomb itself is not more still p. 199nor more solemn than was that room. I let full five minutes pass without word or movement.

Do you know how long five minutes can be? Did you ever try a silent wait of five little minutes, even though life and death were not in the balance? Try to guess at five minutes; and if you are not skilled in counting seconds, you will call time in two. Five minutes can be an eternity. They were so then.

“Madam,” I said again, “you have but ten minutes to live. I implore you to right the great wrong you have done.”

Why that man did not throw me out of the room I will never know. He seemed fascinated by the fearful experiment.

I acknowledge that then the room turned black; but I was myself in an instant. I resumed my solemn death watch. This time I deliberately allowed eight minutes to add themselves to the eternal past. Then I knew I was playing my last card.

“Madam,” I said as solemnly and impressively as I could speak the words, “in two minutes you will be before your God. Are you willing that your soul should face its Maker with the black stain upon it of the dreadful lie you have told? For your own immortal soul’s sake, I implore you to tell the truth.”

A feeble gesture called her husband to her side. I rose and retired across the room. He bent over her, shaken by great sobs. She drew him down to her, kissed him and whispered, “It was not he.”

p. 200I almost fell. The revulsion of feeling was too great. Mastering myself by a supreme effort, I stood to hear the colloquy to the end.

He turned to me with a face of ashen paleness. “Doctor,” he gasped, “pardon.”

I snapped shut the case of my watch. “Madam,” I said, “you will recover,” and left the room and house unmolested.

No one spoke for a moment. Then Carvill ejaculated under his breath, “My God!”

p. 201THE ’DOPTERS

Lemmy stopped short in his game of jack-stones, and looked fearfully over his shoulder. All about him were the rest of the children, unconcerned, playing none the quieter for the reposeful afternoon shadow of the gray cloister-like walls. At the edge of the yard where the grass was worn off most he saw the “biggest boys,” now suspending their game of ball to call to him. In the general cry he recognized the leading, raucous voice of Gus Chapman. Lemmy did not answer. He turned his back and tried to fling his jackstones indifferently. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Gus approaching.

In an instant Lemmy was on his feet. Panic-stricken, he fled, leaving his jackstones upon the ground. He put his hands over his ears to shut out the hooting, derisive cries of the boys who did not understand his fear of the ’Dopters—that horde of individuals who lurked about the Home, a constant menace to his happiness. They looked harmless enough, to be sure, in their varied disguises. Some came as jolly, oldish ladies with much candy and sometimes fat bunches of raisins in their pockets. Others looked for all the world like hearty farmers who might raise apples, both red and p. 202yellow—a very deceptive sort, these farmers, who laughed a great deal and poked the boys’ muscles and pinched the girls’ cheeks. Most to be feared were the ’Dopters in black who hung round more than any of the rest. They brought toys hardly worn at all, but they never seemed to want to let them go at the last minute. They made a show of crying over Gracie Peeler and Nannie Bagget, who had curls and knew how to do a curtsey. The ’Dopters in black always made off with some one.

Despite the endless variety, it was not hard to tell a ’Dopter if you saw him in time. There was something about them. Most of the children recognized them instinctively. Gus was particularly expert at picking out the ’Dopters from the casual visitors at the Home. Watching for them never interfered with his play in the least. He always saw first. Lemmy had learned to trust Gus’s signals of danger, and although he was overwhelmed by the accompanying teasing, he felt very grateful. Gus was his savior—his methods were not to be criticized. Times innumerable Gus had saved him from being adopted.

Who knew what it meant—being adopted? Lemmy could not understand why most of the children thought that it was something nice. None of them seemed to realize that there was any reason to be afraid. They were always talking about Tommie Graham, who had been borne off by the ’Dopters. His friends at the Home had not seen him since his disappearance, but stories had started somehow about Tommie’s having a dog with a schooner back and a train of cars which whizzed around when he pressed a button. It was also said that there was another button which Tommie could p. 203press and some one would come to take him for a ride in a sailboat. But all this was mere hearsay. There was no telling what had really befallen Tommie, all because he was foolish enough to sing in the hearing of the ’Dopters his song about three frogs that sat on a lily pad.

Lemmy was certain that when a ’Dopter threw off his disguise he was a dragon of the very worst kind. It was Simple Simon to believe when they talked about this and that you could have if you would only come along. Lemmy knew, for once from behind the office door he had heard them talking to Miss Border, who wore the white of authority. Their remarks about “parental history” and “hereditary instincts” and “psychological effects of environment” had betrayed them. Lemmy remembered how ominous these things had sounded mixed with whoop and halloo from the playground. And the queer feeling which had shivered through him! The sensation from eating a mouthful of green gooseberries was nothing in comparison.

How could the other children believe that likely as not those words meant something nice? Lemmy knew better. After he had overheard that secret conference with Miss Border, he thought that he understood the ’Dopters pretty well. Theirs was a sticky-fly-paper method; there was no end to the ways they had of fooling you. They had named him “among the least promising”—this, Lemmy gathered, on account of his skinny legs, the result of something “subnormal”; and because of his habit of going off alone into corners, termed “sulkiness and uncompanionability”; his big ears had something to do with it too. One tall lady had said that they were “not exactly Grecian.” Altogether he p. 204was “undesirable.” This classification even Gus took to be aboveboard.

“They don’t wantcha, Lemmy,” Gus repeatedly assured him. “Yuh needn’t be so scarey.” But Gus didn’t fathom the duplicity of the ’Dopters—they hatched up all sorts of schemes to make you feel easy and then got you unawares. Likely as not they knew all the time that he was the littlest boy in the Home who could hang by his heels, and that he could hold his breath longer than Gus—and, though it was a secret, that he had a pet toad named Nippy in the broken wall where it was green and wet. They seemed to know everything—the ’Dopters.

The thought of these things made Lemmy’s heels fly faster. He whisked behind the spirea bushes and drew from underneath the widespreading branches a short ladder which he had constructed laboriously from the odds and ends of dry-goods boxes. He set up the rickety support and climbed nimbly to the top of the high, broad wall, where the low elm trees hid him from view. He drew the ladder up carefully after him, and with a breath of relief stretched himself at full length, safe from the ’Dopters for a little while at least. It was comfort to have such a place where he could hide, unless the ’Dopters came at mealtime, when no one could escape. He would not soon forget the time when Lucy Simmons was dragged away just as she had started to eat her piece of blackberry pie. She never came back to finish it. One could never be really safe from the ’Dopters. There was no let-up to looking out for them. And there would always be ’Dopters as long as the Outside remained. Lemmy was afraid p. 205of the Outside. He liked to look at it from the top of the wall; it appeared fascinatingly full of mystery, but it always terrified him. There was no place really safe, even bed. Lemmy sighed and squinted through the fluttering leaves at a bit of cloud. After a while it would be getting pink, as it did when supper time came—baked potatoes and milk, and maybe jam from the long, dark shelves in the vegetable cellar. Lemmy’s thoughts flew to the empty barrel in which he intended to hide when winter came on and the elm leaves fell to the ground. It would be hard to get by Mrs. O’Gorman, who was always puttering about the basement with a pad and pencil, muttering unintelligible things under her breath. Perhaps the linen closet would be safer, only they might come when Gerda and Lou were putting away the ironed things.

Lemmy’s speculations were interrupted by a deep “Ho-ho-hum” from the other side of the wall. The exclamation had a luxurious sound, as if some one was treating himself to a good rest. Lemmy peered over the edge of the wall, and gave a little gasp.

There on the bench beneath was some one who had undoubtedly stepped out of book covers. He was a big man, a very big man, with a brown skin lined with fine wrinkles which told all sorts of things without his saying a word. His hair was gray, but he looked somehow very young and up to anything lively. His old trousers were turned up, and his coat with its big buttons, flung wide apart, disclosed a faded blouse. From his belt dangled a heavy chain, and from his pocket the end of a jolly colored handkerchief. His cap had the look of a cap which had been through things. Slowly p. 206and comfortably he stretched his long arms, and as his sleeve slipped back Lemmy caught sight of a tattooed bird, green and blue and red, above his left wrist. And then he flung his head back, and his blue eves twinkled up at Lemmy without a sign of surprise.

“Southwest,” Lemmy gave back promptly. “And that’s what stirs the water up all purply pink—”

“Wind that makes the lake look like that must come from a place where a fellah could find out about magic,” Lemmy speculated.

“Magic? You want to find out about magic, young man?” The Cap’n sat up with a great show of interest. His eyes were very friendly.

“Oh, more’n anything else in the world,” Lemmy burst out impulsively. “I want to find out how to make a rosebush pop out of a stovepipe hat and how to pull fuzzy little chickens out of people’s sleeves and how to pick gold pieces out of the air the way I saw a man do once to make the lumbermen laugh at Camp Cusson—that’s where I lived when my Daddy used to run the lumber camp until he died, and so did my mother of epidemick—” Lemmy caught his breath. “I want to learn how to do magic so I can have fun and make people laugh.”

The Cap’n chuckled and spread his jolly colored handkerchief across his knees. From an old, p. 207brown wallet he took a coin which he twirled merrily in his nimble fingers.

“Have a look at this,” he said, reaching up to put the coin into Lemmy’s hand.

Lemmy looked curiously at the strange piece of money which lay in his palm. It was not at all like the dimes and nickels which the ’Dopters often slid into a fellow’s pocket. It was shiny and yellow, the color of the pin which always fastened Miss Border’s collar. It was gold! And there were figures of dragons upon it guarding words which Lemmy could not read at all, though they were very short.

Plump into the jolly colored handkerchief Lemmy dropped the coin. Wide-eyed, he watched the Cap’n tie the handkerchief into a knot and twist it smartly to make certain that it was secure. With a fine flourish he flung it high into the air, caught it again deftly and untied the tight knot. Smiling broadly, he spread the handkerchief out upon his knees again. Lemmy stared unbelievingly—the gold coin had vanished and in its place lay a silver dollar. He blinked at the air in a daze. Very quickly the Cap’n retied his handkerchief and tossed it up once more. When he opened it again, wonder of wonders, there was the gold coin!

The Cap’n beamed and drew from his pocket, one, two, three oranges. He took the gold coin again, and carelessly balancing it upon his nose, at the same time tossed the oranges one after the other into the air, juggling them with fine precision so that they rose and fell rhythmically in time to music which the Cap’n alone could hear.

p. 208“They’re majicked!” Lemmy whispered spellbound as he eyed the oranges flashing in the air while the coin remained apparently affixed to the Cap’n’s nose.

His eyes grew wider yet when suddenly the Cap’n ended his performance by gathering in oranges and coin with one grand sweep, not dropping a thing.

Before Lemmy could say Jack Robinson, there right in his own hands was one of the magician’s golden balls.

“Shiver my timbers, did you never see an orange before?” the Cap’n cried as he watched Lemmy’s face.

“Not a Majishun’s orange,” Lemmy answered, fingering his treasure reverently.

“I’ll have one along with you,” the Cap’n urged sociably. “I can beat you peeling!”

The Cap’n started to peel one of the erstwhile magic balls. Lemmy dug his teeth quickly into his own orange. The race was on. Lemmy’s squeal of victory as he threw down the last bit of rind surprised the Cap’n amazingly.

“Eating oranges with a Majishun—what’d Gus p. 209say?” Lemmy murmured, half in a trance. “What if I hadn’t run away from the ’Dopters?”

“The ’Dopters?” The Cap’n put his head on one side and raised his eyebrows very much puzzled indeed. “Who are they?”

“Oh, the ’Dopters are always hanging round the Home, trying to carry us off. A fellah has to watch out all the time. They’re sharp as tacks, always trying to fool us by looking something diff’rent. Ev’ry time they come they change their clothes to put us off the track.”

“Oh, I’m afraid of ’em, they scare me so!” Lemmy’s voice quivered pitifully. “All the time I have to think of ’em. I’m never, never safe from the ’Dopters. I bet they’d poke a fellah’s eyes out once they got him, or starve him maybe. Oh, I don’t know what a ’Dopter wouldn’t do!”

The Cap’n listened gravely. Never once did he laugh as Lemmy poured forth his miserable fear of the ’Dopters. The Cap’n understood. Lemmy could tell that. By the time the oranges had disappeared, Lemmy had told the Cap’n all about the ’Dopters and even confided the existence of Nippy.

“I’ll show him to you,” Lemmy offered, hustling down the ladder to return with his pet toad upon a wet leaf for exhibition.

The Cap’n was a gratifying sort. He saw at once Nippy’s good points—the beautiful brightness of his eyes, the fine spots upon his back, the superiority of his intellect. Nippy in turn winked his approval at the Cap’n as if they had many a joke in common.

“As fine a toad as ever sat a rock or sailed the sea,” avowed the Cap’n enthusiastically. “By the p. 210bye, young man, how’d you like to take Nippy on a cruise with me?”

Lemmy clutched the wall and gazed for one electrical second into the Cap’n’s eyes. It wasn’t a joke!

Lemmy ensconced Nippy quickly in the little perforated box which he always kept in his pocket for him; then he swung himself from the wall straight into the Cap’n’s arms. It seemed so natural and safe to be walking along Outside, ahold of a Majishun’s hand.

Down the hill they went with never a look behind at those gray walls, for their eyes were fixed upon the great lake, Superior, pulsing now under the wonder touch of the southwest wind, shimmering all the colors of the opal. There lay the boats poking up their brightly painted smokestacks for folks to see. Down, down, and down, such a short way, and yet, the wonderful farness of it!

“Here we are at the docks—the Northern Star waiting for us,” the Cap’n announced presently.

Lemmy swung along a little faster, for there in full sight were the high ore docks stretching far, far into the water. Of course they had been “majicked” there. Thus the wonder of them was explained.

The Cap’n lifted him to his shoulder and walked along the abutment to one of the biggest freighters nosing the end of the dock.

p. 211“All aboard the Northern Star,” the Cap’n said, giving him a lift up the ladder.

Lemmy climbed like a little monkey, as fast as he could, for fear he wouldn’t really get aboard.

Straight up to the bridge the Cap’n took him. “You can see us load up from here. Keep your eyes open and many a sight you’ll see.” Lemmy heard the Cap’n’s words as if in a dream. He looked wonderingly about him.

On top of the high dock he could see cars full of reddish, yellowish chunks which the Cap’n called iron ore. Hurrying about everywhere were the dock workers, smudged from head to foot with pigment which gave them the look of pirates. With quick calls these men loosened the doors in the bottoms of the cars to let the ore rattle down into the big pockets in the dock. But nearer at hand something more engrossing was happening. Deck-hands aboard the Northern Star were opening the hatches. All along the deck of the freighter the hatchways yawned ready for the load of ore. There was a great rattle of cables from above, and down came the chutes into the hatchways. Lemmy could see the men on the dock poking long poles into the pockets to set the ore sliding. The first chunks struck the bottom of the hold thunderingly and then heavy masses came sliding down the chutes with a steady, rushing sound which thrilled Lemmy like nothing he had ever heard before. It was not long before the big freighter was loaded full of the ore, and one after another the long chutes were drawn back into place against the dock. When the men set about closing the hatchways, the Cap’n took Lemmy below to see his quarters.

“Have a look in,” the Cap’n suggested, following Lemmy’s gaze. “It’s chock-full of stuff from everywhere.”

He threw back the lid, and Lemmy had a whiff of tar and tobacco and salt, an indescribable smell, suggesting untold adventure. “Chock-full” the chest was of all manner of wonderful things: compasses and shells, quadrants and gaudy strips of silk, battered old books, squinty-eyed monkeys carved out of ivory, long strings of many-colored beads, chains, silver and copper and gold all strung with bangles—there was no end to the treasure store.

The Cap’n took a cutlass from the chest and balanced it upon his nose as easily as he had poised the coin there.

“See here, young ’un,” he said suddenly. “You’re old enough to start learning magic.”

“A sort of A-B-C magician, yes. Here, take this!” He thrust into Lemmy’s hand a carved ebony ring. “I’ll show you how to make it disappear.”

Very patiently, the Cap’n initiated Lemmy into the rudiments of magic, teaching him how to exhibit with a flourish before imaginary spectators, then with an adroit pass to make it disappear until he chose by a swift movement to hold it once more in full view between his thumb and finger. The mastery of the old trick, dependent only upon a little dexterity in sleight-of-hand, filled Lemmy with enormous pride. He glowed with delight at the p. 213Cap’n’s applause, mingled with the easily imagined handclapping from the invisible audience. He was lifted far, far away from commonplace things. He was a novitiate in a new world of unending mystery and delight. He tried to say “thank you” to the Cap’n, but his gratitude overwhelmed him. He could only press the ring back reverently into the Cap’n’s hand. There were no words for a thing such as this.

Then came a noise at the door. At the Cap’n’s bidding in walked a burly fellow as big as the Cap’n himself.

“Look at the young ’un, Andy McDonald—he’s off with us tonight,” the Cap’n informed him.

“Bless my soul,” Andy McDonald exclaimed, tousling Lemmy’s hair, “the Northern Star’s in luck.”

“Now Andy’ll find you a proper place for Nippy and I’ll be off on a bit of business before we set out.” The Cap’n left him with Andy McDonald, who knew exactly where to catch flies for Nippy and where to get pebbles to his liking and where to find just the sort of safe, dampish corner where he could voyage happily. And McDonald was very ingenious at devising quarters which would give Nippy plenty of room and yet keep him in bounds.

“He might jump overboard in his sleep, you know, dreamin’ like,” Andy McDonald remarked as he screened Nippy in.

As soon as Nippy was settled, Andy gave a shrill whistle which brought Chink, the rat terrier mascot of the boat, tearing to make Lemmy’s acquaintance.

“He’s got a collar with spikes on it,” Lemmy p. 214cried excitedly. “And a piece of his ear’s nipped off!”

“He gets scarred up, Chink does, but he never gets licked. Don’t let him get in a row with Nippy.”

How could Lemmy know that during these enchanted moments with Andy McDonald the Cap’n was talking with Miss Border about “parental history” and “hereditary instincts” and all the rest of the ’Dopters’ secrets?

It was at table that Lemmy saw the Cap’n again—the head of a feast befitting a Majishun such as he. Lemmy tried hard not to gobble, but the chicken was oh, so tender, and he had never before tasted what the Cap’n called “kumquats.” There was so much he couldn’t possibly eat it all. He finally gave up trying when the Cap’n assured him that there would be more tomorrow.

Up on the bridge again Lemmy watched the busy engine haul in the cables which held the freighter to the dock. A capable little tug, which the Cap’n called familiarly “Sultana,” came to help them head the boat into the channel.

“We’re off,” cried the Cap’n as the Sultana chug-chugged away, while with slow majesty the Northern Star made its way out into the lake.

“Look behind at the Diamond Necklace,” Andy called to him. Turning to look back, Lemmy saw the Allouez ore docks glittering, palpitating, in the fast gathering purple of the night. Upon the hill electric signs blazed out fantastically; here a red sun rising over a green hill, and farther on a multicolored fan opening and closing with a bewildering flash; then came a comical, twinkling bucket of shiny paint which would bubble over. Past the p. 215signs came rows and rows of lights set regularly like soldiers.

The Northern Star was moving faster now, passing between the big piers of the canal under the Aërial Bridge past the lighthouse with revolving signals.

A big passenger boat coming into the harbor passed them swiftly, giving two long whistles by way of greeting. Lemmy caught the tinkle of music and the sound of people laughing on board—then suddenly they were gone.

Out—out—past all the lights went the Northern Star straight into the silver white moon path stretching endlessly across the water.

Lemmy looked up at the winking stars and leaned comfortably back against the Cap’n’s arm.

“We’ve given them the slip,” the Cap’n assured him. “They’ll never get you now.”

Dreamily, with his head upon the Cap’n’s shoulder, Lemmy happily fingered the ebony ring which had somehow “got majicked” into his pocket.

p. 216PREM SINGH

Prem Singh had company. When I went in the gathering dusk to feed the cow I noticed, instead of the usual solitary figure crouched above the little camp fire in the open, two lean forms silhouetted against the dancing flames, while a flow of guttural conversation that broke occasionally into seemingly excited treble argument mingled with the fragrant smoke from burning greasewood roots.

“He probably has a letter from India,” I told the Lady of the Castle, when I went back into the little stone house, “and has rung in a chap from the gang below to read it to him.”

“From his brother, probably,” said the Lady. “He’ll be all excited over it. You’ll have to do the milking.”

Her surmise as to the letter was correct, though I didn’t have to do the milking.

“Letter come China country! My brother!” Prem Singh announced exultantly, when he came for the milk pail. “Pretty good!” He ducked his head sideways in a delighted nod. “I go milk now.”

We had known of this brother ever since the Hindu had become our devoted and isolated adherent. He was Prem Singh’s family, the only relative he had in the world.

“My father, mammy, been die,” he had explained to me. “Both. My father, my mammy, p. 217two my sister, my little brother: all one time die. Too much sick. All my uncle, my auntie, everybody die. Too many people. Just me, my big brother, live. Thass all.” From which we gathered that a cholera epidemic had left the two boys orphans: Prem Singh, now our vassal, and Kala Singh, half a dozen years older, at present a British policeman at Shanghai.

It was a poor life, this brother’s, but highly treasured by the younger brother, who, curiously enough, proved to be the stable member of the family. Kala Singh had left a bad record behind him in India, including a year’s jail sentence for knifing a co-conspirator in a bank robbery.

“My brother pretty much been marry,” Prem Singh told me one time, his face clouding over. “One time twelve hundred, one time fifteen hundred, dollar—my country rupee. All go.” He snapped his fingers to illustrate the disappearance of the marriage money into thin air. “Too much drink. Too much gambler.”

Evidence that the black sheep had never mended his ways was furnished abundantly in the repeated requests that came for money, which Prem Singh never refused.

“Mester,” he would usually ask me on the day succeeding the arrival of a letter from “China country,” “you two hundred dollar today bank take off, mice.” I had never been able to teach him the use of the possessive “mine”; it was invariably mice. “I send money China country. My brother.” Once or twice I remonstrated with him about this, to no purpose. After all, it was his own money: the two dollars a day which, with practically no outgo, added up month by month in the p. 218bank. A letter from India, which he told me came from one of his brother’s deserted wives, proved equally futile, though troubling him for several days. Its only ultimate result was to prejudice his young mind still further against womankind and the institution of marriage.

“Me? Not any been marry!” he assured me, his eyes flashing. “Never! All time too much trouble! No good.”

Yet he was engaged, one of those betrothals arranged in infancy by Hindu parents, binding till death. It hung over Prem Singh like a sword of Damocles, exiling him forever from his native land.

“This country pretty good,” he told me often. “Girl wait all time my country. Twenty year old now, I guess, maybe. I stay America! Pretty good. Not any go back!” He shook his head emphatically. “Maybe some time my brother come this country. Thass good!” His eyes gleamed at the pleasant vision.

It was this dream of a reunion with his beloved black sheep of a brother in the great and good land of America, far from the cloudy danger of marriage that overhung all India, that more than any other illumined his long days and lonely evenings on the California mesa. He kept aloof from the other Hindus, from the large camps where they congregated, twenty and thirty together, for the clearing work that in time was to transform mesa into orchard land. He preferred to remain alone, apart, as my man.

“You pretty good man, Mester,” he told me. “I all time stay here, please. I your man. My life!” Then he smiled. “Maybe some time my brother come; then two your men! Both. Thass pretty good!”

p. 219And now the dream seemed likely to materialize. When he returned with the full milk pail, Prem Singh had a question to ask. He fidgeted awkwardly about it, remaining in the kitchen an unconscionable length of time, resting one foot and then the other. It came out at last with a rush.

“I don’t know, Prem Singh. I’ll find out in Los Angeles, if you want. Steerage?”

“No, Sair!” He was indignant. “Not any! Maybe my brother come this country. Second class, sure. Thass pretty good.”

I learned the amount, and it went forward on the next boat by money order to Kala Singh, care Sikh Temple, Shanghai. Then followed for Prem Singh a protracted period of pleasant anticipation that ended dismally two months later when another letter arrived from China country, announcing that the money was gone.

“Too much gambler, my brother,” Prem Singh confided to me sadly. “I guess ticket more better.”

It was a good idea; and the next registered letter carried no additional money order, but instead a one-way ticket, second class, from Shanghai.

This was efficacious; and when, six weeks later, another letter arrived from Shanghai, Prem Singh came to the house in a tremble of excitement.

“Mester, you know Salina Cruz? This country? Canada? I guess not. Meeseeco? I guess maybe! My brother come Salina Cruz. English read.” He always used the word “read” indiscriminately for read or write, reading or writing.

Inclosed with the sheet covered with Indian script was a small slip bearing a message in p. 220English. “Arrive Salina Cruz November 29,” it read. “Send money.”

“I guess my brother read maybe, himself,” announced Prem Singh, scanning it closely. “Pretty smart man, my brother. English pretty good speak. My country read easy, English read little. Me not any. Not smart, me.” Then he shook his head. “I guess this not any my brother read.”

I did not think so, emphatically not. Prem Singh was in doubt. His natural caution warned him against such a move. On the other hand his affection for his brother, his instinctive generosity, his desire to hasten in any way possible his brother’s approach to the land of promise, urged him on. In the end he decided to wait for a more definite request.

It was not long in coming, arriving in the form of a telegram almost on the heels of the letter. “Send seventy dollars, Kala Singh, care British Consul, Salina Cruz, Mexico,” the message ran. Evidently this brother was no fool.

Prem Singh immediately dispatched a hundred by registered mail, bemoaning only the fact that the telegraph company would not transmit money to that point.

Followed another period of waiting—anxious this time, for why should there be so much delay?—and then the end.

It is no easy matter for Hindus to enter this country, though there is as yet no definite Hindu exclusion act. The immigration laws already in p. 221existence can be so construed, in accordance with the desires of a certain rabid element of whites on the Pacific Coast, that it is almost impossible for a turbaned citizen of Great Britain to enter the United States. For the most part those that now drift into this country of ours land in Canada or Mexico, and straggle across the international line, running the gauntlet to escape detection.

This Kala Singh attempted. It was at Christmas time, we learned through a Hindu who had made the voyage from Shanghai with him. Landed at Salina Cruz, they had taken boat again for Ensenada; thence, working overland, had come to the American border in the vicinity of Yuma. The pair had been detected by the border patrol, pursued, captured, and locked up for the night in a small jail. Participating, before daylight, with men held for greater offenses, in a general jail break, they had been ordered to halt, and fired upon in the darkness. Kala Singh had been found by a chance bullet, and killed instantly.

“Isn’t there anything we can do?” the Lady of the Castle asked me when I told her about it. “Isn’t there anything?”

I went out to where Prem Singh crouched alone over his little fire of greasewood roots under the great vault of heaven.

There was a pause. “I make my country bread,” he announced at length, clearing his throat, obviously manufacturing conversation in order to put me at my ease; and then, after a little: “I think maybe go back my country pretty soon.”

He nodded affirmation. “Next month, maybe, I go,” he said wearily. “America not very good. My country more better. Maybe bime-by been marry.”

p. 223EVEN SO

It all happened a century ago. “On this day,” the village minister of those other years wrote in his slow, regular hand—the pages of his journal are yellow as saffron now, and the ink is faded brown—“on this day did Captain Hastings sail in command of the Amaryllis, taking with him as hitherto, poor Christine Widmer, concerning whom there has been so much talk. For my own part I cannot be properly scandalized by their relation. Certainly the thought of marriage with one in her condition is not to be tolerated, and I believe her to be happier with him than elsewhere.” Christian charity, indeed!

There have always been men of the Hastings name in the village. They came in the days of its first settlement. There are a score of them living here at this very minute. And, like the most of them in the early years of the republic, Donald Hastings followed the sea. Holiest, impetuous, young, as were so many of those sea captains in that golden era of the early nineteenth century, he left but one shadow on his memory—perhaps not altogether a shadow. Therein lies the story.

Singsong voices swelled to a wild chatter, and p. 224the steering sweep was swung hard over. But the old junk, clumsy and slow to obey her helm, remained in the center of the channel. For a moment, collision was imminent. Then from the deck of that Chinese vessel on the Chu Kiang, one of thousands as like as their yellow masters, came the sharp call:

“Who’s there below?” A deep voice from above roared the words in a tone of amazement.

A rattle of commands came down to the junk, hoarse and loud on the night air. The Chinese clamored in ducklike harshness of speech. Then the slowly turning junk and the veering ship passed by a margin of inches. And as they passed, seven men came scrambling over the bulwarks of the ship to a deck filled with shadowy figures that gathered in a silent circle. Then the circle opened and one man, standing out from the rest, confronted the seven in the near darkness.

“This,” replied the leader of the seven, with a quick gesture, “is all that is left of the crew of the Helen of Troy.”

“Ah!” The voice was cool and noncommittal. “Of the Helen of Troy. Do you know what ship this is?”

“Yes, I am Amos Widmer—and you are . . . all that is left of the crew of the Helen of Troy!”

p. 225There was a suggestion of irony in his tone. He stood there for a time, smiling queerly in the dusk, and looking past the other, who faced him with folded arms. His was not a pleasant smile.

“Boy,” he said at last in a soft, gentle voice, “Captain Hastings, of the Helen of Troy, will have the unoccupied stateroom. Show him down, and put yourself at his service.”

There was one porthole to the stateroom, iron gray it seemed, and a lantern swung from an overhead beam. When the boy had gone, Hastings leaned back and surveyed darkly the narrow confines of the little room.

Then he heard a woman laughing somewhere in the ship, as if a long way off, and was swept by a flood of conflicting emotions.

In a way, it had all begun long before, when the Helen of Troy slipped through the narrows of my old New England port on a day in early June, the wind abeam, and was passed by a ship outward bound under full press of canvas. The scene came back to Hastings there in the dim light of the stateroom; the New England shore dark against the yellow sunset; the ship, phantom-like, her sails barred by shadows of spar and rigging; then the rumbling voice of the mate of the Helen of Troy: “The Winnemere, as I’m alive! It ain’t in nature to be meeting with her always. Nagasaki! Batavia! Sumatra! Aye, she sang another tune, though, the night we passed her in Macassar Strait.”

It seemed to Hastings that he could hear again his own reply, faint and far off: “There were light winds that night. But she’s an able craft in coarse weather.” Training his glass at the tall figure on p. 226the deck of the outgoing vessel, he had muttered, “Grin, damn ye, grin!” and flung back his head with an air of elation. Not in ships alone were Donald Hastings and Amos Widmer rivals.

So the Winnemere had sailed to meet the oncoming dusk, and the Helen of Troy had come bravely into port. And there Donald Hastings had heard an old story, and like many a better man before him, had gone back to the sea to forget that he ever had loved. But one thing he had not been able to forget.

After a time that faint laughter, breaking the pregnant silence of the little stateroom, came again to Hastings’ ears. There was in it a strange note that puzzled him, an unfamiliarity that overbore the lingering familiarity of its tone. Presently, as he stood with parted lips, the boy came, knocking, and asked him to the captain’s cabin. As he traversed the narrow passage he heard the laughter yet again, louder now, and more than ever was puzzled by it. For though it reminded him of Christine Duncan’s voice, it had a penetrating wildness like no laughter he had heard before. He entered the door with his hands half raised, as if to guard against an unexpected attack. But the gesture was needless. Amos Widmer, calm as Buddha, was seated already at the oak table.

Smiling softly when his guest appeared, Widmer motioned him to a chair. “Now then, boy,” he murmured, “what has that black scoundrel in the galley got ready for us?”

“The honor is mine.” Unstopping the decanter on the table, Widmer filled two wine glasses. “Your health, sir!” he said.

p. 227Hastings fingered the stem of his own glass. Young and hot-headed, versed in rough courtesies and frank enmities, he was placed at a singular disadvantage by this quiet man with the eyes of a devil. “I did not expect this honor, sir,” he repeated, “or this pleasure. Your—” his pause was almost imperceptible—“wife?”

Of the two, Hastings was the less mature, although perhaps physically the stronger. Certainly his face, frank, impetuous, fearless, was the more wholesome. But lacking the easy grace and the calm assurance that characterized the other, he realized a certain want in his own hard schooling that left him almost powerless in the duel of wits, baffled by a bewildering subtlety, like a young fencer drilled in the rudiments, blade to blade, meeting for the first time an opponent who refuses contact. There was the same sense of helplessness, the same mental groping for possible parries and thrusts, without the comforting rasp of steel on steel, that to the trained hand and wrist reveals more than sight itself of an antagonist’s intent. Once an enemy always an enemy, unless there were reason otherwise, he had supposed. He breathed deeply.

Self-possessed, yet watching his uninvited guest between almost imperceptibly narrowed eyelids, Widmer continued casually, “Yes, she is ailing. But of yourself? How came you here?”

“Our masts were carried away in a typhoon. The natives came out, apparently to plunder the waterlogged hull, but, by the grace of God, human compassion was stirred in their yellow bellies. The p. 228Helen of Troy was an able ship—” Hastings eyed Widmer with a touch of patronage that passed apparently unnoticed “—and a rich cargo was under her hatches, but there was no way to save her.”

Hastings fingered the stem of his glass. Silence filled the cabin. Then the boy appeared with a great tray.

“For some reason,” Widmer began after a time, “I am reminded of a garden, a garden with honeysuckle in bloom. There’s a white house by the garden, three stories high and square as a cube. Do you remember the house? A door with oval-paned side lights? And the little pillars?”

Hastings’ face whitened, except for a red spot on each cheek. Shoving back his chair, he half rose. “If you—” he cried.

“Ha! ha! I see you remember the garden. Surely you would not resent a mere pleasantry. That garden! How many times we have avoided meeting there, you and I. Well, it’s all over now. Don’t hold ill will toward me, even though I carried off the queen of the garden. Men have loved and lost and laid resentment aside before now. It is a bond between us that we have loved Christine Duncan. If only she were stronger, how gladly she would join me in welcoming you. It is long since she has been able to receive guests.” Widmer’s voice fell, perhaps a trifle more than was natural. Certainly his eyes never left the flush on Hastings’ face. But his voice rose again, lightly, as he resumed. “Allow me!” And he proffered the decanter.

Again the adversary had withdrawn his blade. Again that baffling sense of nothing to contend with.

p. 229When, late, Hastings returned to his quarters, he heard, in the still watches of the night, a woman laughing faintly.

Already in the far interior of China the cold fingers of winter were reaching toward the south, and the northeast monsoon had settled on the sea. But where now innumerable steamships are to be met,—tramps, their iron flanks streaked with rust; trim liners of Japan, the almost untranslatable Maru coupled with their names; dingy coasters, slattern traders, and men of war from half the navies of the world, a hundred years ago there were only the slow junks and the white-sailed ships of the Occident, with now and then a high-sided, square-sterned Dutchman.

The next evening Hastings came on deck and, standing by the taffrail, gazed long toward Hainan and the sunset. No boat was in sight. Save for a small island that lay a point abaft the beam, the Winnemere was running before the wind through an unbroken expanse of water. Hearing steps, he turned.

It was Widmer. “A fine evening,” he remarked in his singularly restrained voice.

Silence followed. Since the seven survivors of the Helen of Troy had come tumbling over the bulwarks of the Winnemere there had been many such silent moments. Always the words exchanged by the two captains were like those tentative thrusts with which the fencer tries the mettle of his opponent.

“It is a pleasure to be able to bring home the crew of the Helen of Troy,” Widmer said, slowly, covertly watching the other’s face. “I remember p. 230when you left us in Macassar Strait. The Winnemere was always a slow craft in light winds. Your men like to tell the story of that race.”

“Yes, there was much talk of that race. You beat us on the run up from the Horn another time—that story, too, became well known. Remarkably well known.”

Looking off at the single island, a dark blot on the shining sea, Widmer laughed softly.

“There was another race, however: a race by land. There was a prize for that race, such a prize!” Facing about at Hastings, he bit his mustache angrily. “Well, though the prize was rotten at the heart, I won it, by God!” he whispered.

Hastings turned, his fists clenched, but Widmer, the tension of his face departing like a shadow, raised his hand and stepped two paces back. “Be careful, Captain Hastings. A single blow, and you would find yourself in the lazarette. You have the freedom of the ship, but—merely a hint, Captain Hastings, as from friend to friend—guests on this ship have found it unwholesome to leave the straight path from their stateroom to the deck. Ships have many eyes.” Widmer paused. “It will be a rare pleasure to bring home the captain of the Helen of Troy, but if necessary—” Leaving the sentence unfinished, he smiled and strolled away.

And that night, when he should have been asleep, again Hastings heard the woman laughing.

The breath of the monsoon stirred the sea from Hie-che-chin to Vanguard Bank, and leagues and leagues beyond. In the moonlight the waves came rolling up in mountains of silver, vanishing again p. 231into the farther darkness, in never-ending succession. They swept past the Winnemere as, with all sail set, she bore down the China Sea, past her and away into the distance like shoals of fish tumbling in the water, and when they had gone a long journey they came to a derelict hull, and tossed it and turned it, and bore it on.

When Widmer had gone on deck, Hastings emerged from his narrow quarters and made his way swiftly through the now familiar cabin, through the captain’s own stateroom, to the single door beyond. He heard, indistinctly from behind the closed door, only a confusion of small sounds, the rustle of skirts, the faint noise of some wooden object pushed along the floor, then the murmur of a voice. “Hush,” it said, very softly, “little one, . . . little one . . . ” Then it broke and rose suddenly to a small, plaintive cry. “He isn’t here, . . . where can he be? . . . little one! . . . little one!”

With shaking hand Hastings fumbled for the latch, found it, and pushed, then pulled, but the oaken door did not yield.

Then from within came that low, strange laughter, and the voice, singularly restrained now, “little one . . . little one!”

Startled by footsteps on deck just outside the companionway, Hastings turned back through the darkness to his stateroom, and closed the door very gently as the companionway was shadowed by the form of some one descending.

Almost stifled by the confinement of the room, he went on deck, when the way was clear, and leaned over the weather rail, with the wind and the flying spray beating hard against his face. p. 232But even so, he felt, strangely, that the air was close and that he was restricted by something at once vague, yet paradoxically definite. By and by, wandering amidships, he found the second mate, late promoted from the forecastle, smoking comfortably by the mainmast, and glad of a chance to beguile the watch with friendly conversation.

So foreign to Hastings’ blunt directness was the finesse of intrigue that even the unsuspecting mate was not drawn off his guard. Coming, as he thought, adroitly to the subject that filled his mind, Hastings was surprised by the sudden change in the second officer’s attitude.

“I suppose,” he had remarked, in a voice carefully casual, “Captain Widmer has no children.”

The officer’s attitude seemed all at once a little less friendly. Raising his eyes to the dark heavens, he remarked, “It’s a raw night, for all there’s no great of a wind.”

“It’s al’ays seemed hard lines to me that the Lord didn’t put monsoons in the north Atlantic. Think o’ the good they’d do thereabouts! To be sure, typhoons is a curse. But there’s the trades, say. Now, if the Lord had only seed fit—”

The other took his pipe from his mouth and eyed the master of the Helen of Troy speculatively. “It don’t do, sir,” he replied, with a cautious glance about, “to ask questions aboard this vessel. A child, you say? There was a child. But—” again glancing aft, the man lowered his voice to a whisper, “I mistrust it warn’t his’n.”

p. 233The next day the two captains met for the first time at dinner in the cabin, Hastings silent, Widmer smiling with his lips, in spite of mirthless eyes.

For a time neither spoke. The boy, in mute testimony to the fit of ill temper that had beset Widmer, scurried hack and forth in obvious terror. As the ship rolled, the water in the glasses and the wine in the decanter rocked this way and that. It was Widmer, as usual, who broke the silence. “I have heard,” he said in his low voice, “that some one was listening outside my door last night. If any man in my crew were caught there, I’d have him pitched to the sharks.”

“Yes, sir, I’d have him pitched to the sharks. There is no occasion for excitement. Certainly no guest of mine would be guilty of anything like that. I should not like to be under the necessity of sending a guest of mine forward. But as sure as my name is Amos Widmer, if it comes to action I’ll act with the best of them—or the worst.”

Then Hastings smiled. “It would indeed be a singular circumstance that would force a gentleman—” the stress on the word was ever so slight—“to take such measures with a guest.”

So deep the silence, as they finished the meal, that each heard twice the faint ripple of a woman’s laugh.

With all her canvas set, the Winnemere swept on down the long line dotted on the charts, to Singapore and Malacca Strait; and off among the islands, with the stumps of her broken masts rising from the seas that washed her decks, lay the hull of the Helen of Troy.

Evening came, and again the two sat opposite p. 234each other at the cabin table. But this time Hastings was the more taciturn. After the manner of many an outspoken man who becomes all at once aware that he has been made game of, he withdrew into a silence that, half unwittingly, met Widmer at his own game. And Widmer, with that unpleasant light in his eyes, again masked himself with exaggerated courtesy.

“Who would have thought—” his voice was unnaturally smooth as he repeated the sentence for the twentieth time, lingering over the irony of each phrase, “—who would have thought that I should have the honor of bringing home Captain Hastings, of the Helen of Troy!” Then he laughed shortly.

“Such an honor!” Widmer continued. “Think of it. More than once I’ve raced the Helen of Troy and been beaten. And a good many times more than once I’ve seen Donald Hastings sitting in the garden by the white house, and have gone away and left him there. But there was a time when Donald Hastings found the gate open and the garden empty. And now the time is come when all that is left of the crew of the Helen of Troy is right glad of passage on the Winnemere.”

If there was any indication that Hastings was listening to the other’s words, it was only in the tension of his fingers as they pressed the table top, and in the whiteness of his knuckles.

But Widmer, speaking at intervals as if to probe for some most sensitive nerve center, went on, his eyes fixed on Hastings’ forehead: “An empty garden—and now the Helen of Troy is gone—it would be an honor indeed to bring him home, p. 235but an empty honor, after all—what if he never came home—if—!” Suddenly he lowered his eves until they looked into Hastings’ own. “My wife, sir,” he said with fierce intensity, “cried the day I married her, cried at her wedding, shed a bucket of tears. Tears are no wedding flummery, sir. I didn’t know then why it was. But I know now. Do you hear? I know, damn it, know.”

Once again Hastings felt the rasp of steel, and closed to the combat in a manner worthy of his opponent’s saner moments. “If you mean to imply—”

Before his slow speech was past his lips, Widmer interrupted him, changing his expression so facilely that Hastings felt again that sense of losing all touch with the blade that maneuvered for his weakness: “I beg you to pardon me. I was excited. Of course I imply nothing. Nothing that you would be guilty of.”

And Hastings, quicker of hand than of brain, tried again to follow that baffling change of front. He was gaining experience in that other school of fence, and was not so easily evaded now.

Throughout the meal he studied Widmer cautiously. Thin mouth, cold eyes, an outward politeness itself threatening by the suggestion of what lay behind it. He had known the man’s reputation of old; the ever-present apprehension of the cabin boy, the servility of the mate, the silence of the crew, all went to bear it out.

Yes, each knew; and each knew, unconfessed, that the other knew. All night the thought haunted Hastings. He recalled numerous half-spoken sentences fraught with scarcely concealed meaning, and others, outspoken and direct, that made no p. 236pretense of concealment. He had come back to the sea to forget that he ever had loved, but, after all, he could not forget. He even doubted if the girl had forgotten. Such dreams as they had dreamed together do not vanish overnight. He saw her on the porch of the old house, by the slim, white pillars. He remembered her in the garden sweet with honeysuckle. On the wharf, by the church door, here, there, everywhere, among the familiar scenes of the old town, she appeared in the eyes of his memory. Then like a dark cloud came the memory of a certain night—and the strange laughter, the locked door, and the words he had heard her say.

At noon next day Widmer was gay. He laughed and joked, and seemed unaware of Hastings’ silence. At night he gave himself up again to a politeness elaborate and artificial. But through it all Hastings felt a certain threatening undertone. And Widmer, taking no chances, gave secret orders, quite as if he had not fathomed Hastings and found him shallow to the lead.

The sun set in a blaze of fire, shooting great beams of light far into the heavens, and the moon rose in a pale halo. A junk in the offing tossed on the long swell that rolled away into the distance, and the WVinnemere, her braces rattling as they ran, leaned easily before the wind that swept the gray sea. The sky changed from blue to scarlet, from scarlet to flaming gold, and from gold, as the night set in, to sea green and steel blue. The ship’s lanterns twinkled in the dusk; the stars came out thickly overhead; and presently, as the moon climbed above the horizon, its wan light thinly illuminated the decks of the ship and the towering structure of masts and spars and canvas and cordage.

p. 237Late at night, when all was quiet, Hastings crept out of his berth. For a time he could hear only the straining of ropes, the creaking of blocks, and the whisper of the sea. Then he heard the sound of some one sobbing. Then the sound changed to that low laugh.

That laugh! He had half expected, half feared, to hear it. He felt within himself the sharp palpitation stimulated by quick, intense emotion, that for want of a better name we call leaping of the heart. With a quick motion he started forward in the darkness, but his feet struck something soft. It was the little cabin boy, asleep on a folded blanket. Uttering a cry, the lad scrambled to his feet and fled up the companionway.

For a moment there was silence, heavy and suspicious, then, out of the dark, came Widmer’s calm challenge. “What does this mean?”

Again silence ensued. The slow opening of a shutter, through which a few rays of light had been struggling feebly, suffused the scene with a dim, yellow glow. Hastings, his knees slightly bent, his hands raised as for attack or defense, his lips parted, was confronted by Amos Widmer, who stood with folded arms, smiling softly.

Taken at an overwhelming disadvantage, Hastings’ mind, groping, could summon no reply.

Down the companionway came only the familiar sounds of a ship at sea, the creaking of blocks and braces, the low voices of the watch, the whisper of the ocean.

“There are laws—” Hastings’ voice was thick—“that override the laws of ‘hospitality.’”

p. 238“I fear, sir, you are little versed in the customs of gentlemen.” And Widmer, measuring the effect of the retort, let the smile creep to his eyes.

Drawing himself erect, Hastings stepped forward until the shadow of the casement fell across his face and masked it, but although he said nothing, Widmer persisted.

“Gentlemen have a code of their own. And when a man fails to meet that code, it is sometimes necessary to teach him a painful lesson.”

Another pause followed, then, clearly and distinctly, a shrill laugh from somewhere beyond the cabin sounded on the night air.

“Gentlemen—” Widmer’s sneering voice began again, but the sentence was not finished.

An outthrust hand flung back the shutter. There was a quick movement in the sudden darkness, a hoarse gasp, a strange sound that frightened the little cabin boy, who had thrown himself, belly down, by the open hatch overhead, then from above came the lookout’s voice, sharp with warning.

A third voice broke into the dialogue: “What’s all this? There’s nothing there.”

All at once came a crash and shock that sent the mizzen-topmast by the board, and hurled men from their feet. For a moment there was silence, then that shrill yell sounded, that wrings hearts:

“All hands on deck!” Then the voice came down the hatch into the darkness below: “Captain Widmer! Captain Widmer! For God’s sake, come up! We’ve run afoul a derelict!”

Instead, as the boats were launched by the pale light of the crescent moon, and the Winnemere, listing heavily to port, settled rapidly, the captain of the Helen of Troy appeared by the after port davits, with a woman wrapped in a loose cloak.

And when the boats were in the water Donald Hastings and the woman in the loose cloak sat in the sternsheets of the third to be launched. And the men, as they rowed, heard snatches of the woman’s talk, which was about a child; how some one had cursed it and its father, and how the child was gone now. Sometimes the woman laughed a strange laugh that the men did not like, but they were only sailors, so they rowed on into the night and asked no questions.

By and by they rested on their oars and, looking back, saw an extraordinary sight. Revealed in the faint moonlight, the Winnemere, sinking by the head, set at defiance the natural laws of ships upon the sea. At first it seemed as if her masts were being raked forward, then her stern rose, then, without sound or sign, she went under with all sail set. And from somewhere came a whisper that the derelict with the two upstanding stumps of masts, which went rolling down the wind, was all that was left of the Helen of Troy. All—but victorious.

The first sunrise coming slowly on the track p. 240of daylight found the boats, a little group of dark spots in the vast plain of the sea, held together, apparently, by something of that same magnetic power that leads two bits of cork to adhere each to each. When the sun rose again, they were scattered over miles of gray ocean. When the third day broke from a sky banked with clouds, only two boats were to be seen—two boats and a single sail small on the horizon.

The sail grew and took shape. Out of the borderland between sea and sky came a bark flying the flag of England. Presently, as she headed into the wind, the woman, lying in Donald Hastings’ arms, saw dimly the faces lined above the rail, then was lifted on board and carried into the cabin.

“Donald,” she whispered in quiet happiness, “Oh, Donald!” Her voice changed. “But the baby! He was angry about the baby: your baby—our baby.” And she laughed that strange laugh.

The sun, forcing its way through the clouds, touched the dark brown paneling with golden light. In the silence of the cabin the voices on deck were distinctly audible. “He was that cruel to his wife!” some one was saying. “All of us was glad enough to see him left.” But only a fragment of the narrative came to the little group below.

“Don’t! I came—too late.” He dropped on his knees beside the berth in which she had been laid. “I will! I will marry you!”

Again she laughed that strange, low laugh. The captain of the bark, his medicine chest open before him, shook his head. “You’ll not p. 241marry her,” he muttered. “It’ll not be allowed. You’ve but to hear her to know that.”

“I will,” Hastings cried, wildly. “There’s little enough a man can do to atone for great wrong.”

There was indeed no wedding. Not often is the path of atonement made broad and easy. Instead, the story of my old New England town came to pass, the story of a man who provided for his enemy’s wife as if she were his own. For in the years to come there sailed with Donald Hastings a woman who laughed strangely at times, and talked of something other people pretended to have forgotten. And Donald Hastings, the marriage forbidden, gave her the rest of his life, covering her lapses of speech by quick wit and ever-remembering kindness, making her seem almost like other women, and placing out of his own reach forever the fellowship of those who called themselves honest folk.

It all happened a hundred years ago. Stories, good and bad,—mostly bad,—were told of them then, and have been told ever since. Such is the world’s way. And of Amos Widmer it was known only that he was lost at sea when the Winnemere went down. Who of us can say what accountings are to be made on that day when the good and evil are balanced, when things forgotten are remembered, and things unknown are brought to light?

“On this noon,” wrote the village minister in that rare old diary of his, “did Captain Hastings p. 242sail in command of the Amaryllis, taking with him, as hitherto, poor Christine Widmer.” Then, in the intimate privacy of the book, he adds—wise, rash, cautious old man: “I am almost of a mind, since things are as they are, that it is for the best,—even so.”

p. 243THE CASK ASHORE

At the head of a diminutive creek of the Tamar River, a little above Saltash on the Cornish shore, stands the village of Botusfleming, or Bloflemy, and in early summer, when the cherry orchards come into bloom, you will search far before finding a prettier.

The years have dealt gently with Botusfleming. As it is today, so, or nearly so, it was on a certain sunny afternoon in the year 1807, when the Rev. Edward Spettigew, curate in charge, sat in the garden before his cottage and smoked his pipe while he meditated a sermon. That is to say, he intended to meditate a sermon. But the afternoon was warm; bumblebees hummed drowsily among his wallflowers and tulips. From his bench the eye followed the vale’s descent between overlapping billows of cherry blossom to a gap wherein shone the silver Tamar: not, be it understood, the part called Hamoaze, where lay the warships and the hulks containing the French prisoners, but an upper reach seldom troubled by shipping.

Parson Spettigew laid the book face downward on his knee while his lips murmured a part of the text he had chosen: “A place of broad rivers and streams . . . wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby. . . .” His pipe went out. The book slipped from his knee to the ground. He slumbered . . .

p. 244The garden gate rattled, and he awoke with a start. In the pathway below him stood a sailor, a middle-sized, middle-aged man, rigged out in best shore-going clothes: shiny tarpaulin hat, blue coat and waistcoat, shirt open at the throat, and white duck trousers with broad-buckled waistbelt.

“Beggin’ your reverence’s pardon,” began the visitor, touching the brim of his hat, and then upon second thought uncovering, “but my name’s Jope, Ben Jope—”

“Eh? What can I do for you?” asked Parson Spettigew, a trifle flustered at being caught napping.

“—of the Vesoovious bomb, bos’n,” pursued Mr. Jope, with a smile that disarmed annoyance: so ingenuous it was, so friendly, and withal so respectful; “but paid off at eight this morning. Maybe your reverence can tell me whereabouts to find an embalmer in these parts?”

“Embalmer.” Mr. Jope chewed for a moment or two upon a quid of tobacco, and began a thoughtful explanation. “Sort of party you’d go to supposin’ your reverence had a corpse by you and wanted to keep it for a permanency. You take a lot of gums and spices, and first of all you lays out the deceased, and next—”

“Yes, yes,” the parson interrupted, hurriedly; “I know the process, of course.”

“No, most certainly not. . . . But, my good man, an embalmer!—and at Botusfleming, of all places!”

The sailor’s face fell. He sighed patiently. p. 245“That’s what they said at Saltash, more or less. I got a sister living there—Sarah Treleaven her name is—a widow woman, and sells fish. When I called on her this morning, ‘Embalmer?’ she said; ‘go and embalm your grandmother!’ Those were her words, and the rest of the population wasn’t scarcely more helpful. But as luck would have it, while I was searchin’, Bill Adams went for a shave, and inside o’ the barber’s shop what should he see but a fair-sized otter in a glass case. Bill began to admire it, careless like, and it turned out the barber had stuffed the thing. Maybe your reverence knows the man? ‘A. Grigg and Son’ he calls his-self.”

Mr. Jope’s face fell again. “Well-a-well,” he suggested, recovering himself, “I daresay the size don’t matter, once you’ve got the knack. We’ve brought him along, anyway; an’ what’s more, we’ve made him bring all his tools. By his talk, he reckons it to be a shavin’ job, and we agreed to wait before we undeceived him.”

Mr. Jope pressed a forefinger mysterious to his lip, then jerked a thumb in the direction of the river. “If your reverence wouldn’ mind steppin’ down to the creek with me?” he suggested, respectfully.

Parson Spettigew fetched his hat, and together the pair descended the vale beneath the dropping petals of the cherry. At the foot of it they came p. 246to a creek, which the tide at this hour had flooded and almost overbrimmed. Hard by the water’s edge, backed by tall elms, stood a dilapidated fish store, and below it lay a boat with nose aground on a beach of flat stones. Two men were in the boat. The barber, a slip of a fellow in rusty top hat and suit of rusty black, sat in the stern sheets face to face with a large cask: a cask so ample that, to find room for his knees, he was forced to crook them at a high, uncomfortable angle. In the bows, boathook in hand, stood a tall sailor, arrayed in shore-going clothes, similar to Mr. Jope’s. His face was long, sallow, and expressive of taciturnity, and he wore a beard, not where beards are usually worn, but as a fringe beneath his clean-shaven chin and lantern jaw.

“Well, here we are!” asserted Mr. Jope, cheerfully. “Your reverence knows A. Grigg and Son, and the others you can trust in all weathers, bein’ William Adams, otherwise Bill, and Eli Tonkin: friends o’ mine an’ shipmates both.”

The parson, perplexed, stared at the tall seaman, who touched his hat by way of acknowledging the introduction.

“This here’s Bill Adams,” said Mr. Jope, and again the tall seaman touched his hat. “Is it Eli you’re missin’? Eli’s in the cask.”

“We’ll hoick him up to the store, Bill, if you’re ready. It looks a nice cool place. And while you’re prizin’ him open, I’d best explain to his reverence and the barber. Here, ship out the shore plank; and you, A. Grigg and Son, lend a hand to heave. . . . Aye, you’re right; it weighs more’n p. 247a trifle—bein’ a quarter-puncheon, an’ the best proof sperrits. Tilt her this way. . . . Ready? . . . Then w’y-ho! and away she goes!”

With a heave and a lurch that canted the boat until the water poured over her gunwale, the huge tub was rolled overside into shallow water. With a run and a tremendous lift they hoisted it up to the turfy plat, whence Bill Adams steered it with ease through the ruinated doorway of the store, while Mr. Jope returned, smiling and mopping his brow.

“It’s this-a-way,” he said, addressing the parson. “Eli Tonkin his name is, or was; and, as he said, of this parish.”

“Tonkin?” queried the parson. “There are no Tonkins surviving in Botusfleming parish. The last of them was a poor old widow I laid to rest the week after Christmas.”

“Belay there! . . . Dead, is she?” Mr. Jope’s face exhibited the liveliest disappointment. “And after the surprise we’d planned for her!” he murmured ruefully. “Hi, Bill!” he called to his shipmate, who, having stored the cask, was returning to the boat.

“Wot is it?” asked Bill Adams, inattentively. “Look ’ere, where did we stow the hammer an’ chisel?”

The tall man absorbed the news slowly. “That’s a facer,” he said at length. “But maybe we can fix her up, too? I’ll stand my share.”

“Times an’ again I’ve heard Eli talk of his poor old mother,” said Mr. Jope, turning to the parson. “W’ch you’ll hardly believe it, but though I knowed him for a West-country man, ’twas not till the last I learned what parish he hailed from. It happened very curiously—Bill, rout up A. Grigg and Son, an’ fetch him forra’d here to listen; you’ll find the tools underneath him in the stern sheets.”

Bill obeyed, and, possessing himself of a hammer and chisel, returned to the shore. The little barber drew near and stood at Mr. Jope’s elbow; his face wore an unhealthy pallor and he smelt potently of strong drink.

“Brandy it is,” apologized Mr. Jope, observing a slight contraction of the parson’s nostril. “I reckoned ’twould tauten him a bit for what’s ahead. . . . Well, as I was sayin’, it happened very curiously. This day fortnight we were beatin’ up an’ across the Bay o’ Biscay, after a four months’ to-an’-fro game in front of Toolon Harbor. Blowin’ fresh it was, an’ we makin’ pretty poor weather of it—the Vesoovious bein’ a powerful wet tub in anything of a sea, an’ a slug at the best o’ times. Aboard a bombship everything’s got to be heavy.

“Well, sir, for a couple of days she’d been carryin’ canvas that fairly smothered us, an’ Cap’n Crang not a man to care how we fared forra’d, so long’s the water didn’ reach aft to his own quarters. But at last the first mate, Mr. Wapshott, took pity on us an’—the Cap’n bein’ below, a-takin’ a nap after dinner—sends the crew o’ the maintop aloft to take a reef in the tops’l. Poor Eli was one. Whereby the men had scarcely reached the top p. 249afore Cap’n Crang comes up from his cabin an’ along the deck, not troublin’ to cast an eye aloft. Whereby he missed what was happenin’. Whereby he had just come abreast o’ the mainmast, when—sock at his very feet there drops a man! ’Twas Eli, that had missed his hold an’ dropped clean on his skull. ‘Hallo!’ says the cap’n, ‘an’ where the deuce might you come from?’ Eli heard it—poor fellow—an’ says he, as I lifted him, answerin’ very respectful, ‘If you please, sir, from Botusfleming, three miles t’other side of Saltash.’

“‘Then you’ve had a mighty quick passage, that’s all I can say,’ answers Cap’n Crang, an’ turns on his heel.

“Well, sir, we all agreed the cap’n might ha’ showed more feelin’, specially as poor Eli’d broke the base of his skull an’ by eight bells handed in the number of his mess. Five or six of us talked it over, agreein’ as how ’twasn’ hardly human, an’ Eli such a good fellow, too, let alone bein’ a decent seaman. Whereby the notion came to me that as he’d come from Botusfleming—those bein’ his last words—back to Botusfleming he should go; an’ on that we cooked up a plot. Bill Adams bein’ on duty in the sick bay, there wasn’ no difficulty in sewin’ up a dummy in Eli’s place; an’ the dummy, sir, nex’ day we dooly committed to the deep,—as the sayin’ goes,—Cap’n Crang hisself readin’ the service. The real question was what to do with Eli. Whereby, the purser an’ me bein’ friends, I goes to him an’ says, ‘Look here,’ I says, ‘we’ll be paid off in ten days or so, an’ there’s a trifle o’ prize money, too. What price’ll you sell us a cask o’ the ship’s rum?—say a quarter-puncheon for choice?’ ‘What for?’ says he. ‘For shore-going p. 250purposes,’ says I; ‘Bill Adams an’ me got a use for it.’ ‘Well,’ says the purser,—a decent chap, an’ by name Wilkins,—’I’m an honest man,’ says he, ‘an’ to oblige a friend you shall have it at store valuation rate. An’ what’s more,’ says he, ‘I got the wind o’ your little game, an’ll do what I can to help it along, for I al’ays liked the deceased, an’ in my opinion Cap’n Crang behaved most unfeelin’. You tell Bill to bring the body to me, an’ there’ll be no more trouble about it till I hands you over the cask at Plymouth.’ Well, sir, the man was as good as his word. We smuggled the cask ashore last evenin’, an’ hid it in the woods this side o’ Mount Edgcumbe. This mornin’ we reshipped it, as you see. First along we intended no more than just to break the news to Eli’s mother an’ hand him over to her; but Bill reckoned that to hand him over, cask an’ all, would look careless; for, as he said, ‘’Twasn’t as if you could bury ’im in a cask.’ We allowed your reverence would draw the line at that, though we hadn’ the pleasure o’ knowin’ you then.”

“Yes,” agreed the parson, as Mr. Jope paused; “I fear it could not be done without scandal.”

“That’s just how Bill put it. ‘Well, then,’ says I, thinkin’ it over, ‘why not do the handsome while we’re about it? You an’ me ain’t the sort of men,’ I says, ‘to spoil the ship for a ha’porth o’ tar.’ ‘Certainly we ain’t,’ says Bill, ‘and we’ve done a lot for Eli,’ says I. ‘We have,’ says Bill. ‘Well, then,’ says I, ‘let’s put a coat o’ paint on the whole business an’ have him embalmed!’ Bill was enchanted.”

p. 251“Bill was enchanted. Hark to him in the store, there—knockin’ away at the chisel.”

“But there’s some misunderstanding,” the little man protested, earnestly. “I understood it was to be a shave.”

“Have some more brandy.” Mr. Jope pulled out and proffered a flask. “Only don’t overdo it, or it’ll make your head shaky. Serious? You may lay to it that Bill’s serious. He’s that set on the idea, it don’t make no difference to him—as you may have noticed—Eli’s mother not bein’ alive to take pleasure in it. Why, he wanted to embalm her, too! He’s doin’ this now for his own gratification, is Bill; an’ you may take it from me when Bill sets his heart on a thing he sees it through. Don’t you cross him—that’s my advice.”

“No, you don’t!”—as the little man made a wild spring to flee up the beach Mr. Jope shot out a hand and gripped him by the coat collar. “Now, look here,” he said very quietly, as the poor wretch would have groveled at the parson’s feet, “you was boastin’ to Bill, not an hour agone, as you could stuff anything.”

“Bad language, too?—that’s not like Bill, as a rule. Ahoy, there! Bill!”

p. 252“What’s up?” Without waiting for an answer, Mr. Jope ran the barber before him up the beach to the doorway, the parson following. “What’s up?” he demanded again, as he drew breath.

“Take an’ see for yourself,” answered Mr. Adams, darkly, pointing with his chisel. A fine fragrance of rum permeated the air of the store.

Mr. Jope advanced and peered into the staved cask. “Gone?” he exclaimed, and gazed around blankly.

“It ain’t the usual way o’ rum. And it is rum?” Bill appealed to the parson.

“I tell you what’s happened. That fool of a Wilkins has made a mistake in the cask . . . ”

“They’ll have returned Eli to the Victuallin’ Yard before this,” said Bill, gloomily.

“I overheard Wilkins sayin’ as he was to pass over all stores an’ accounts at nine-thirty this mornin’.”

“An’ once there, who knows where he’s got mixed? He’ll go the round of the Fleet, maybe. Oh, my word! an’ the ship that broaches him!”

Bill Adams opened his mouth and shut it, finding no speech; opened it again, and: “They’ll reckon they got a lucky bag,” he said, weakly.

“An’ Wilkins paid off with the rest, an’ no address. Even if he could help, which I doubt.”

“Eh? I got a note from Wilkins, as it happens.” Bill Adams took off his tarpaulin hat and extracted a paper from the lining of the crown. p. 253“He passed it down to me this mornin’ as I pushed off from the ship. Said I was to keep it, an’ maybe I’d find it useful. I wondered what he meant at the time, me takin’ no particular truck with pursers ashore. . . . It crossed my mind, as I’d heard he meant to get married, that maybe he wanted me to stand best man at the weddin’. W’ich I didn’ open the note at the time, not likin’ to refuse him after he’d behaved so well to us.”

“Pass it over,” commanded Mr. Jope. He took the paper and unfolded it, but either the light was dim within the store, or the handwriting hard to decipher.

Parson Spettigew carried the paper to the doorway. He read its contents aloud and slowly:

“But what are we to do with it?” asked Mr. Jope, scratching his head in perplexity.

p. 254“That’s all very well,” replied his friend. “You never had no property, an’ don’t know its burdens. We’ll have to hire a house for this, an’ live there till it’s finished.”

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELLMAN BOOK OF FICTION, 1906-1919 ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™ electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™

Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™, including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

	PAGE
The Mute, Robert W. Sneddon	1
The Laughing Duchess, Virginia Woodward Cloud	13
Long, Long Ago, Frederick Orin Bartlett	34
The Right Whales Flukes, Ben Ames Williams	45
When Breathitt Went to Battle, Lewis H. Kilpatrick	70
The Forgiver, Marjorie L. C. Pickthall	87
Told to Parson, Eden Phillpotts	100
Iron, Randolph Edgar	111
The Perfect Interval, Margaret Adelaide Wilson	113
The Archbishop Of Rheims, Emily W. Scott	132
The Trawnbeighs, Charles Macomb Flandrau	145
The Life Belt, J. J. Bell	157
Amina, Edward Lucas White	168
The Silver Ring, Frank Swinnerton	183
The Surgeon, B. W. Mitchell	193
The ’Dopters, Aileen Cleveland Higgins	201
Prem Singh, John Amid	216
Even So, Charles Boardman Hawes	223
The Cask Ashore, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch	243

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Bellman Book of Fiction, 1906-1919

The Bellman
Book of Fiction