"He thinks because he happens to have a steam engine he needn't look to
see which way the wind is blowing."
"She's pitching pretty badly," Griswold called back. "If he only had
sense enough to ease off a little...." Suddenly he became aware of the
finer heroism of his companion. He knew now why she had refused to take
shelter under the lee of the island, and why she was holding the catboat
down to the edge of peril to keep the windward advantage of the laboring
steamer. "Margery, girl, you're a darling!" he shouted. "Take all the
chances you want to and I'm with you, if we go to the bottom!"
She nodded complete intelligence and took in another inch of the
straining main-sheet.
"If Halverson loses his nerve they're going to need help, and need it
before the _Osprey_ can get out to them," she prophesied.
Griswold looked again, this time over the catboat's counter, and saw a
big schooner, close-reefed, hauling out from a little bay on the north
shore. The launch's plight had evidently impressed others with the
necessity of doing something. The need was sufficiently urgent. Once
again the Swedish man of machinery in charge of the craft in peril was
inching his helm up in a vain endeavor to hold the course, and the
little steamer was rolling almost funnel under. Griswold forgot that his
companion was a woman and swore rabidly.
"Look at the fool!" he yelled. "He's trying to come about! If he gets
into the trough----"
The thing was done almost as he spoke. A wilder squall than any of the
preceding ones caught the upper works of the launch and heeled her
spitefully. At the critical instant the steersman lost his head and
spun the wheel, and it was all over. With a heaving plunge and a muffled
explosion the launch was gone.
Once again Griswold was given to see the stuff Margery Grierson was made
of in the finer warp and woof of her.
"That's for us," she said calmly; and then: "Help me get another inch or
two on this sheet. We don't want to let those people on the _Osprey_ do
all of the heroic things."
Together they held the catboat down to its work, sending it ripping
through the crested waves and fighting sturdily for every foot of the
precious windward advantage. None the less, it was the big schooner,
thrashing down the wind with every square yard of its reefed canvas
drawing, which was first at the scene of disaster. Through the rain and
spume they could see the schooner's crew picking up the shipwrecked
passengers, who were clinging to life-belts, broken bulkheads, and
anything that would float. So swiftly was the rescue effected that the
rescuer had luffed and filled and was tearing on its way down the lake
again when the close-hauled _Clytie_ came up with the first of the
floating wreckage. The tiller maiden's dark eyes were shining again, but
this time their brightness was of tears.
"Oh, boy, boy!" she cried, with a little heart-broken catch in her
voice; "some of them must have gone down with her! Can you believe that
the _Osprey_ got them all?" And then, with the sweet lips trembling: "I
did my best, Kenneth; my very best: and--it wasn't--good enough!"
She was putting the catboat up into the wind, and Griswold stumbled
forward to get the broader outlook. Suddenly he called back to her.
"Port!--port your helm hard! there's a man in a life-belt--he's just out
of reach. Hold her there--steady--steady!" He had thrown himself flat,
face down, on the half-deck forward and was clutching at something in
the heaving seas. "I've got him!" he cried, and a moment later he was
working his way aft, holding the man's face out of water.
It asked for their united strength to get the gray-haired, heavy-bodied
victim of the capsize over the _Clytie's_ rail. They had to bring the
life-belt too; the old man's fingers were sunk into it with a dying grip
that could not be broken. At first Griswold was too much preoccupied and
shocked to recognize the drawn face with its hard-lined mouth and long
upper lip. When he did recognize it the gripping fear was at his
heart--the fear that makes a cruel coward of the hunted thing in all
nature.
What might have happened if he had been alone; if Margery, taking her
place at the tiller and busying herself swiftly in getting the catboat
under way again, had not been looking on; he dared not think. And that
other frightful thought he put away, fighting against it madly as a
condemned man might push the cup of hemlock from his lips. Forcibly
breaking the drowned one's hold upon the life-belt, he fell to work
energetically, resorting to the first-aid expedients for the reviving of
the drowned as he had learned them in his boyhood. Once, only, he flung
a word over his shoulder at Margery as he fought for the old man's life.
"Make for the nearest landing where we can get a doctor!" he commanded;
and then, in a passion of gratitude: "O God, I thank thee that I am not
a murderer!--he's coming back! he's breathing again!"
A little later he was able to leave off the first-aid arm-pumpings and
chest-pressings; to straighten the limp and sprawling limbs, and to dive
into the cuddy cabin, under Margery's directions, for blankets and rugs.
When all was done that could be done, and he had propped the
blanket-swathed body with the cushions so that the crash and plunge of
the pitching catboat would be minimized for the sufferer, he went aft to
sit beside the helmswoman, who was getting the final wave-leap of speed
out of the little vessel.
"He is alive?" she asked.
"Yes; and that is about all that can be said. He isn't drowned; but he
is old, and the shock has gone pretty near to snapping the thread."
"Of course, you remember him?" she said, looking away across the leaping
waters.
Griswold, with his heart on fire with generous emotions, felt the cold
hand gripping him again.
"He is the old gentleman you introduced me to at the Inn the other day:
Galbraith; is that the name?"
"Yes," she rejoined, still looking away; "that is the name."
Griswold fell silent for the time; but a little later, when the catboat
was rushing in long plunges through the entrance to the Wahaskan arm of
the lake, he said: "You are going to take him to Mereside?"
"Yes. He is a friend of poppa's. And, anyway, it's the nearest place,
and you said there was no time to lose."
There were anxious watchers on the Mereside landing-stage: the gardener,
the stable-man, Thorsen, and three or four others. When the landing was
safely made, Miss Grierson took command and issued her orders briskly.
"Four of you carry Mr. Galbraith up to the house, and you, Thorsen, put
Baldur into the two-wheeled trap and be ready to go for Doctor Farnham
when I tell you where you can find him. Johnnie Fergus, you come here
and take care of the _Clytie_; you know how to furl down and moor her."
Griswold helped the bearers lift the blanketed figure out of the
_Clytie's_ cockpit, and while he was doing it, the steel-gray eyes of
the rescued one opened slowly to fix a stony gaze upon the face of the
man who was bending over him. What the thin lips were muttering Griswold
heard, and so did one other. "So it's you, is it, ye murdering blue-eyed
deevil?" And then: "Eh, man, man, but I'm sick!"
Griswold walked with Margery at the tail of the little procession as it
wound its way up the path to the great house.
"You heard what he said?" he inquired craftily.
"Yes: he is out of his head, and no wonder," she said soberly. Then:
"You must go home and change at once; you are drenched to the skin.
Don't wait to come in. I'll take care of your manuscript."
XXX
THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES
The cyclonic summer storm had blown itself out, and the clouds were
beginning to break away in the west, when Griswold, obeying Margery's
urging to go home and change his clothes, turned his back upon Mereside
and his face toward a future of thickening doubts and unnerving
possibilities.
Once more he found himself wrestling with the keeper of the gate, the
angel of the flaming sword set to drive him forth among the outcasts.
One by one the confidently imagined safeguards were crumbling. He had
been traced to Wahaska--so much could be read between the lines of
Charlotte Farnham's story; if Margery's newsboy protégé was to be
believed, he was watched and followed. And now, after having
successfully passed the ordeal of a face-to-face meeting and
hand-shaking with Andrew Galbraith, chance or destiny or the powers of
darkness had intervened, and a danger met and vanquished had been
suddenly brought to life again, armed and menacing.
Griswold had not deceived himself, nor had he allowed Margery's apparent
convincement to deceive him. The old man's mind had not been wandering
in the eye-opening moment of consciousness regained. On the contrary,
what he had failed to do under ordinary and conventional conditions had
become instantly possible when the plunge into the dark shadow had
brushed away all the artificial becloudings of the memory page. What
action he would take when he should recover was as easy to prefigure as
it was, for the present at least, a matter negligible. The dismaying
thing was that the broad earth seemed too narrow to hide in; that
invention itself became the clumsiest of blunderers when, it was given
the simple task of losing a single individual among the millions of
unrelated human atoms.
Thus the threat of the peril which might be called the physical. But
beyond this there was another, and, for a man of temperament, a still
more ominous foreshadowing of evil to come. Of some subtle, deep-seated
change in himself he had long been conscious. Again and again it had
manifested itself in those moments of craven fear and ruthless,
murderous promptings, when kindliness, gratitude, love, all the
humanizing motives, had turned suddenly to frenzied hatred, and the
primitive savage had leaped up, fiercely raging with the blood-lust.
Here, again, he suffered loss, and was conscious of it. The point of
view was changed, and still changing. Something, a thing indefinable,
but none the less real, had gone out of him. Once, in the heart of a
thick darkness of squalor and misery, he had seen a great light and the
name of it was love for his kind. But now the light was waning, and in
its room a bale-fire was beckoning. There be those, fat, well-nurtured,
and complacent souls faring ever along the main-travelled roads of life,
who need no guiding lamp and will never see the glimmer of the
bale-fires. But the breaker of traditions was of those who, having once
seen the light, must follow where it leads or violate a primal law of
being. Some vague sense of this was stirring the dying embers for the
proletary as he was climbing the hill to the street of quiet entrances;
but he pushed the saving thought aside and chose to call it fanaticism.
He had drawn the line and he would hew to it.
For a long time after he had reached his room, and had had his bath and
change, Griswold sat at his writing-table with his head in his hands,
thinking in monotonous circles. As in those other stressful moments, the
importunate devil was at his ear; now mocking him for not having left
the drowned enemy as he was; now whispering the dreadful hope that age
and the shock and the drowning might still re-erect the barrier of
safety. The eyes of the recusant grew hot and a loathsome fever ran
sluggishly through his veins when he realized the depths to which he had
descended; that he, once the brother-loving, could coldly weigh the
chance of life and death for another and be unable to find in any corner
of his heart the hope that life might prevail.
He was still sitting, miserably reflective, in the dark, when Mrs.
Holcomb came up to call him to dinner. What excuse he made he could not
remember two minutes after she had gone down. But to make a fourth with
the motherly widow and her two bank clerks at the cheerful dinner-table
was a thing beyond him. Somewhat later he heard the two young men come
upstairs, and, still further along, go down again. They were social
souls, his two fellow lodgers; kindly young fellows with boyish faces
and honest eyes: Griswold wondered if they would still look up to him
and defer to him as the older man of broader culture if they could
know....
The tiny chiming clock on his dressing-case in the adjoining bedroom had
tinkled forth its ten tapping hammer strokes when the man sitting in the
dark heard the pounding of hoofs and the rattling of buggy wheels in the
quiet street. He was absently awaking to the fact that the vehicle had
stopped at his own door when he heard voices, the widow's and another,
in the lower hall, and then a man's footsteps on the stair. To a
hard-pressed breaker of the traditions at such a moment an unannounced
visitor, coming up in the dark, could mean but one thing. Griswold
silently opened a drawer in the writing-table and groped for the mate to
the quick-firing pistol which, after the change of wet clothing, he had
put aside to dry.
The visitor came heavily upstairs, and Griswold, swinging his chair to
face the open door, saw the shadowy bulking of the man as he came
through the upper hall. When the bulk filled the doorway it was covered
by the pistol held low, and Griswold's finger was pressing the trigger.
"Asleep, old man?" said the intruder in Raymer's well-known voice.
There was a sound like a gasping sob, and another as of a drawer closing
softly. Then Griswold said: "No; I'm not asleep. Come in. Shall I light
the gas?"
"Not for me," returned the bedtime visitor, entering and groping for the
chair at the desk-end, into which, when he had placed it, he dropped
wearily. "I want to smoke," he went on. "Have you got a cigar--no, not
the pipe; I want something that I can chew on."
A cigar was found, in the drawer which had so lately furnished the
weapon, and by the flare of the match in Raymer's fingers Griswold saw a
face haggard with anxiety. In the kindlier days it had been one of his
redeeming characteristics that he could never dwell long upon his own
harassments when another's troubles were brought to him.
"What is the matter, Edward?" he asked.
"A mix-up with the labor unions. It's been brewing for some little time,
but I didn't want to worry you with it. Unless we announce a flat
increase of twenty per cent in wages to-morrow morning, and declare for
the closed shop, the men will go out on us at noon. I've seen it coming.
It began with the enlarging of the plant and the taking on of the new
men needed. We've always had the open shop, as you know, and it was all
right so long as we were too small for the unions to scrap about. But
now we get the Iron Workers' ultimatum: we can do as we please about
the profit-sharing; but the flat increase must go on the pay-rolls, and
the shop must be run as a closed shop."
If the god of mischance had chosen the moment it could not have been
more opportune for the fire-lighting of malevolence. Griswold's
swing-chair righted itself with a click, and Bainbridge's prophecy that
a hot-hearted proletary was likely to become the hardest of masters
became a prediction fulfilled.
"We'll see them in hell, first, Raymer! Isn't that the way you feel
about it?"
"Partly," allowed the smoker. "But it can hardly be disposed of that
easily, Kenneth. A good third of the men are our old standbys; men who
were in the shops under my father. Some pretty powerful influence has
been brought to bear upon them to swing them against us. I don't know
what it is, but I do know this: every second man we have hired lately
has turned out to be either a loud-mouthed agitator or a silent mixer of
trouble medicine."
"Let the causes go for the present," said Griswold shortly. "We're
talking about the men, now. The ungrateful beggars are merely proving
that it isn't in human nature to meet justice and fairness and generous
liberality half-way. If they want a fight, give it to them. Hit first
and hit hard; that's the way to do. Shut up the plant and make it a
lock-out."
"I was afraid you might say something like that in the first heat of
it," said the young ironmaster. "It's a stout fighting word, and I
guess, under the skin, you're a stout fighting man, Kenneth--which I'm
not. Where are your convictions about the man-to-man obligations? We've
got to take them into the account, haven't we?"
"Damn the convictions!" snapped Griswold viciously. "If I've been giving
you the impression that I'm an impracticable theorist, forget it. These
fellows want a fight: I say give them a fight--all they want of it and a
little more for good measure."
Raymer did not reply at once. This latest Griswold was puzzling him, and
with the puzzlement there went sorrowful regret; the regret that has
been the recanter's portion in all the ages. When he spoke it was out of
the heart of common sense and sanity.
"I know how you feel about it; I had a little attack of the same sort
this afternoon when the grievance committee dropped down on me. But
facts are pretty stubborn things, and they've got us foul. We have
twenty thousand dollars' worth of work for the Pineboro road on the shop
tracks, and the trouble-makers have picked their opportunity. If we
can't turn out this work, we'll lose the Pineboro's business, which, as
I have told you, is a pretty big slice of our business. Under such
conditions I don't dare to pull down a fight which may not only shut us
up for an indefinite time, but might even go far enough to smash us."
Griswold took his turn of silence, rocking gently in the tilting chair.
When the delayed rejoinder came, the harshness had gone out of his
voice, but there was a cynical hardness to take its place.
"It's your affair; not mine," he said. "If you've made up your mind not
to fight, of course, that settles it. Now we can come down to the
causes. You've been stabbed in the back. Do you know who's doing it?"
"The Federated Iron Workers, I suppose."
"Not in a thousand years! They are only the means to an end." The
tilting chair squeaked again, and he went on: "If I'm going to show you
how you can dodge this fight, I'll have to knock down a door or two
first. If I blunder in where I'm not wanted, you can kick me out. There
is one way in which you can cure all this trouble-sickness without
resorting to surgery and blood-letting."
"Name it," said Raymer eagerly.
"I will; but first I'll have to break over into the personalities. Have
you made up your mind that you are going to marry Margery Grierson?"
Raymer laughed silently, leaning his head back on the cushion of the
lazy-chair until his cigar stood upright.
"That's a nice way to biff a man in the dark!" he chuckled. "But if
you're in earnest I'll tell you the straightforward truth: I don't
know."
"Why don't you know?" If there were a scowl to go with the query, Raymer
could not see it.
"I'll be frank with you again, Kenneth. What little sentiment there is
in me leans pretty heavily that way. You have been with her a good bit
and you know her--know how she appeals to any man with a drop of red
blood in him. But I'm twenty-eight years old and well past the time
when the young man's fancy lightly turns--and all that. I can't ignore
the--the--well, the proprieties, you might say, though that isn't
exactly the word."
"You mean that Margery Grierson doesn't measure up to the requirements
of the Wahaskan Four Hundred?" There was satirical scorn in the
observation, but Raymer did not perceive it.
"Oh, I don't know as you would put it quite that baldly," he protested.
"But you see, when it comes to marrying and settling down and raising a
family, you have to look at all sides of the thing. The father, as we
all know, is a cold-blooded old werewolf; the mother nobody knows
anything about save that--happily, in all probability--she isn't living.
And there you are. Yet I won't deny that there are times when I'm
tempted to shut my eyes and take the high dive, anyway--at the risk of
splashing a lot of good people who would doubtless be properly
scandalized."
By this time Griswold was gripping the arms of his chair savagely and
otherwise trying to hold himself down; but this, too, Raymer could not
know.
"You have reason to believe that it rests wholly with you, I suppose?"
came from the tilting chair after a little pause. "Miss Grierson is only
waiting for you to speak?"
"That's a horrible question to ask a man, Kenneth--even in the dark. If
I say yes to it, it can't sound any other way than boastful and--and
caddish. Yet I honestly believe that-- Oh, hang it all! can't you see
how impossible you're making it, old man?"
"Not impossible; only a trifle difficult," was the qualifying rejoinder.
"It is easier from this on. That is the peaceful way out of the shop
trouble for you, Raymer. When you can go to Jasper Grierson and tell him
you are going to marry his daughter, the trouble will be as good as
cured."
For a little time Raymer was speechless. Then he burst out.
"Well, I'll be-- Jove, Griswold, you don't lack much of being as
cold-blooded as the old buccaneer himself! What makes you think he is
stirring up the trouble?"
"It doesn't require any special thought. He wanted to freeze you out a
little while back, and you balked him. Now he has come back at you
another way."
"I wonder!" said the iron-founder musingly; and then: "I more than half
believe you are right. But if you are, do you realize what you are
proposing?"
"I am not proposing anything; I am merely suggesting. But you needn't
put in the factor of doubt. This labor trouble that is threatening to
smash you is Jasper Grierson's reply to the move you made when you let
me in and choked him off. He is reaching for you."
Again Raymer held his peace and the atmosphere of the room grew pungent
with tobacco smoke.
"I'm feeling a good bit like a yellow dog, Kenneth," he said, at length.
"After what I've admitted and what you've said, I'm left in the
position of the poor devil who would be damned if he did and be damned
if he didn't. You have succeeded in fixing it so that I _can't_ ask
Margery Grierson to be my wife, however much I'd like to."
"That isn't the point," insisted Griswold half-savagely. "How you may
feel about it, or what your people may say, is purely secondary. The
thing to be considered is, what will happen to Miss Grierson?"
"Oh, the devil! if you put it that way----"
"I am putting it precisely that way."
"Why, see here, old man; if you were Madge's brother, you couldn't be
putting the screws on any harder! What's got into you to-night?"
Griswold was inexorable.
"Miss Grierson hasn't any brother, and she might as well not have any
father--better, perhaps. As God hears me, Raymer, I'm going to see to it
that she gets a square deal."
"In other words, if she has made up her clever little mind that she
wants to be Mrs. Ed. Raymer----"
"That is it, exactly."
"By George! I believe you are in love with her, yourself!"
"I am," was the cool reply.
"Well, of all the-- Say, Griswold, you're a three-cornered puzzle to me
yet. I don't know what the other three-fourths of the town is saying,
but my fourth of it has it put up that you've everlastingly cooked my
goose at Doctor Bertie's; that you and Charlotte are just about as good
as engaged. Perhaps you'll tell me that it isn't true."
"It isn't--yet."
"But it may be, later on? Now you are getting over into my little
garden-patch, Kenneth. If you think I'm going to stand still and see you
put a wedding ring on Charlotte Farnham's finger when I know you'd like
to be putting it on Madge Grierson's----"
Griswold's low laugh came as an easing of stresses.
"You can't very well marry both of them, yourself, you know," he
suggested mildly. And then: "If you were not so badly torn up over this
shop trouble, you'd see that I'm trying to give you the entire field. I
shall probably leave town to-morrow, and I merely wanted to do you, or
Miss Grierson, or both of you, a small kindness by way of leave-taking."
"Leave town?" echoed the iron-founder. "Where are you going?"
"I don't know yet."
"But you are coming back?"
"No."
Once more Raymer puffed at the shortened cigar until the end of it
glowed like a small distress signal in the dark.
"Tell me," he broke out finally: "has Margery Grierson turned you down?"
"No."
"Then Charlotte has?"
"No."
"Confound it all! can't you say anything but 'No'? Do you mean to tell
me that you are going away, leaving me bucked and gagged by this labor
outfit to live or die as I may? Great Scott, man! if my money's gone,
yours goes with it!"