THE DRAWING
As has been previously said, one must go fast and far to come to a place
where there is neither a Hotel Metropole nor a newspaper. Doubtless
there are communities of civilized men on the North American continent
where there is neither, but Comanche was not one of them.
In Comanche the paper was a daily. Its editor was a single-barreled
grafter who wore a green mohair coat and dyed whiskers. His office and
establishment occupied an entire twelve-by-sixteen tent; the name of the
paper was _The Chieftain_.
_The Chieftain_ had been one of the first enterprises of Comanche. It
got there ahead of the first train, arriving in a wagon, fully equipped.
The editor had an old zinc cut of a two-storied brick business house on
a corner, which he had run with a grocery-store advertisement when he
was getting out a paper in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This he now made use of with
impressive effect and inspiring display of his cheerful confidence in
his own future and that of the town where, like a blowing seed of
cottonwood, he had found lodgment.
He ran this cut in every issue at the top of what would have been his
editorial column if there had been time for him to write one, with these
words:
FUTURE HOME OF _THE CHIEFTAIN_ ON THE
CORNER THIS PAPER NOW OCCUPIES,
AS DESIGNED BY THE EDITOR AND
OWNER, J. WALTER MONG
From the start that Editor Mong was making in Comanche his dream did not
appear at all unreasonable. Everybody in the place advertised, owing to
some subtle influence of which Mr. Mong was master, and which is known
to editors of his brand wherever they are to be found. If a business man
had the shield of respectability to present to all questioners, he
advertised out of pride and civic spirit; if he had a past, J. Walter
Mong had a nose, sharpened by long training in picking up such scents;
and so he advertised out of expediency.
That being the way matters stood, _The Chieftain_ carried very little
but advertisements. They paid better than news, and news could wait its
turn, said the editor, until he settled down steadily into a weekly and
had room for it.
But Mr. Mong laid himself out to give the returns from the drawing for
homesteads, it being one of those rare chances in which an editor could
combine business and news without putting on an extra form. The
headquarters of the United States land-office for that territory being
at Meander, the drawing was to take place there. Meander was sixty miles
farther along, connected with the railroad and Comanche by stage and
telephone. So, every hour of the eventful day, Editor Mong was going to
issue an extra on telephonic information from the seat of the drawing.
On the day of the drawing, which came as clear and bright as the painted
dreams of those who trooped Comanche's streets, there remained in the
town, after the flitting entrants had come and gone, fully thirty
thousand expectant people. They were those in whom the hope of low
numbers was strong. For one drawing a low number must make his selection
of land and file on it at Meander within a few days.
In the case of the first number, the lucky drawer would have but three
days to make his selection and file on it. If he lapsed, then Number Two
became Number One, and all down the line the numbers advanced one.
So, in case that the winner of Number One had registered and gone home
to the far East or the middle states, he couldn't get back in time to
save his valuable chance. That gave big hope to those who expected
nothing better than seven or nine or something under twenty. Three or
four lapses ahead of them would move them along, each peg adding
thousands to their winnings, each day running out for them in golden
sands.
By dawn the streets were filled by early skirmishers for breakfast, and
sunrise met thousands more who, luggage in hand, talked and gesticulated
and blocked the dusty passages between the unstable walls of that city
of chance, which soon would come down and disappear like smoke from a
wayside fire. The thousands with their bags in hand would not sleep
another night beneath its wind-restless roofs. All those who expected to
draw Claim Number One were ready to take the stage or hire a special
conveyance to Meander, or, failing of their expectations in the lottery,
to board the special trains which the railroad had made ready, and leave
for home.
By nine o'clock it seemed to the waiting throngs that several ordinary
days had passed since they left their sagging canvas cots at daybreak to
stand attendant upon the whim of chance. They gathered in the blazing
sun in front of the office of the paper, looking in at Editor Mong, who
seemed more like a quack doctor that morning than ever before, with his
wrinkled coat-sleeves pushed above his elbows and his cuffs tucked back
over them, his black-dyed whiskers gleaming in shades of green when the
sun hit them, like the plumage of a crow.
For all the news that came to Comanche over the telephone-wire that day
must come through the office of _The Chieftain_. There was but one
telephone in the town; that was in the office of the stage-line, and by
arrangement with its owners, the editor had bottled up the slightest
chance of a leak.
There would be no bulletins, the editor announced. Anyone desiring news
of the drawing must pay twenty-five cents for a copy of the paper
containing it. It was the editor's one great chance for graft, and he
meant to work it until it was winded.
The lottery was to open in Meander at ten o'clock; but long before that
hour the quivering excitement which shook the fabric of Comanche had
reached the tent where Mrs. Reed mothered it over the company of
adventurers. The lumberman and insurance agent were away early; Sergeant
Schaefer and Milo Strong followed them to the newspaper office very
shortly; and the others sat out in front, watching the long shadows
contract toward the peg that June had driven in the ground the day
before at the line of ten o'clock.
"Well, this is the day," said William Bentley. "What will you take for
your chance, Doctor?"
"Well, it wouldn't take very much to get it this morning," Dr. Slavens
replied, peering thoughtfully at the ground, "for it's one of those
things that grow smaller and smaller the nearer you approach."
"I'd say twenty-five hundred for mine," offered Horace.
"Great lands!" exclaimed Mrs. Reed, blinking, as she looked out across
the open toward the river. "If anybody will give me three dollars for my
chance he can take it, and welcome."
"Then you'd feel cheap if you won," June put in. "It's worth more than
that even up in the thousands; isn't it, Mr. Walker?"
Walker was warm in his declaration that it would be a mighty small and
poor piece of Wyoming that wouldn't be worth more than that.
"We haven't heard from you, Miss Horton," said William Bentley.
"I'm afraid nothing would tempt me to part with my chance," Agnes
replied. "I hold it just the reverse of Dr. Slavens. The longer I look
at it the bigger it gets."
The doctor was the only one present who understood fully how much she
had built around that chance. Their eyes met as he looked across at her;
he remembered what she had said of planting trees, and having roses
beside her door.
"It's almost there!" cried June, looking at her stake.
"Twenty minutes yet," announced Horace, who sat with his watch in his
palm.
They were all bonneted and booted, ready for an expedition, although
they had none in sight. It was as if they expected Number One to come
flying through the town, to be caught and held by the swiftest of foot,
the one alert and ready to spring up and dash after it.
"Shall we go over to the newspaper office?" asked the doctor, looking
across again and catching Agnes' eyes.
June jumped up and accepted the proposal for all.
"Oh, let's do!" she exclaimed. "Let's be there to get the very first
word!"
On the part of the ladies there was a dash into the tent to adjust their
headgear before glasses and to renew the powder on their noses. While
they were gone Horace Bentley, the lawyer, stood with his watch exposed
to his impatient eye.
"In five minutes," he announced as the ladies rejoined them, "they will
draw the first name from the wheel at Meander. I hope that it may be the
name of someone in this party."
"I hope it will be yours," said Dr. Slavens' eyes as he looked earnestly
at Agnes; and: "Number Two would do very well for me in case your name
came first," her eyes seemed to answer him.
But there was none by who knew what had passed between them of their
hopes, so none could read the messages, even if there had been any so
curious as to try.
Mrs. Mann was humming a little song as they started away toward the
newspaper office, for she was tiring of Wyoming, where she had not seen
a single cowboy yet; and the prospect of returning to the miller was
growing dear to her heart. There was a quiet over Comanche that morning
which seemed different from the usual comparative peace of that portion
of the day--a strained and fevered quiet, as of hushed winds before a
gale. It took hold of even June as the party passed through the main
street, joining the stream of traffic which pressed in one direction
only.
They could not arrive within a square of the newspaper-tent, for the
crowd around it was packed and dense; so they stopped where there was
breathing-space among groups of men who stood with their gripsacks
between their feet, waiting for the first word.
At five minutes past ten the editor of _The Chieftain_ handed his
printer a slip of paper, and the name of the winner of Claim Number One
was put in type. The news was carried by one who pushed through the
throng, his hat on the back of his head, sweat drenching his face. The
man was in a buck-ague over the prospect of that name being his own, it
seemed, and thought only of drawing away from the sudden glare of
fortune until he could collect his wits.
Some people are that way--the timid ones of the earth. They go through
life leaving a string of baited traps behind them, lacking courage to go
back and see what they have caught.
More than two hundred names were in the first extra run off _The
Chieftain's_ press at half-past ten. The name of the winner of Number
One was Axel Peterson; his home in Meander, right where he could step
across the street and file without losing a minute.
Milo Strong, the schoolmaster from Iowa, drew Number Thirty-Seven. None
of the others in the colony at the Hotel Metropole figured in the first
returns.
They went back as silently as they had come, the doctor carrying the
list in his hand. Before the tent stood the lumberman and the insurance
agent, their bags in their hands.
"We've got just six minutes to catch the first train out," said the
insurance agent, his big smile just as wide as ever. "Good luck to you
all, and hope we meet again."
The lumberman waved his farewell as he ran. For them the gamble was off.
They had staked on coming in below one hundred, and they had lost. There
was nothing more to hang around Comanche for, and it is supposed that
they caught the train, for they were seen there no more.
There were several hundred others in that quick-coming and quick-going
population whose hopes were dispersed by the printed list. And so the
town suffered a heavy drain with the departure of the first train for
the East. The railroad company, foreseeing the desire to be gone, had
arranged a long string of coaches, with two engines hitched up and
panting to set out. The train pulled away with every inch of space
occupied.
All day the enterprising editor printed and sold extras. His press, run
by an impertinent little gasoline engine, could turn out eighteen
hundred of those single-sheet dodgers in an hour, but it couldn't turn
them out fast enough. Every time Editor Mong looked out of his tent and
saw two men reading one paper he cursed his limited vision which had
stood in the way of putting sixty dollars more into a press of twice
that capacity. As it was, the day's work brought him nearly three
thousand dollars, money on the spot; no back subscriptions to worry
over, no cabbage or cordwood in exchange.
When the drawing closed for the day and the last extra was off, more
than three thousand numbers had been taken from the wheel at Meander.
The only one among the Metropole colony to draw after the first
published list was Agnes Horton. Claim Number Nine Hundred and Five fell
to her lot.
Claims that high were useless, and everybody knew it; so interest
dropped away, the little gasoline engine popped its last impertinent pop
and subsided, and the crowds drifted off to get ready to depart as fast
as trains could be made up to haul them. Sergeant Schaefer, having
failed of his expectations, felt a revival of interest in the military
life, and announced that he would leave on the first train out next
morning.
That night the price of cots suffered a dispiriting drop. Fifty cents
would hire the most exclusive bed in the phantom city of Comanche.
As for Dr. Slavens, the day's events had left him with a dazed feeling
of insecurity. His air was cleared of hope; he could not touch a stable
bit of footing as far around him as he could reach. He had counted a
good deal on drawing something along in the early hundreds; and as the
day wore along to his disappointment in that hope he thought that he
might come tagging in at the end, in the mean way that his cross-grained
luck had of humiliating him and of forcing the fact that he was more or
less a failure before his eyes.
No matter what he drew under three thousand, he said, he'd take it and
be thankful for it. If he could locate on a trickle of water somewhere
and start out with a dozen ewes and a ram, he'd bury himself away in the
desert and pull the edges of it up around him to keep out the
disappointments of the world. A man might come out of it in a few years
with enough money--that impenetrable armor which gives security even to
fools--to buy a high place for himself, if he couldn't win it otherwise.
Men had done well on small beginnings with sheep; that country was full
of them; and it was a poor one, indeed, that wasn't able to buy up any
ten doctors he could name.
So Dr. Slavens ran on, following the lead of a fresh dream, which had
its foundation on the sands of despair. When the drawing had passed the
high numbers which he had set as his possible lowest, he felt like
sneaking away, whipped, to hide his discouragement where there was no
one to see. His confounded luck wouldn't even grant him the opportunity
of burying himself out there in that gray sea of blowing dust!
There was no use in trying to disguise the fact any longer; he was a
fizzle. Some men were designed from the beginning for failures, and he
was one of the plainest patterns that ever was made. There was a place
for Axel Peterson, the alien, but there was no place for him.
In spite of his age and experience, he did not understand that the world
values men according to the resistance they interpose against it;
according to the stamping down of feet and the presenting of shoulders
and the squaring arms to take its blows. Cowards make a front before it
and get on with amazing success; droves of poltroons bluster and storm,
with empty shells of hearts inside their ribs, and kick up a fine dust
in the arena, under the cloud of which they snatch down many of the
laurels which have been hung up for worthier men. Success lies
principally in understanding that the whole game is a bluff on the
world's part, and that the biggest bluffer in the ring takes down the
purse.
But the timid hearts of the earth never learn this; the sentimentalists
and the poets do not understand it. You can't go along sweeping a clear
path for your feet with a bunch of flowers. What you need is a good,
sound club. When a hairy shin impedes, whack it, or make a feint and a
bluff. You'll be surprised how easily the terrifying hulks of adversity
are charmed out of the highway ahead of you by a little impertinence, a
little ginger, and a little gall.
Many a man remains a coward all his life because somebody cowed him when
he was a boy. Dr. Slavens had put his hands down, and had stood with his
shoulders hunched, taking the world's thumps without striking back, for
so many years in his melancholy life that his natural resistance had
shrunk. On that day he was not as nature had intended him, but as
circumstances had made him.
It had become the friendly fashion in camp for the doctor and Agnes to
take a walk after supper. June's mother had frowned on the boldness of
it, whispering to June's aunt. But the miller's wife, more liberal and
romantic, wouldn't hear of whisperings. She said their conduct was as
irreproachable in that country as eating peas with a spoon.
"I wish I was in her place!" she sighed.
"_Dorothy Ann!_" gasped Mrs. Reed. "Remember your husband, Dorothy
Ann!"
"I do," sighed the miller's wife.
"Well, if you _were_ in her place you'd ask somebody to accompany you on
your moonlight strolls, I hope. I _hope_ that's what you'd do, Dorothy
Ann."
"No," answered the miller's wife thoughtfully. "I'd propose. She'll lose
him if she doesn't."
On the evening of that day of blasted hopes the two of them walked away
in the gloaming toward the river, with few words between them until they
left the lights of Comanche behind.
"Mr. Strong is considerably elated over his luck," said Agnes at last,
after many sidling glances at his gloomy profile.
"That's the way it goes," Dr. Slavens sighed. "I don't believe that
chance is blind; I think it's just perverse. I should say, not counting
myself, that Strong is the least deserving of any man in the crowd of
us. Look at old Horace Bentley, the lawyer. He doesn't say anything, but
you can see that his heart is aching with disappointment."
"I have noticed it," she agreed. "He hasn't said ten words since the
last extra."
"When a man like that dreams, he dreams hard--and deep," the doctor
continued. "But how about yourself?"
She laughed, and placed a restraining hand upon his arm.
"You're going too fast," she panted. "I'll be winded before we get to
the river."
"I guess I was trying to overtake my hopes," said he. "I'm sorry; we'll
go slower--in all things--the rest of the way."
She looked at him quickly, a little curiously, but there was no
explanation in his eyes, fixed on the graying landscape beyond the
river.
"It looks like ashes," said he softly, with a motion of the hand toward
the naked hills. "There is no life in it; there is nothing of the dead.
It is a cenotaph of dreams. But how about your claim?"
"It's a little farther up than I had expected," she admitted, but with a
cheerful show of courage which she did not altogether feel.
"Yes; it puts you out of the chance of drawing any agricultural land,
throws you into the grazing and mineral," said he.
"Unless there are a great many lapses," she suggested.
"There will be hundreds, in my opinion," he declared. "But in case there
are not enough to bring you down to the claim worth having--one upon
which you could plant trees and roses and such things?"
"I'll stick to it anyhow," said she determinedly.
"So this is going to be home?" he asked.
"Home," she answered with a caressing touch upon the word. "I came here
to make it; I sha'n't go away without it. I don't know just how long it
will take me, nor how hard it will be, but I'm going to collect interest
on my hopes from this country before I turn my back."
"You seem to believe in it," said he.
"Perhaps I believe more in myself," she answered thoughtfully. "Have you
determined what you are going to do?"
He laughed--a short, harsh expression of ironical bitterness.
"I've gone through the mill today of heat and cold," said he. "First, I
was going to sell my relinquishment for ten thousand dollars as soon as
the law would allow, but by noon I had come down to five hundred. After
that I took up the notion of sheep stronger than Milo, from Iowa, ever
thought of it. It took just one more extra to put that fire out, and now
the ashes of it aren't even warm. Just what my next phantasy will be I
can't say."
"But you're going to stay here, aren't you?"
"I've thought of that, too. I've thought of making another try at it in
a professional way. But this is a big, empty country. Few people live in
it and fewer die. I don't know."
"Well, you're a doctor, not an undertaker, anyhow," she reminded him.
"Yes; I missed my calling," he laughed, with the bitterness of defeat.
"No," she corrected; "I didn't mean that. But perhaps at something else
you might get on faster here--business of some kind, I mean."
"If I had the chance!" he exclaimed wearily, flinging his hat to the
ground as he sat beside her on a boulder at the river's edge. "I've
never had a square and open chance at anything yet."
"I don't know, of course," said she. "But the trouble with most of us,
it seems to me, is that we haven't the quickness or the courage to take
hold of the chance when it comes. All of us let so many good ones get
away."
Dusk had deepened. The star-glow was upon the river, placid there in its
serene approach to the rough passage beyond. He sat there, the wind
lifting the hair upon his forehead, pondering what she had said.
Was it possible that a man could walk blindly by his chances for
thirty-five years, only to be grasping, empty-palmed, after them when
they had whisked away? For what else did his complainings signify? He
had lacked the courage or the quickness, or some essential, as she had
said, to lay hold of them before they fled away beyond his reach
forever.
There was a chance beside him going to waste tonight--a golden, great
chance. Not for lack of courage would he let it pass, he reflected; but
let it pass he must. He wanted to tell her that he would be a different
man if he could remain near her all the rest of his years; he longed to
say that he desired dearly to help her smooth the rough land and plant
the trees and draw the water in that place which she dreamed of and
called home.
But there was nothing in his past to justify her confidence in his
future. Women worth having did not marry forlorn hopes in the
expectation of making a profit out of them by and by. He had no hearth
to offer her; he had no thatch; he had not a rood of land to lead a
mountain stream across and set with the emerald and royal purple of
alfalfa; not a foot of greensward beside the river, where a yeaning ewe
might lie and ease the burden of her pains. He had nothing to offer,
nothing to give. If he asked, it must be to receive all and return
nothing, except whatever of constancy time might prove out of his
heart.
If he had even a plan to lay down before her and ask her to share, it
would be something, he thought; or a brave resolve, like her own. But
there was emptiness all around him; his feet could not find a square
yard of solid earth to shape his future upon. It was not that he
believed that she cared for money or the material rewards of success,
for she had spoken bitterly of that. The ghosts of money's victims were
behind her; she had said as much the first time they had talked of their
hopes in that new land.
There must be something in that place for him, as she had said; there
must be an unimproved opportunity which Fate had fashioned for his hand.
Hope lifted its resilient head again. Before the morning he must have a
plan, and when he had the plan he would speak.
"We'll have to be breaking up camp in a day or two more," Agnes said,
disturbing the long silence which had settled between them.
"I suppose so," he responded; "but I don't know what the plans of the
others are."
"Mr. Strong is going to Meander in the morning," she told him; "and
Horace Bentley is going with him, poor fellow, to look around, he says.
William Bentley told me this evening that he would leave for home in a
day or two, and Mrs. Reed and her charges are waiting to hear from a
friend of June's who was in school with her--I think she is the
Governor's daughter, or maybe he's an ex-governor--about a long-standing
invitation to visit her in her summer home, which is near here, as they
compute distances in Wyoming."
"And Schaefer is leaving in the morning," reflected the doctor. "That
leaves but you and me unaccounted for. Are you going on to Meander
soon?"
"Yes; I want to be there to file when my time comes."
"I've thought of going over there to feel things out, too," Dr. Slavens
went on. "This place will shrink in a few days like a piece of wet
leather in the sun. They'll have nothing left of it but the stores, and
no business to sustain them until the country around here is settled.
That may be a long time yet. Still, there may be something around here
for me. I'm going to look into the possibilities tomorrow. And we'll
have at least another talk before we part?"
"Many more, I hope," she said.
Her answer presented an alluring lead for him to say more, but before he
could speak, even if minded to do it, she went on:
"This has been a pleasant experience, this camping in the clean, unused
country, and it would be a sort of Persian poet existence if we could go
on with it always; but of course we can't."
"It isn't all summer and fair skies here," he reminded her, "any more
than it is in--well, Persia. Twenty below in winter sometimes, Smith
said. Do you remember?"
"Yes," she sighed. "But it seems impossible."
"You wouldn't believe this little river could turn into a wild and
savage torrent, either, a few hundred yards along, if you had nothing to
judge it by but this quiet stretch," he returned. "But listen to it down
there, crashing against the rocks!"
"There's no news of that rash man who went into the cañon for the
newspaper?" Agnes asked.
"He must have lodged in there somewhere; they haven't picked him up on
the other side," he said, a thoughtful abstraction over him.
"I hope you've given up the thought of trying to explore it?"
"I haven't thought much about it lately," he replied; "but I'm of the
same opinion. I believe the difficulties of the cañon are greatly
exaggerated. In fact, as I told you before, the reward posted by that
newspaper looks to me like easy money."
"It wouldn't pay you if the reward were ten times as large," she
declared with a little argumentative heat.
"Perhaps not," said he, as if he had but a passing and shallow interest
in the subject.
Sitting there bareheaded to the wind, which was dropping down coldly
from the far mountains, he seemed to be in a brooding humor.
"The moon is late tonight," he noted. "Shall we wait till it rises?"
"Yes," she answered, feeling the great gentleness that there was about
him when he was in a serious way.
Why he had not been successful in the profession for which nature
plainly had designed him she could not understand; for he was a man to
inspire confidence when he was at his best, and unvexed by the memory of
the bitter waters which had passed his lips. She felt that there would
be immeasurable solace in his hand for one who suffered; she knew that
he would put down all that he had in life for a friend.
Leaning her chin upon her palm, she looked at him in the last light of
the west, which came down to them dimly, as if falling through dun
water, from some high-floating clouds. As if following in her thought
something that had gone before, she said:
"No; perhaps you should not stay in this big, empty country when there
are crowded places in the world that are full of pain, and little
children in them dying for the want of such men as you."
He started and turned toward her, putting out his hand as if to place it
upon her head.
"How did you know that it's the children that give me the strongest call
back to the struggle?" he asked.
"It's in your eyes," said she. And beneath her breath she added: "In
your heart."
"About all the success that I ever won I sacrificed for a child," he
said, with reminiscent sadness.
"Will you tell me about it?"
"It was a charity case at that," he explained, "a little girl who had
been burned in a fire which took all the rest of the family. She needed
twenty-two square inches of skin on her breast. One gave all that he
could very well part with----"
"That was yourself," she nodded, drawing a little nearer to him quite
unconsciously.
"But that was not half enough," he continued as if unaware of the
interruption. "I had to get it into the papers and ask for volunteers,
for you know that an average of only one in three pieces of cuticle
adheres when set into a wound, especially a burn. The papers made a good
deal of it, and I couldn't keep my name out, of course. Well, enough
school-children came forward to patch up three or four girls, and
together we saved her.
"No matter. The medical association of that city jumped me very promptly.
The old chaps said that I had handled the case unprofessionally and had
used it merely for an advertisement. They charged unprofessional
conduct against me; they tried me in their high court and found me
guilty. They dug the ground from under my feet and branded me as a
quack. They broke me, they tried to have my license to practice revoked.
But they failed in that. That was three years ago. I hung on, but I
starved. So when I speak in what may seem a bitter way of the narrow
traditions of my profession, you know my reason is fairly well grounded."
"But you saved the little girl!"
It was too dark for him to see her eyes. The tears that lay in them
could not drop their balm upon his heart.
"She's as good as new," said he cheerfully, fingering the inner pocket
of his coat. "She writes to me right along. Here's a picture-card that
followed me here, mailed from the home that the man who gave his tough
old hide to mend her found for her when she was well. She lives in
Oklahoma now, and her sweet fortitude under her misfortune has been a
remembrance to sustain me over many a hungry day."
"But you saved the little girl!" Agnes repeated with unaccountable
insistence, as if trying to beat down the injustice of his heavy penance
with that argument.
And then he saw her bow her head upon her folded arms like a little
child, and weep in great sobs which came rackingly as if torn from the
core of her heart.
Dr. Slavens picked up his hat, put it on, got to his feet, and took a
stride away from her as if he could not bear the sight of her poignant
sympathy. Then he turned, came back, and stooped above her, laying his
hand upon her hair.
"Don't do that!" he pleaded. "All that's gone, all that I've missed, is
not worth a single tear. You must not make my troubles your own, for at
the worst there's not enough for two."
She reached out her tear-wet hand and clung to his, wordless for a
little while. As it lay softly within his palm he stroked it soothingly
and folded it between his hands as if to yield it freedom nevermore.
Soon her gust of sorrow passed. She stood beside him, breathing brokenly
in the ebb of that overmastering tide. In the opening of the broad
valley the moon stood redly. The wind trailed slowly from the hills to
meet it, as if to warm itself at its beacon-fire.
"You saved the little girl!" said she again, laying her warm hand for a
moment against his cheek.
In that moment it was well for Dr. Warren Slavens that the lesson of his
hard years was deep within his heart; that the continence and abnegation
of his past had ripened his restraint until, no matter how his lips
might yearn to the sweets which were not his own, they would not taste.
He took hold of himself with a rough hand, for the moonlight was upon
her trembling lips; it stood imprisoned in the undried tears which lay
upon her cheeks.
The invitation was there, and the time, such as the lines of a man's
life are plotted to lead up to from the beginning. But there was lacking
too much on his part for an honest man to stoop and gather what
presented. He might have folded his arms about her and drawn her to his
breast, as the yearning of his soul desired; he might have kissed her
lips and dispelled the moonlight from her trembling tears--and spoiled
it all for both.
For that would have been a trespass without mitigation, a sacrilege
beyond excuse. When a man took a woman like that in his arms and kissed
her, according to his old-fashioned belief, he took from every other man
the right to do so, ever. In such case he must have a refuge to offer
her from the world's encroachments, and a security to requite her in all
that she yielded for his sake.
Such he had not. There was no hearthstone, there was no roof-tree, there
was no corner of refuge in all the vast, gray world. He had no right to
take where he could not give, although it wrenched his heart to give it
up.
He took the soft, warm hand which had bestowed its benediction on his
cheek, and held it in childish attitude, swinging at his side. No word
was said as they faced back to the unstable city, their shadows trailing
them, long and grotesque, like the sins of men which come after them,
and gambol and grimace for all the world to see but those who believe
them hidden.