advanced upon the first man whom he saw. On both shoulders of this one
he brought down his hands with the grasp of a Titan. Also he shook him
slightly:
“You tell me how to get to where I’m goin’ or I’ll lamm the lights out
of you!” he roared.
The man—a young timekeeper whose work took him out earlier, so to
speak, than his station—regarded the Inger in alarm.
“Lord Heavens,” the young timekeeper said, “how do I know where you’re
goin’?”
Still grasping him with one hand, the Inger opened the other and shook
Lory’s paper in the man’s face.
“That’s where,” he said. “Now do you know?”
The man looked right and left and took the paper, on which the Inger’s
fingers did not loosen.
“Well, get on an Indiana Avenue car and transfer,” he said. “Anybody
could tell you that.”
“Where?” yelled the Inger. “Where is that car?”
A crowd was gathering, and the clerk inclined to jest by way of
discounting that disconcerting clutch on his shoulder.
“Depends on which one you catch—” he was beginning, but the Inger,
with his one hand, shook him deliberately and mightily:
“Where?” he said. “And none of your lip about north or south! Point
your finger. _Where?_”
It was at that minute that the young timekeeper caught sight of
Lory. She had pressed forward, and she stood with the Inger’s pack
on the ground at her feet, and her own on her shoulder. She was, of
course, still hatless, but she had knotted upon her head a scarlet
handkerchief; and in that dull air, her hair and face, under their cap
of color, bloomed exquisitely. The man, having stared at her for a
moment, and at that strange luggage of theirs, took out his watch:
“Come along,” he said curtly. “I’ll put you on your car.”
The Inger searched his face. “No tricks?” he demanded. Then, swiftly,
he released his hold. “Obliged to ye,” he said, and picked up his pack
and followed.
They slipped on the black stones, breasted the mass waiting to board
the same car, and somehow found a foothold. Already there was no seat.
The patient crowd herded in the aisles. Elated with the success of
his method, the Inger looked round at the seated men, screened by
newspapers, then reached out to the nearest one, slipped his hand in
his collar, and jerked him to his feet.
The man whirled on him in amazement and then in a wrath which reddened
his face to fever. But for a breath he hesitated before the sheer bulk
of the Inger.
“You’ll be locked up by dark,” he said only, “_I_ don’t need to get
you.”
He treated himself to a deliberate, luxurious look at Lory, leaned
negligently against the shoulder of the man seated nearest, and went
back to his newspaper.
It seemed incredible that one should ride for an hour on a street car
to get anywhere. At the end of ten minutes the Inger had gone back to
the platform and:
“Say,” he said. “We wasn’t goin’ in the country, you know.”
The conductor went on counting transfers.
“Say—” the Inger went on, slightly louder, and the man glanced up
imperturbably.
“I says I’d leave you off, didn’t I?” he demanded. “It’s ten mile yet.”
Ten miles! The Inger stood by Lory and looked at the streets. Amazing
piles of dirty masonry, highways of dirty stone, processions of carts,
armies of people.
“He lied,” he thought. “They couldn’t keep it up for ten miles.”
When at last the two were set down, it was on one of those vast,
treeless stretches outside Chicago, where completed sidewalks cut the
uncompleted lengths of sand and coarse grass, and where an occasional
house stands out like a fungus—as quickly evolved as a fungus, too,
and almost as parti-colored. But these open spaces the two hailed in
thanksgiving.
The Inger dropped his pack and stretched mightily.
“What’d they want to go and muss up the earth for?” he said. “It’s good
enough for me, naked.”
The girl footed beside him, looking everywhere in wonder. Her scarlet
handkerchief cap had slipped sidewise on her hair which was loosened
and fallen on her neck. Her dress, of some rough brown, was scant and
short, and it was tight on her full arms and bosom, beneath a little
blue knit shawl that had been her mother’s. But she was as lovely here
as ever she had been in the desert and on Whiteface. And as soon as
they were alone, the Inger always fell silent, with the perpetual sense
of trying to understand.
The days on the train had not left them as their meeting had found
them. There had been hours, side by side, drawing over the burning
yellow and rose of their desert; and over the flat emptiness and
fulness of Kansas; nights on the rear platform, close to the rail, so
that the overhead lights should not extinguish the stars; hours when
the train waited for a bridge to be mended, and they had walked on
the prairie, and secretly had been homesick for the friendly huddling
shapes against the horizons. To the Inger, with the Flag-pole for his
background, the luxury of a Pullman had occurred no more than to Lory.
It was a way for some folk to ride, as diamonds were for certain folk
to buy. But as for them, they had sat in the day-coach, and at night
had laid their heads on their packs, as simply as they had eaten the
remains of their lunch, and of food snatched at station counters.
And all the way, he had been trying to understand. She was very gentle
with him—sometimes he felt as if she were almost pitying. Always she
seemed the elder. How was it possible, he wondered, that she could be
to him like this?
For in these days he had come to understand her, with a man’s curiously
clear understanding of a “good” woman. He knew the crystal candor of
her, the wholesomeness, the humanness, and, for all her merriment
and her charm and her comradeship, the exquisite aloofness of her, a
quality as strange in Jem Moor’s daughter as it was unusual in any
womanhood of Inch. But, these things being so, how was it possible that
she could tolerate him? She could not have forgiven him—that was
unthinkable, and, he dimly felt, undesirable. How then could she be to
him so gentle, so genuinely human?
Of exactly what had occurred that night on Whiteface, he could not be
sure. He wearied himself, trying to remember what he had said, what
he had done. Of one thing he was certain: he had not laid his hands
on her. That he should have remembered, and that, he knew, she would
not have let pass by as she was letting memory of that night pass. Yet
it was the same thing, for he had tried. What, then, exactly, was she
thinking?
These things he did not cease to turn in his mind. And bit by bit
it seemed to him that he understood: for at first, on the mountain,
she had needed him. Without him she could not have followed that
imperceptible trail. Then, here on the train, she was deeply his
debtor, as he had forced her to be. Whatever, in her heart, she was
thinking of him, she could not now reveal to him. Indeed how was it
possible that she did not despise him? So, as she had sat beside him on
the Overland, he had been torturing himself.
Yet never once did her gentleness to him fail. There was, in her manner
now, as she spoke to him, something of this incomparable care:
“Will you do something?” she said, looking away from him.
“If it’s for you, I reckon you can reckon on it,” he said.
“I donno who it’s for,” she told him. “But will you be just as nice to
my uncle as you are to me?”
He stared at her.
“Be kind of polite to him,” she said. “Don’t pull your revolver on
him,” she explained.
“I hardly ever pull my revolver,” he defended himself indignantly.
“Well, don’t shake him or—or lift him up by the collar for anything,”
she suggested.
“Oh,” he comprehended. “You want me to trot out my Chicago manners—is
that it? He laughed. “All right,” he said. “I’m on.”
“Uncle Hiram is good,” she cried earnestly. “He come to see us,
once—he’s good! You treat him right—please.”
The Inger sunk his chin on his chest and walked, mulling this. So she
hadn’t liked his way with folks! He felt vaguely uneasy, and as if he
had stumbled on some unsuspected standard of hers.
“I don’t know,” she said, troubled, “what Aunt ’Cretia’s goin’ to
think. I mean about your coming with me.”
He raised his head.
“What about me coming with you?” he demanded.
Before the clear candor of his eyes, her own fell.
“She’ll think the truth,” he blazed, “or I’ll burn the house down!”
At this they both laughed, and now it was she who was feeling a dim
shame, as if from some high standard of his, she had been the one to
vary.
At the intersection of two paved roads, whose sidewalks were
grass-grown, in their long waiting for footsteps, stood the house which
they had been seeking. It was of dullish blue clapboards whose gabled
ends were covered with red-brown toothed shingles. The house was too
high for its area, and a hideous porch of cement blocks and posts
looked like a spreading cow-catcher. On a clothes line, bed blankets
and colored quilts were flapping, as if they were rejoicing in their
one legitimate liberty from privacy.
Everywhere, on the porch, and on the scrubby lawn, and within the open
door, stood packing boxes. The leap of alarm which Lory felt at sight
of them was not allayed by the unknown woman in blue calico, with
swathed head, who bent over the box in the hall.
At Lory’s question, the woman stared.
“You mean the family that’s just went out of here?” she asked. “Well,
they’ve moved to Washington, D.C.”
“What’s that?” cried the Inger, suddenly.
“If you mean the family that’s just went out of here—” the woman was
beginning.
The Inger struck his hand sharply on the post.
“We mean Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Folts,” he shouted. “And if you’re trying
to be insulting—”
The woman looked at him, open-mouthed.
“Why, my land,” she said, “I never heard their names in my life. I just
happened to know the family moved to Washington. You better ask next
door—mebbe they knew ’em.”
Lory interposed, thanked her, got back to the street.
“S’posin’ she _was_ puttin’ on,” she urged. “It don’t hurt us any.”
“Puttin’ on,” raged the Inger. “Well, I should say. Pretendin’ not to
know the name of whoever moved out of the same house she’s movin’
into!”
It was true, the neighbor told them. Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Folts had been
gone for almost a month. She found the Washington address for them,
and in a moment they were back on the Illinois prairie again, with
grass-grown sidewalks leading them nowhere.
“I must look for a job,” Lory said, only. “I must begin now and look
for a job.”
The Inger’s look travelled over the waste stretches, cut by neat real
estate signs. The sun was struggling through a high fog, the sky was
murky, and on the horizon where Chicago lay, the black smoke hung like
storm clouds.
“What a devil of a hole,” he said. “It looks like something had swelled
up big, and bust, and scattered all over the place.”
“I donno how to look for a job,” Lory said only, staring toward that
black horizon cloud where lay the city.
“Don’t you want to go on to Washington?” the Inger asked casually.
Lory shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said. “An’ I ain’t goin’ to come down on to you again.”
He looked down at her, and for the first time since they had boarded
the Overland, he saw the hunted look in her eyes. She was turning
toward the City with exactly the look with which she had turned, over
shoulder, toward Inch and Bunchy.
... He looked at her bright fallen hair, at the white curve of her
throat, at the strong brown hand with which she held her pack that she
steadfastly refused to let him carry. Here she was, remote from all
the places and people that she had ever known. Here she was, almost
penniless. He thought of her bright insolence as she had sat his horse
that morning on the desert, of her breathless appeal to him in the dark
of his hut, of her self-sufficiency in the night of his cowardice and
failure.... Now here she was, haunted by another fear.
In the days of their comradeship, he had felt in her presence shame,
humility, the desire to protect; and passion, steadfastly put down
by the memory of that night for which he was trying desperately to
make amends. But never till that moment had he felt for her a flash
of tenderness. Now—it must have been the brown hand nearest him, on
her pack, which so moved him—he felt a great longing just to give her
comfort and strength and a moment of cherishing.
She looked up at him. And abruptly, and with no warning, it seemed to
the Inger as they walked there together, and he looking down at her,
that he _was_ she. He seemed to move as she moved, to be breathing as
she breathed, to be looking from her eyes at that storm-cloud of a
city lying in wait for her. For an instant of time, he seemed to cease
to exist of himself, and to be wholly Lory. Then she looked away, and
he lifted his eyes to the flat green and brown, and was striding on,
himself again.
“I never thought of it before,” he burst out. “It _is_ a job to be a
woman. And alone in Chicago—Lord!”
Her look flashed back at him.
“I can get along just as well there, or anywhere else, as you can,” she
challenged.
Going back on the car, he argued it with her. Why should they not go on
to Washington. His bank was to telegraph him funds—these were probably
waiting for him now. Why should she not find work with her aunt, in
Washington as well as in Chicago—and be that much farther from Bunchy
in the bargain?
She listened, imperturbably bought a newspaper, and looked out an
employment agency; and ended by being left at the agency while the
Inger went off to the telegraph office.
He had gone but a step or two when he felt her touch on his arm.
“And oh, listen!” she said. “If the money ain’t come, don’t _kill_ the
man!”
He laughed, a great ringing laugh that made the passers-by on Wabash
Avenue look amusedly after him. Then he strode off among them. At
intervals, all the way to the telegraph office, he cursed the town. The
noise confused him, the smoke blinded and choked him, he understood
nobody’s talk of “east” and “west.” Unmercifully he jostled people who
got in his way, and he pushed by them, unmindful of remonstrance. At a
corner a traffic policeman roared out at him to halt. He stared at the
officer, then leaped on the running board of a motor that was making a
left-hand turn, and dropped off on the other side of the causeway.
“Get a grown man’s job, little fellow!” he yelled in derision.
He could find neither the signs nor the numbers. The beat of the
traffic made indistinguishable the voices of those who tried to
reply to his questions. To the fifth or sixth man whom he sought to
understand, he roared out in a terrible voice:
“My Lord, haven’t you got any lungs?”
The man fled. The Inger tramped on, to a chant which was growing in his
soul:
“Give me Inch. Give me Inch. Give me Inch....”
But by the time he had gained the telegraph office, and the man at
the window, after long delay, had told him that identification would
be necessary before he could collect his money, the Inger’s mood had
changed. He stood before the window and broke into a roar of laughter.
“Identify me!” he said. “Me! Why, man, I’m Inger. I own the Flag-pole
mine. I just got here, from Inch, Balboa County. You might as well try
to identify the West coast. Look at me, you fool!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Inger,” said the man, respectfully. “You’ll have to
bring somebody here who knows you. A resident.”
“There ain’t a resident of nothing this side the Rockies that ever laid
eyes to me,” said the Inger. “You guess twice.”
The clerk meditated.
“Haven’t you got your name on something about you?” he said softly.
The Inger thought. He rarely had a letter, he never carried one. He
had never in his life owned a business card or an embroidered initial.
Suddenly his face cleared.
“You bet!” he cried, and drew his six-shooter, which the men at the
mines had given him, and levelled it through the bars.
“There’s my name on the handle,” he said. “Want I should fire, just to
prove it’s mine?”
The man hesitated, glanced once about the office, looked in the Inger’s
eyes,—and risked his job.
“That’ll be sufficient,” said he. “But if you’ll allow me, you’d best
cover that thing up.”
“I donno,” said the Inger, reflectively, “but I’d best shoot my way
down State Street. I don’t seem to get along very fast any other way.”
He had one more visit to make. This was to a railway ticket office,
where he deliberately made a purchase and took away a time-card. Then
he returned to the employment office.
There he faced a curious sight. The outer room was small and squalid
with its bare, dirty floor, its discolored walls, the dusty,
curtainless panes of its one window which looked in on a dingy court.
About the edge of the room, either seated on deal benches without
backs, or standing by the wall, were perhaps twenty women. They were
old, they were young, they were relaxed and hopeless, or tense and
strained—but the most of them were middle-aged and shabby and utterly
negligible. They had not the character of the defeated or the ill
or the wretched. They were simply drained of life, and were living.
Occasionally an inner door opened and a man’s voice called “Next.” Few
of the women talked. One or two of them slept. The window was closed
and the air was intolerable.
To all this it took the Inger a moment or two to accustom his eyes.
Then he saw Lory. She was sitting on her pack, on the floor, amusing a
fretting baby on the knees of its mother, who dozed. In that dun place,
the girl’s loveliness was startling, electric. The women felt it, and
some sat staring at her.
“If I had that face—” he caught from one.
“Come along out of this, for the Lord’s sake!” said the Inger.
They all turned toward him and toward Lory as she rose, crimsoning as
they looked at her. She went to the doorway where he stood.
“I’ll lose my turn if I come now,” she said.
He held her wrist and drew her into the hall. Other women were waiting
to get into the room. Well-dressed, watching men went and came.
“You come with me,” said the Inger.
“But—” she tried to say.
“You come along with me,” he repeated. And as her troubled look
questioned him:
“I’ve got two tickets to Washington,” he said. “You don’t want no job
here if you get one.”
“You hadn’t ought—” she began, breathlessly.
“I know it,” he told her. “What I’d ought to ’a’ done was to get two
tickets to Whiteface and the hut. Hadn’t I?”
The baby, deserted, began to cry weakly. Lory turned back to her,
stooped over her, comforted her. As he stood there, leaning in the
doorway, once more there came to the Inger that curiously sharp sense
of the morning on the prairie.
For a flash as he looked at those empty faces and worn figures, he
knew—positively and as at first hand—what it was to be, not Lory
alone now, but all the rest. Abruptly, with some great wrench of the
understanding, it was almost as if momentarily he were those other
wretched creatures. When Lory had brought her pack and joined him, he
stood for a moment, still staring into that room.
“My God,” he said. “I wish I could do something for ’em!”
He struggled with this.
“‘Seems as if it’d help if I’d canter in and shoot every one of ’em
dead,” he said.
* * * * *
They went out on the street again, intent on finding a place to lunch.
There were two hours until the Washington train left. The Inger
refusing utterly to ask anybody anything, they walked until they came
to a place which, by hot flapjacks in the making in the great window,
the Inger loudly recognized to be his own.
Seated at a little white oil-cloth covered table beneath which the
Inger insisted on stowing the packs, the two relaxed in that moment of
rest and well-being.
The Inger, seeing her there across from him, spoke out in a kind of
wonder.
“It seems like I can’t remember the time when you wasn’t along,” he
said.
She laughed—and it was pathetic to see how an interval of comfort
and quiet warmed her back to security and girlishness. But not to the
remotest coquetry. Of that, since the morning on the desert, he had
had in her no glimpse. By this he knew dimly all that he had forfeited.
He made wistful attempts to call forth even a shadow of her old way.
“A week ago,” he said, “I hardly knew you.”
She assented gravely, and found no more to say about it.
“A week ago,” he said, “I was fishing, and didn’t bring home nothin’
but a turtle.” He smiled at a recollection. “I was scrapin’ him out,”
he said, “when I heard your weddin’ bell. How’d you ever come to have a
weddin’ bell?” he wondered.
“It was Bunchy’s doing,” she said, listlessly. “He sent the priest a
case o’ somethin’, to have it rung. I hated it.”
“Well,” said the Inger, “it was Bunchy’s own rope, then, that hung him.
I shouldn’t have come down if I hadn’t heard the bell—” he paused
perplexed. “You didn’t know I was down there, though?” he said.
“No, I thought you’d be up on the mountain when I went up. I didn’t
think you’d be in town. You hardly ever,” she added, “did come down.”
He did not miss this: she had noticed, then, that he hardly ever came
down.
“When I did come,” he said, “I always saw you with Bunchy. Only that
once.”
“Only that once,” she assented, and did not meet his eyes. “Oh!” she
cried, “I’ll be glad when we get to Washington and I’m off your hands!
That’s why I wanted a job here—to be off your hands!”
On this the Inger was stabbed through with his certainty. It was true,
then. She was longing to be free of him—and no wonder! To hide his
hurt and his chagrin he turned to the waiter, who was arriving with
flapjacks, and lifted candidly inquiring eyes.
“See anything the matter with my hands?” he drawled.
“No, sir,” said the man, in surprise.
“Well, neither do I,” said the Inger. “What _is_ the matter with ’em?”
he demanded of Lory, as the man departed.
“Why, if it wasn’t for me on ’em,” said Lory, “you’d be starting for
war.”
War! The Inger heard the word in astonishment. That was so, he _had_
been going to the war. He had been bent on going to the war, and had so
announced his intention. In that day on the mountain, those days on the
train, these hours in the city, he had never once thought of war. He
flooded his flapjacks with syrup, and said nothing.
“Washington ain’t _much_ out of your way,” she added. “You can get
started by day after to-morrow anyway.”
Still he was silent. Then, feeling that something was required of him,
he observed nonchalantly:
“Well, we don’t have to talk about it now, as I know of.”
In this, however, he reckoned without his host of the restaurant. As
the Inger paid the bill, there was thrust in his hands a white poster,
printed in great letters:
GIANT MASS MEETING
THE COLISEUM
TO-NIGHT! TO-NIGHT! TO-NIGHT!
WHAT IS AMERICA
TO DO
IN THE PRESENT CRISIS
The Inger read it through twice.
“What crisis?” he asked.
The restaurant keeper—a man with meeting eyebrows, who looked as if he
had just sipped something acid—stopped counting change in piles, and
stared at him.
“Where you from?” he asked, and saw the packs, and added “Boat, eh?
Ain’t you heard about the vessel?”
The Inger shook his head.
“Well, man,” said the restaurant keeper with enjoyment, “another nice
big U. S. merchantman is blowed into flinders a couple o’ days ago,
a-sailin’ neutral seas. Nobody much killed, I guess—but leave ’em wait
and see what we give ’em!”
“Does it mean war?” asked the Inger, eagerly.
“That’s for the meetin’ to say,” said the man, and winked, and, still
winking, reached for somebody’s pink check.
The Inger turned to Lory with eyes alight.
“Let’s get a train in the night,” he said. “Let’s stay here for this
meeting.”
In the circumstances, there was nothing that she could well say against
this. She nodded. The Inger consulted his timetable, found a train
toward morning, and the thing was done. He left the place like a boy.
“Let’s see some of this Mouth o’ the Pit this afternoon,” he said,
“being we’re here. And then we’ll head for that war meeting. It’s grand
we got here for it,” he added.
Lory looked up at him in a kind of fear. On the mountain that night she
had not once really feared him. But here, she now understood, was a man
with whom, in their days together, she had after all never yet come
face to face.
VI
THEY sat where they could see the great audience gather. The people
came by thousands. They poured in the aisles, advanced, separated,
sifted into the rows of seats, climbed to the boxes, the galleries,
ranged along those sloping floors like puppets. The stage filled. There
were men and women, young, old, clothed in a mass of black shot through
with color. Here were more people than ever in their lives Lory or the
Inger had seen. The stage alone was a vast audience hall.