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A BREATH OF PRAIRIE
AND OTHER STORIES
By WILL LILLIBRIDGE
THE DOMINANT DOLLAR. Illustrated in color by Lester Ralph.
Crown 8vo . . . $1.50
BEN BLAIR, PLAINSMAN. Frontispiece in color by Maynard Dixon.
Seventieth thousand. Crown 8vo . . . $1.50
QUERCUS ALBA: The Veteran of the Ozarks.
With frontispiece. 16mo. Net . . . $.50
A. C. MCCLURG & CO., Publishers
CHICAGO
[Illustration: She wheeled swiftly round, confronting him. [See
"Journey's End."]]
A BREATH OF PRAIRIE
AND OTHER STORIES
BY WILL LILLIBRIDGE
AUTHOR OF "BEN BLAIR," "THE DOMINANT DOLLAR," ETC.
WITH FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR
BY J. N. MARCHAND
CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1911
Copyright
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1911
Published April, 1911
W. J. Hall Printing Company
Chicago
A TRIBUTE
It is an accepted truth, I believe, that every novelist embodies in
the personalities of his heroes some of his own traits of character.
Those who were intimately acquainted with William Otis Lillibridge
could not fail to recognize this in a marked degree. To a casual
reader, the heroes of his five novels might perhaps suggest five
totally different personalities, but one who knows them well will
inevitably recognize beneath the various disguises the same dominant
characteristics in them all. Whether it be Ben Blair the sturdy
plainsman, Bob McLeod the cripple, Dr. Watson, Darley Roberts, or even
How Landor the Indian, one finds the same foundation stones of
character,--repression, virility, firmness of purpose, an abhorrence
of artificiality or affectation,--love of Nature and of Nature's works
rather than things man-made. And these were unquestionably the
pronounced traits of Will Lillibridge's personality. Markedly
reserved, silent, forceful, he was seldom found in the places where
men congregate, but loved rather the company of books and of the great
out-doors. Living practically his entire life on the prairies it is
undoubtedly true that he was greatly influenced by his environment.
And certain it is that he could never have so successfully painted the
various phases of prairie-life without a sympathetic, personal
knowledge.
The story of his life is characteristically told in this brief
autobiographical sketch, written at the request of an interested
magazine.
"I was born on a farm in Union County, Iowa, near the boundary of the
then Dakota Territory. Like most boys bred and raised in an atmosphere
of eighteen hours of work out of twenty-four, I matured early. At
twelve I was a useful citizen, at fifteen I was to all practical
purposes a man,--did a man's work whatever the need. In this capacity
I was alternately farmer, rancher, cattleman. Something prompted me to
explore a university and I went to Iowa, where for six years I
vibrated between the collegiate, dental, and medical departments.
After graduating from the dental in 1898 I drifted to Sioux Falls and
began to practise my profession. As the years passed the roots sank
deeper and I am still here.
"Work? My writing is done entirely at night. The waiting-room,--the
plum-tree,--requires vigorous shaking in the daytime. After dinner,--I
have a den, telephone-proof, piano-proof, friend-proof. What
transpires therein no one knows because no one has ever seen.
"Recreation? I have a mania, by no means always gratified,--to be out
of doors. Once each summer 'the Lady' and I go somewhere for a
time,--and forget it absolutely. In this way we've been able to travel
a bit. We,--again 'the Lady' and I,--steal an hour when we can, and
drive a gasoline car, keeping within the speed laws when necessary.
Once each Fall, when the first frost shrivels the corn-stalk and when,
if you chance to be out of doors after dark you hear, away up
overhead, invisible, the accelerating, throbbing, diminishing purr of
wings that drives the sportsman mad,--the town knows me no more."
Every novel may have a happy close, but a real life's story has but
one inevitable ending,--Death.
And to "the Lady" has been left the sorrowful task of writing "Finis"
across the final page.
January 29, 1909, he died at his home in Sioux Falls after a brief
illness. But thirty-one years of age, he had won a place in literature
so gratifying that one might well rest content with a recital of his
accomplishments. But his youth suggests a tale that is only partly
told and the conjecture naturally arises,--"What success might he not
have won?" Five novels, "Ben Blair," "Where the Trail Divides," "The
Dissolving Circle," "The Quest Eternal," and "The Dominant Dollar,"
besides magazine articles, and a number of short stories (many of them
appearing in this volume) were all written in the space of eight
years' time, and, as he said, were entirely produced after nightfall.
While interested naturally in the many phases of his life,--as a
professional man, as an author, as the chief factor in the domestic
drama,--yet most of all it pleases me to remember him as he appeared
when under the spell of the prairies he loved so well. Tramping the
fields in search of prairie-chicken or quail, a patient watcher in the
rushes of a duck-pond, or merely lying flat on his back in the
sunshine,--he was a being transformed. For he had in him much of the
primitive man and his whole nature responded to the "call of the
wild." But you who know his prairie-tales must have read between the
lines,--for who, unless he loved the "honk" of the wild geese, could
write, "to those who have heard it year by year it is the sweetest,
most insistent of music. It is the spirit of the wild, of magnificent
distances, of freedom impersonate"?
To the late Mrs. Wilbur Teeters I am indebted for the following
tribute, which appeared in the "Iowa Alumnus."
"Dr. Lillibridge's field of romance was his own. Others have told of
the Western mountains and pictured the great desert of the Southwest,
but none has painted with so masterful a hand the great prairies of
the Northwest, shown the lavish hand with which Nature pours out her
gifts upon the pioneer, and again the calm cruelty with which she
effaces him. In the midst of these scenes his actors played their
parts and there he played his own part, clean in life and thought, a
man to the last, slipping away upon the wings of the great storm which
had just swept over his much-loved land, wrapped in the snowy mantle
of his own prairies."
Edith Keller-Lillibridge
CONTENTS
I A BREATH OF PRAIRIE 13
II THE DOMINANT IMPULSE 61
III THE STUFF OF HEROES 87
IV ARCADIA IN AVERNUS 109
Chapter I Prelude
Chapter II The Leap
Chapter III The Wonder of Prairie
Chapter IV A Revelation
Chapter V The Dominance of the Evolved
Chapter VI By a Candle's Flame
Chapter VII The Price of the Leap
V JOURNEY'S END 239
VI A PRAIRIE IDYL 265
VII THE MADNESS OF WHISTLING WINGS 279
Chapter I Sandford the Exemplary
Chapter II The Presage of the Wings
Chapter III The Other Man
Chapter IV Capitulation
Chapter V Anticipation
Chapter VI "Mark the Right, Sandford!"
Chapter VII The Bacon What Am!
Chapter VIII Feathered Bullets
Chapter IX Oblivion
Chapter X Upon "Wiping the Eye"
Chapter XI The Cold Gray Dawn
VIII A FRONTIER ROMANCE: A TALE OF JUMEL MANSION 309
IX THE CUP THAT O'ERFLOWED: AN OUTLINE 339
X UNJUDGED 347
XI THE TOUCH HUMAN 367
XII A DARK HORSE 373
XIII THE WORTH OF THE PRICE 393
ILLUSTRATIONS
She wheeled swiftly round, confronting him. Frontispiece
They saw the hands which had gone to hips flash up and
forward like pistons, and two puffs of smoke like
escaping steam. 74
"You'll apologize." 190
The two men went East together. 326
He heard a voice ... and glanced back. 388
A BREATH OF PRAIRIE
AND OTHER STORIES
A BREATH OF PRAIRIE
I
Dense darkness of early morning wrapped all things within and without
a square, story-and-a-half prairie farm-house. Silence, all-pervading,
dense as the darkness, its companion, needed but a human ear to become
painfully noticeable.
Up-stairs in the half-story attic was Life. From one corner of the
room deep, regular breathing marked the unvarying time of healthy
physical life asleep. Nearby a clock beat loud automatic time, with a
brassy resonance--healthy mechanical life awake. Man and machine, side
by side, punctuated the passage of time.
Alone in the darkness the mechanical mind of the clock conceived a bit
of fiendish pleasantry. With violent, shocking clamor, its deafening
alarm suddenly shattered the stillness.
The two victims of the outrage sat up in bed and blinked sleepily at
the dark. The younger, in a voice of wrath, relieved his feelings with
a vigorously expressed opinion of the applied uses of things in
general, and of alarm-clocks and milk pans in particular. He thereupon
yawned prodigiously, and promptly began snoring away again, as though
nothing had interrupted.
The other man made one final effort, and came down hard upon the
middle of the floor. Rough it was, uncarpeted, cold with the damp
chill of early morning. He groped for a match, and dressed rapidly in
the dim light, his teeth chattering a diminishing accompaniment until
the last piece was on.
Deep, regular breathing still came from the bed. The man listened a
moment, irresolutely; then with a smile on his face he drew a feather
from a pillow, and, rolling back the bed-clothes, he applied the
feather's tip to the sleeper's bare soles, where experience had
demonstrated it to be the most effective. Dodging the ensuing kick,
he remarked simply, "I'll leave the light, Jim. Better hurry--this is
going to be a busy day."
Outside, a reddish light in the sky marked east, but over all else
there lay only starlight, as, lantern in hand, he swung down the
frozen path. With the opening barn door there came a puff of warm
animal breath. As the first rays of light entered, the stock stood up
with many a sleepy groan, and bright eyes shining in the half-light
swayed back and forth in the narrow stalls, while their owners waited
patiently for the feed they knew was coming.
Jim, still sleepy, appeared presently; together the two went through
the routine of chores, as they had done hundreds of times before. They
worked mechanically, being still stiff and sore from the previous
day's work, but swiftly, in the way mechanical work is sometimes
done.
Side by side, with singing milk pails between their knees, Jim stopped
long enough to ask, "Made up your mind yet what you'll do, Guy?"
The older brother answered without a break in the swish of milk
through foam:
"No, I haven't, Jim. If it wasn't for you and father and mother and--"
he diverted with a redoubled clatter of milk on tin.
"Be honest, Guy," was the reproachful caution.
"--and Faith," added the older brother simply.
The reddish glow in the east had spread and lit up the earth; so they
put out the lantern, and, bending under the weight of steaming milk
pails, walked single file toward the house and breakfast. Far in the
distance a thin jet of steam spreading broadly in the frosty air
marked the location of a threshing crew. The whistle,--thin,
brassy,--spoke the one word "Come!" over miles of level prairie, to
the scattered neighbors.
Four people, rough, homely, sat down to a breakfast of coarse, plain
cookery, and talked of common, homely things.
"I see you didn't get so much milk as usual this morning, Jim," said
the mother.
"No, the line-backed heifer kicked over a half-pailful."
"Goin' to finish shuckin' that west field this week, Guy?" asked the
father.
"Yes. We'll cross over before night."
Nothing more was said. They were all hungry, and in the following
silence the jangle of iron on coarse queensware, and the aspiration of
beverages steaming still though undergoing the cooling medium of
saucers, filled in all lulls that might otherwise have seemed to
require conversation.
Not until the boys got up to go to work did the family bond draw tight
enough to show. Then the mother, tenderly as a surgeon, dressed the
chafed spots on her boys' hands, saying low in words that spoke
volumes, "I'll be so glad when the corn's all husked"; and the father
followed them out onto the little porch to add, "Better quit early
so's to hear the speakin' to-night, Guy."
"How are you feeling to-day, father?" asked the young man, in a tone
he attempted to make honestly interested, but which an infinite
number of repetitions had made almost automatic.
The father hesitated, and a look of sadness crept over his weathered
face.
"No better, Guy." He laid his hand on the young man's shoulder,
looking down into the frank blue eyes with a tenderness that made his
rough features almost beautiful.
"It all depends upon you now, Guy, my boy." Unconsciously his voice
took on the incomparable pathos of age displaced. "I'm out of the
race," he finished simply.
The heavy, weather-painted lumber wagon turned at the farm-yard, and
rumbled down a country road, bound hard as asphalt in the fall frosts.
The air cut sharply at the ears of the man in the box, as he held the
lines in either hand alternately, swinging its mate with vigor. The
sun was just peeping from the broad lap of the prairie, casting the
beauty of color and of sparkle over all things. Ahead of the wagon
coveys of quail broke and ran swiftly in the track until tired, when,
with a side movement the tall grass by the border absorbed them.
Flocks of prairie-chickens, frightened by the clatter, sprang winging
from the roadside, and together sailed away on spread wings. The man
in the wagon looked about him and forgetting all else in the
quick-flowing blood of morning, smiled gladly.
He stopped at the edge of the field, tying the reins loosely and
building up the sideboards, gradually shorter, each above the other,
pyramid-like, until they reached higher than his own head as he stood
in the wagon-box. Stiff from the jolting and inactivity of the drive,
he jumped out upon the uneven surface of the corn-field.
Slowly at first, as sore fingers rebelled against the roughness of
husks, he began work, touching the frosty ears gingerly; then as
he warmed to the task, stopping at nothing. The frost, dense,
all-covering, shook from the stalks as he moved, coloring the rusty
blue of his overalls white, and melting ice-cold, wet him through
to the skin on arms and shoulders and knees. Swiftly, two motions to
the ear, he kept up a tapping like the regular blows of a hammer, as
the ears struck the sideboard. Fifteen taps to the minute, you would
have counted; a goodly man's record.
This morning, though, Landers' mind was not upon his work. The vague,
uncertain restlessness that marked the birth of a desire for broader
things than he had known heretofore, was taking form in his brain. He
himself could not have told what he wanted, what he planned; he simply
felt a distaste for the things of Now; an unrest that prevented his
sitting quiet; that took him up very early at morning; that made him
husk more bushels of corn, and toss more bundles of grain into the
self-feed of a threshing machine than any other man he knew; that kept
him awake thinking at night until the discordant snores of the family
sent him to bed, with the covers over his ears in self-defence.
A vague wonder that such thoughts were in his mind at all was upon
him. He was the son of his parents; his life so far had been their
life: why should he not be as content as they?
He could not answer, yet the distaste grew. Irresistibly he had
acquired a habit of seeing unpleasant things: the meanness and the
smallness of his surroundings; the uncouth furnishings of his home;
the lack of grace in his parents and acquaintances; the trifling
incidents that required so many hours of discussion; and in all things
the absence of that sense of humor and appreciation of the lighter
side of life which, from reading, he had learned to recognize.
Try as he might, he could not recollect even the faint flash of a poor
pun coming originally from his parents. Was he to be as they? A
feeling of intense repugnance swept over him at the thought--a
repugnance unaccountable, and of which he felt much ashamed.
Self-suspicion followed. Was it well for him to read the books and
think the thoughts of the past year? He could not escape except by
brutally tearing himself by the roots from his parents' lives. It was
all so hopelessly selfish on his part!
"True," answered the hot spirit of resentment, "but is it not right
that you should think first of Self? Is not individual advancement the
first law of Nature? If there is something better, why should you not
secure it?"
The innate spirit of independence, the intense passion of pride and
equality inborn with the true country-bred, surged warmly through his
body until he fairly tingled.
Why should others have things, think thoughts, enjoy pleasures of
which he was to remain in ignorance? The mood of rebellion was upon
him and he swore he would be as they. Of the best the world contained,
he, Guy Landers, would partake.
With the decision came an exultant consciousness of the graceful play
of his own muscles in rapid action. The self-confidence of the
splendid animal was his. He would work and advance himself. The world
must move, and he would help. He would do things, great things, of
which he and the world would be proud.
Unconsciously he worked faster and faster as thought travelled. The
other wagons dropped behind, the tapping of corn ears on their
sideboards making faint music in the clear air.
The sun rose swiftly, warming and drying the earth. Instead of frost
the dust of weathered husks fell thickly over him. Overflowing with
life and physical power, he worked through the long rows to the end,
then mounted the wagon and looked around. Silently he noted the gain
over the other workers, and a smile lit up the sturdy lines of his
face.
Evening was approaching. The rough lumber wagon, heavily loaded from
the afternoon's work, groaned loudly over the uneven ground. Instead
of the east, the west was now red, glorious. High up in the sky,
surrounding the glow, a part of it as well, narrow luminous sun-dogs
presaged uncertain weather to follow.
Guy Landers mounted the wagon wearily, and looked ahead. The end of
the two loaded corn-rows which he was robbing was in sight, and he
returned doggedly to his task. The ardor of the morning had succumbed
to the steady grind of physical toil, and he worked with the impassive
perseverance of a machine.
Night and the stillness thereof settled fast. The world darkened so
swiftly that the change could almost be distinguished. The rows ahead
grew shadowy, and in their midst, by contrast, the corn-ears stood out
white and distinct. The whole world seemed to draw more closely
together. The low vibrant hum that marked the location of the distant
threshing crew, sounded now almost as near as the voice of a friend. A
flock of prairie-chickens flew low overhead, their flatly spread wings
cutting the air with a sound like whips. They settled nearby, and out
of the twilight came anon the confused murmur of their voices.
Landers stopped the impatient horses at the end of the field, and
shook level the irregular, golden heap in the wagon-box. Slowly he
drew on coat and top-coat, and mounted the full load, sitting sideways
with legs hanging over the bulging wagon-box. It was dark now, but he
was not alone. Other wagons were groaning homeward as well. Suddenly,
thin and brassy, out of the distance came the sound of a steam
whistle; and when it was again silent the hum of the thresher had
ceased. From a field by the roadside, a solitary prairie-rooster gave
once, twice, its lone, restless call.
The man stretched back full length on the corn bed and looked up where
the stars sparkled clear and bright. It all appealed to him, and a
moisture formed in his eyes. A new side to the problem of the morning
came to him. These sounds--he realized now how he loved them. Verily
they were a part of his life. Mid them he had been bred; of them as of
food he had grown. That whistle, thin and unmusical; that elusive,
indescribable call of prairie male; all these homely sounds that meant
so much to him--could he leave them?
The moisture in his eyes deepened and a tightness gripped his throat.
Slowly two great tears fought their way down through the dust on his
face, and dropped lingeringly, one after the other amid the
corn-ears.
II
The little, low, weather-white school-house stood glaring solitarily
in the bright starlight, from out its setting of brown, hard-trodden
prairie. Within, the assembled farmers were packed tight and regular
in the seats and aisles, like kernels on an ear of corn. In the front
of the room a little space had been shelled bare for the speaker, and
the displaced human kernels thereto incident were scattered crouching
in the narrow hall and anteroom. From without, groups of men denied
admittance, thrust hairy faces in at the open windows. A row of dusty,
grease-covered lamps flanked by composition metal reflectors,
concentrated light upon the shelled spot, leaving the remainder of the
room in variant shadow. The low murmur of suppressed conversation,
accompanied by the unconscious shuffling of restless feet, sounded
through the place. Becoming constantly more noticeable, an unpleasant,
penetrating odor, of the unclean human animal filled the room.
Guy Landers sat on a crowded back seat, where, leaning one elbow on
his knee, he shaded his eyes with his hand. On his right a big, sweaty
farmer was smoking a stale pipe. The smell of the cheap, vile tobacco,
bad as it was, became a welcome substitute for the odor of the man
himself.
At his left were two boys of his own age, splendid, both of them, with
the overflowing vitality that makes all young animals splendid. They
were talking--of women. They spoke low, watching sheepishly whether
any one was listening, and snickering suppressedly together.
The young man's head dropped in his hands. It all depressed him like a
weight. From the depths of his soul he despised them for their
vulgarity, and hated himself for so doing, for he was of their life
and work akin. He shut his eyes, suffering blindly.
Consciousness returned at the sound of a strangely soft voice, and he
looked up a little bewildered. A swarm of night-bugs encircled each of
the greasy lamps, blindly beating out their lives against the hot
chimney; but save this and the soft voice there was no other sound.
The man at the right held his pipe in his hand; to the left the boys
had ceased whispering; one and all were listening to the speaker with
the stolid, expressionless gaze of interested animals.
Guy Landers could not have told why he had come that night. Perhaps it
was in response to that gregarious instinct which prompts us all at
times to mingle with a crowd; certainly he had not expected to be
interested. Thus it was with almost a feeling of rebellious curiosity
that he caught himself listening intently.
The speech was political, the speaker a college man. What he said was
immaterial--not a listener but had heard the same arguments a dozen
times before; it was the man himself that held them.
What the farmers in that dingy little room saw was a smooth-faced
young man, with blue eyes set far apart and light hair that exposed
the temples far back; they heard a soft voice which made them forget
for a time that they were very tired--forget all else but that he was
speaking.
Landers saw further: not a single man, but a type; the concrete
illustration of a vague ideal he had long known. He realized as
the others did not, that the speaker was merely practising on
them--training, as the man himself would have said. When Landers
was critically conscious, he was not deceived; yet, with this
knowledge, at times he forgot and moved along with the speaker,
unconsciously.
It was all deliriously intoxicating to the farmer--this first
understanding glimpse of things he had before merely dreamed
of--and he waited exultantly for those brief moments when he felt,
sympathetically with the speaker, the keen joy of mastery in
perfect art; that joy beside which no other of earth can compare, the
compelling magnetism which carries another's mind irresistibly
along with one's own.
The speaker finished and sat down wearily, and almost simultaneously
the hairy faces left the windows. The shuffling of feet and the murmur
of rough voices once more sounded through the room; again the odor of
vile tobacco filled the air. Several of the older men gathered around
the speaker, in turn holding his hand in a relentless grip while they
struggled bravely for words to express the broadest of compliments.
Young boys stood wide-eyed under their fathers' arms and looked at the
college man steadily, like young calves.
The reaction was on the slender young speaker, and though the
experience was new, he shook hands wearily. In spite of himself a
shade of disgust crept into his face. He was not bidding for these
farmers' votes, and the big sweaty men were foully odorous. He worked
his way steadily out into the open air.
Landers, in response to a motive he made no attempt to explain even to
himself, walked over and touched the chairman on the shoulder.
"'Evening, Ross," he greeted perfunctorily. "Pretty good talk, wasn't
it?" Without waiting for a reply he went on, "Suppose you're not
hankering for a drive back to town to-night? I'll see that"--a swift
nod toward the departing group--"he gets back home, if you wish."
Ross looked up in pleased surprise. He was tired and sleepy and only
too glad to accept the suggestion.
"Thank you, Guy," he answered gratefully. "I'll do as much for you
some time."
Landers waited silently until the last eulogist had lingeringly
departed, leaving the bewildered speaker gazing about for the
chairman.
"I'm to take you to town," said Landers, simply, as he led the way
toward his wagon. He then added, as an afterthought: "If you're tired
and prefer, you may stay with me to-night."
The collegian, looking up to decline, met the countryman's eye, and
for the first time the two studied each other steadily.
"I will stay with you, if you please," he said in sudden change of
mind.
They drove out, slowly, into the frosty night, the sound of the other
wagons rattling over frozen roads coming pleasantly to their ears.
Overhead countless stars lit up the earth and sky, almost as brightly
as moonlight.
"I suppose you are husking corn these days," initiated the collegian,
perfunctorily.
"Yes," was the short answer.
They rode on again in silence, the other wagons rumbling slowly away
into the distance until their sound came only as a low humming from
the frozen earth.
"Prices pretty good this season?" questioned the college man,
tentatively.
Landers flashed around on him almost fiercely.
"In Heaven's name, man," he protested, "give me credit for a thought
outside my work--" He paused, and his voice became natural: "--a
thought such as other people have," he finished, sadly.
The two men looked steadily at each other, a multitude of conflicting
emotions on the face of the collegian. He could not have been more
surprised had a clothing dummy raised its voice and spoken. Landers
turned away and looked out over the frosty prairie.
"I beg your pardon,"--wearily. "You're not to blame for thinking--as
everybody else thinks." His companion started to interrupt but Landers
raised his hand in silencing motion. "Let us be honest--with
ourselves, at least," he anticipated.
"I know we of the farm are dull, and crude, and vulgar, and our
thoughts are of common things. You of the other world patronize us;
you practise on us as you did to-night, thinking we do not know. But
some of us do, and it hurts."
The other man impulsively held out his hand; a swift apology came to
his lips, but as he looked into the face before him, he felt it would
be better left unsaid. Instead, he voiced the question that came
uppermost to his mind.
"Why don't you leave--this--and go to school?" he asked abruptly. "You
have an equal chance with the rest. We're each what we make
ourselves."
Landers broke in on him quickly.
"We all like to talk of equality, but in reality we know there is
none. You say 'leave' without the slightest knowledge of what in my
case it means." He gave the collegian a quick look.
"I'm talking as though I'd known you all my life." A question was in
his voice.
"I'm listening," said the man, simply.
"I'll tell you what it means, then. It means that I divorce myself
from everything of Now; that I unlive my past life; that I leave my
companionship with dumb things--horses and cattle and birds--and I
love them, for they are natural. This seems childish to you; but live
with them for years, more than with human beings, and you will
understand.
"More than all else it means that I must become as a stranger to my
family; and they depend upon me. My friends of now would not be my
friends when I returned; they would be as I am to you now--a thing to
be patronized."
He hesitated, and then went recklessly on:
"I've told you so much, I may as well tell you everything. On the next
farm to ours there's a little, brown-eyed girl--Faith's her
name--and--and--" His new-found flow of words failed, and he ended in
unconscious apostrophe:
"To think of growing out of her life, and strange to my father and
mother--it's all so selfish, so hideously selfish!"
"I think I understand," said the soft voice at his side.
They drove on without a word, the frost-bound road ringing under the
horses' feet, the stars above smiling sympathetic indulgence at this
last repetition of the old, old tale of man.
The gentle voice of the collegian broke the silence.
"You say it would be selfish to leave. Is it not right, though, and of
necessity, that we think first of self?" He paused, then boldly
sounded the keynote of the universe.
"Is not selfishness the first law of nature?" he asked.
Landers opened his lips to answer, but closed them without a word.
III
Brown, magnetic Fall, with her overflow of animal activity, shaded
gradually into the white of lethic Winter; then in slow dissolution
relinquished supremacy to the tans and mottled greens of Springtime.
Unsatisfied as man, the mighty cycle of the seasons' evolution moved
on until the ripe yellow of harvest and of corn-field wrote "Autumn"
on the broad page of the prairies.
Of an evening in early September, Guy Landers turned out from the
uncut grass of the farm-yard into the yellow, beaten dust of the
country road. He walked slowly, for it was his last night on the farm,
and it would be long ere he passed that way again. This was the road
that led to the district school-house, and with him every inch had
been familiar from childhood. As a boy he had run barefoot in its
yellow dust, and paddled joyously in the soft mud of its summer
showers. The rows of tall cottonwoods that bordered it on either side
he had helped plant, watching them grow year by year, as he himself
had grown, until now the whispering of prairie night winds in their
loosely hung leaves spoke a language as familiar as his native
tongue.
He walked down the road for a half-mile, and turned in between still
other tall cottonwoods at another weather-stained, square farm-house,
scarcely distinguishable from his own.
"'Evening, Mr. Baker." He nodded to the round-shouldered man who sat
smoking on the doorstep.
The farmer moved to one side, making generous room beside him.
"'Evening, Guy," he echoed. "Won't y' set down?"
"Not to-night, Mr. Baker. I came over to see Faith." He hesitated,
then added as an afterthought: "I go away to-morrow."
The man on the steps smoked silently for a minute, the glow from the
corn-cob bowl emphasizing the gathering twilight. Slowly he took the
pipe from his mouth, and, standing up, seized the young man's hand in
the grip of a vise.
"I heerd y' were goin', Guy." He looked down through the steadiest of
mild blue eyes. "Good-bye, my boy." An uncertain catch came into his
voice, and he shook the hand harder than before. "We'll all miss ye."
He dropped his arm, and sat down on the step, impassively resuming his
pipe. Without raising his eyes, he nodded toward the back yard.
"Faith's back there with her posies," he said.
The young man hesitated, swallowing fiercely at the lump in his
throat.
"Good-bye, Mr. Baker," he faltered at length.
He walked slowly around the corner of the house, stopping a moment to
pat the friendly collie that wagged his tail, welcomingly, in the
path. A large mixed orchard-garden, surrounded by a row of sturdy soft
maples, opened up before him; and, coming up its side path, with the
most cautious of gingerly treads, was the big hired man, bearing a
huge striped watermelon. He nodded in passing, and grinned with a
meaning hospitality on the visitor.
At one corner of the garden an oblong mound of earth, bordered with
bright stones and river-clam shells, marked the "posy" bed. Within
its boundaries a collection of overgrown house plants, belated pinks,
and seeding sweet-peas, fought for life with the early fall frosts.
Landers looked steadily down at the sorry little garden. Like
everything else he had seen that night, it told its pathetic tale of
things that had been but would be no more.
As he looked, a multitude of homely blossoms that he had plucked in
the past flowered anew in his memory. The mild faces of violets and
pansies, the gaudy blotches of phlox, stood out like nature. He could
almost smell the heavy odor of mignonette. A mist gathered over his
eyes, and again, as at the good-bye of a moment ago, the lump rose
chokingly in his throat.
He turned away from the tiny, damaged bed to send a searching look
around the garden.
"Faith!" he called gently.
"Faith!"--louder.
A soft little sound caught his ear from the grass-plot at the border.
He started swiftly toward it, but stopped half-way, for the sound was
repeated, and this time came distinctly--a bitter, half-choked sob.
With a motion of weariness and of pain the man passed his hand over
his eyes, then walked on firmly, his footsteps muffled in the short
grass.
A dainty little figure in the plainest of calico, lay curled up on the
sod beneath the big maple. Her face was buried in both arms; her whole
body trembled, as she struggled hard against the great sobs.
"Faith--" interrupted the man softly, "Faith--"
The sobs became more violent.
"Go away, Guy," pleaded a tearful, muffled voice between the breaks.
"Please go away, please--"
The man knelt swiftly down on the grass; irresistibly his arm spread
over the dainty, trembling, little woman. Then as suddenly he drew
back with a face white as moonlight, and a sound in his throat that
was almost a groan.
He knelt a moment so, then touched her shoulder gently--as he would
have touched earth's most sacred thing.
"Faith--" he repeated uncertainly.
The girl buried her head more deeply.
"I won't, I tell you," she cried chokingly, "I won't--" she could say
no more. There were no words in her meagre vocabulary to voice her
bitterness of heart.
The man got to his feet almost roughly, face and hands set like a
lock. He stood a second looking passionately down at her.
"Good-bye, Faith," he said, and his trembling voice was the gentlest
of caresses. He started swiftly away down the path.
The girl listened a moment to the retreating steps, then raised a
tear-stained face above her arms.
"Guy!" she called chokingly, "Guy!"
The man quickened his steps at the sound, but did not turn.
The girl sprang to her feet.
"Oh, Guy! Guy!" pleadingly, desperately. "Guy!"
The man had reached the open. With a motion that was almost insane, he
clapped his hands over his ears, and ran blindly down the dusty path
until he was tired, then dropped hopelessly by the roadside.
Overhead the big cottonwoods whispered softly in the starlight, and a
solitary catbird sang its lonely night song.
The man flung his arms around the big, friendly tree, and sobbed
wildly--as the girl had sobbed.
"Oh, Faith!" he groaned.
IV
A month had passed by, bringing to Guy Landers a new Heaven and a new
earth. Already the prosy old university town had begun to assume an
atmosphere of home. The well-clipped campus, with its huge oaks and
its limestone walks, had taken on the familiar possessive plural "our
campus," and the solitary red squirrel which sported fearlessly in its
midst had likewise become "our squirrel." The imposing, dignified
college buildings had ceased to elicit open-mouthed observance, and
among the student-body surnames had yielded precedence to Christian
names--oftener, though, to some outlandish sobriquet which satirized
an idiosyncrasy of temperament or outward aspect.
Meantime the farmer had learned many things. Prominent among these was
a conception of the preponderant amount he had yet to learn. Another
matter of illumination involved the relation of clothes to man. He had
been reared in the delusion that the person who gave thought to that
which he wore, must necessarily think of nothing else. Very confusing,
therefore, was the experience of having representatives of this same
class immeasurably outdistance him in the quiz room.
Again, on the athletic field he saw men of much lighter weight excel
him in a way that made his face burn with a redness not of physical
exertion. It was a wholesome lesson that he was learning--that there
are everywhere scores of others, equally or better fitted by Nature
for the struggle of life than oneself, and who can only be surpassed
by the indomitable application and determination that wins all
things.
Landers' nature though was that of the born combatant. The class that
laughed openly at his first tremblingly bashful, and ludicrously inapt
answer at quiz, was indelibly photographed upon his memory.
"Before this session is complete--" he challenged softly to himself,
and glared at those members nearest him in a way that made them
suddenly forget the humor of the situation.
But youth is ever tractable, and even this short time had accomplished
much. Already the warm, contagious, college comradeship possessed him.
Violent attacks of homesickness that made gray the brightest fall
days, like the callous spots on his palms, were becoming more rare.
The old existence was already a dream, as yet a little sad, but none
the less a thing without a substance. The new life was a warm,
magnetic reality; the future glowed bright with limitless promise.
"The first day of the second month," remarked Landers, meeting a
fellow-classman on the way to college hall one morning.
"Yes, an auspicious time to quit--this," completed the student with a
suggestive shuffle of his feet. "We've furnished our share of
amusement."
Landers looked up questioningly.
"Is that from the class president?" he asked.
"Yes," answered the other, "hadn't you heard? No more dancing, 'his
nibs' says."
They had reached the entrance to the big college building, and at that
moment a great roar of voices sounded from out the second-floor
windows. Simultaneously the two freshmen quickened their pace.
"The fun's on," commented Landers' informant excitedly, as together
they broke for the lecture-room, two stairs at the jump.
The large department amphitheatre opened up like a fan--the handle in
the centre of the building on the entrance floor, the spread edge,
nearly a complete half-circle, marked by the boundary walls of the
building, a full story higher. The intervening space, at an
inclination of thirty odd degrees, was a field of seats, cut into
three equal parts by two aisles that ran from the entrance,
divergently upward. The small space at the entrance--popularly dubbed
"the pit"--was professordom's own particular region. From this point,
by an unwritten law, the classes ranged themselves according to the
length of their university life; the seniors at the extreme apex of
the angle, the other classes respectively above, leaving the freshmen
far beyond in space.
As guardians of the two narrow aisles, the seniors dealt lightly with
juniors and "sophs," but demanded insatiable toll of every freshman
before he was allowed to ascend.
That a first-year man must dance was irrevocable. It had the authority
of precedent in uncounted graduate classes. To be sure, it was neither
required nor expected that all applicants be masters of the art; but,
agitate his feet in some manner, every able-bodied male member must,
or remain forever a freshman.
When Landers and his companion arrived at the top of the stairs they
found the hall packed close with fellow-classmates. The lower rows of
seats were already filled with triumphant seniors, waiting for the
throng that crowded pit and lobby to come within their reach. With
regular tapping of feet and clapping of hands in unison, the class as
one man beat the steady time of one who marches.
"Dance, freshies!" they repeated monotonously. "Dance!"
"Clear the pit for a rush," yelled the president of the besieging
freshmen, elbowing his way back into the mass.
A lull fell upon the room, as both sides gathered themselves
together.
"Now--all at once!" yelled the president, and pandemonium broke
loose.
"Rush 'em! Shove, behind there!" shrieked the struggling freshmen at
the front.
"Dance, freshies! Dance!" challenged the seniors, as they locked arms
across the narrow aisle.
"Hold 'em, fellows! Hold 'em!" encouraged the men of the upper seats,
bracing themselves against the broad backs below.
The classes met like water against a wall. To go up was impossible;
advantage of gravity and of position was all with the seniors. For an
instant, at the centre, there were frantic yelling and pulling of
loose wearing apparel; then, packed like cotton in a bale, they could
only scream for mercy.
"Loosen up, back there! Back!" they panted, squirming impotently as
they gasped for breath.
Slowly the reaction came amid the triumphant, "Dance, freshies!" of
the conquering hosts.
The jam loosened; the seniors' opportunity came. Like a big machine,
the occupants of the front row leaned forward, and seized upon a
circle of unsuspecting, retreating freshmen, among the number the
class president.
"Pass 'em up! Pass 'em up!" insisted the men above, reaching out eager
hands to aid; and with an irresistibility that seemed miraculous, the
squirming, kicking, struggling freshmen found themselves rolling
upward--head foremost, feet foremost, position unclassified--over the
heads of the upper classmen; bumping against seats, and scattering the
contents of their pockets loosely along the way.
"Up with them," repeated the denizens of the front row as they reached
forward for a fresh supply.
But there was no more material available; the besieging party had
retreated. On the top row the dishevelled president was confusedly
pulling himself together, and grinning sheepishly. The rebellion was
over.
"Dance, freshies," resumed the seniors mockingly; and once more the
regular tap of feet and clapping of hands beat slow march-time.
One by one the freshmen came forward, and, shuffling a few steps to
the encouraging "well done" of the seniors, mounted the steps between
the rows of laughing upper classmen.
It happened that Landers came last. He wore heavy shoes and walked
with an undeniable clump.
"He's Dutch, make him clog," called a man from an upper row.
The class caught the cry. "Clog! Clog!" they commanded.
A big fellow next the aisle made an addition. "Clog there, hayseed,"
he grumbled.
Landers stopped as though the words were a blow. That one word
"hayseed" with all that it meant to him--to be thrown at him now,
tauntingly, before the whole class! His face grew white beneath the
remaining coat of tan, and he stepped up to the big senior with a
swiftness of which no one would have suspected him capable.
"Take that back!" he blazed into the man's face.
The senior hesitated; the room grew breathlessly quiet.
"Take it back, I say!"
The big fellow tried to laugh, but his voice only grated.
"Damned if I will--hayseed," he retorted with a meaning pause and
accent.
Before the words were out of his mouth Landers had the man by the
collar, and they were fighting like cats.
For a time things in that pit were very confused and very noisy. Both
students were big and both were furiously angry. By rule they would
have been very evenly matched, but in a rough-and-tumble scrimmage
there was no comparison. The classes made silent and neutral
spectators, as Landers swung the man around in the narrow pit like a
whirlwind, and finally pushed him back into his seat.
"Now will you take it back!" he roared breathlessly, vigorously
shaking his victim.
The hot lust of battle was upon the farmer, and he forgot that several
hundred students were watching his every motion.
"Take it back," he repeated, "or I'll--" and he lifted the man half
out of the seat.
The senior seized both arms of the chair, and looked up in a dazed
sort of way.
"I--" he began weakly.
"Louder--" interrupted Landers.
"I--beg your pardon," said the reluctant, trembling voice.
That instant the amphitheatre went wild. "Bravo!" yelled a hundred
voices over the clamor of cheering hands.
"Three cheers for the freshman!" shrilled a voice over the tumult; and
the "rah, rah, rah" that followed made the skylight rattle.
Landers stepped back and looked up bewildered; then a realization of
the thing came to him and his face burned as no sun could make it
burn, and his knees grew weak. He gladly would have given all his
present earthly belongings, and all in prospect for the immediate
future for a kindly earth to open suddenly and swallow him.
Perspiration stood out on his face as he went slowly up the stairs, at
every step a row of friendly hands grasping him in congratulation.
Slowly the room became quiet. The whole confusion had not taken up
even the time of grace at the beginning of the hour; and a great burst
of applause greeted the mild old dean as he came absently in, as was
his wont, at the tap of the ten-minute bell. He looked up innocently
at the unusual greeting, and the cheer was repeated with interest. As
first in authority he was supposed to report all such inter-class
offences; but in effect he invariably happened to be conveniently
absent at such times--the times of the freshman rebellion. He began
lecturing now without a word of comment, and on the instant the
peaceful scratching of fountain pens on notebooks replaced the clamors
of war.
The lecture was about half over when there was a tap on the entrance
door; and the white-haired dean, answering, stepped out into the hall.
In a second he returned carrying a thin, yellow envelope.
"A message for--," he studied the writing with near-sighted eyes,
"--for Guy Landers," he announced slowly.
The message went up the incline, hand over hand toward the top row,
and the boy who waited felt the room growing gradually close and dark.
To him a telegram could mean but one thing.
The class sat watching silently until they saw him take the paper from
his neighbor; then in kindness they turned away at the look on his
face. In the pit below the mild old dean began talking absently.
Landers tried to open the envelope, but his nervous hands rebelled. He
laid the broad side firmly against his knee and tore open the end
raggedly, drawing out the inclosed sheet with a trembling rustle that
could be heard all over the room.
The open page was before him; but the letters only danced before his
eyes. He spread the paper as before, flat upon his knee, ere he could
read.
The one short line, the line of which every word was as he expected,
stood clear before him. He felt now a vague sort of wonder that the
brief, picked sentences should have affected him as they had. He had
already known what they told for so long--ever since his name was
spoken at the door--ages ago. He looked hesitatingly around the room.
Several students were scrutinizing him curiously, as though expecting
something. Oh, yes--that recalled him. He must go--home. He hated to
interrupt the lecture, but he must. He got up unsteadily, and started
down the stair, groping his way uncertainly, as a man walks in the
dark.
The kind old dean waited in silence until Landers had passed
hesitatingly through the door; then followed him out into the hall. A
moment, and he returned, standing abstractedly by the lecture table.
He picked up his scattered notes absently, shaking the ends even with
a painstaking hand; then as carefully scattered them as before. He
looked up at the silent, waiting class, and those who were near saw
the tears sparkling in the mild old eyes.
"Landers' father is dead," came the simple, hushed announcement.
V
The bright afternoon sun of late October shone slantingly on the train
of weathered wagons that stretched out like an uncoiling spring from
the group collected in front of the little farm-house. From near and
afar the neighbors had gathered; and now, falling slowly into line,
they formed a chain a full quarter-mile in length.
Guy Landers was glad that at last it was over and they were out in the
sunshine once more. He turned into the carefully reserved place at the
head of the procession with almost a sense of relief. He was tired,
fiercely tired, of the well-meant but insistent pity which dogged him
with a tenacity that drove him desperate. They would not even allow
him to think.
He rode alone on the front seat of the open wagon. Behind him, his
mother and Jim sat stiffly, hand in hand. They gazed dully at the
black thing ahead, and sobbed softly, now singly, now together.
Both--himself as well--were dressed in complete black; old musty
black, gotten out of the dark, hurriedly, and with the close smell of
the closet still upon it. Even the horses conformed to the sober
shade. They had been supplied by a neighbor on account of their
sombre color.
A heavy black tassel swung back and forth with the motion of the
uneven road just ahead of the horses' heads, and Landers sat watching
it idly. He even caught himself counting the vibrations, as though it
were a pendulum, dividing the beats into minutes. Very slow time it
was; but somehow it did not surprise him. It all conformed so
perfectly with the brown, quiet prairie, and the sun shining, slanting
and sleepy.
The swinging tassel grew indistinct, and the _patter_, _patter_,
_patter_ of the teams behind came as from a distance. He closed his
eyes, and the events of the past two days drifted through his mind.
Already they seemed indistinct, as a dream. He wondered dully that
they could be true and yet seem so foreign to his life, now. He even
began to doubt their verity, and opened his eyes slowly, half
expecting to see the cool, green campus, and the big college
buildings. The slanting sunlight met him full in the face, and the
black pendant swung monotonously, from side to side, as before. He
wearily closed his eyes again.
Only two days since he had heard the taunting "Dance, freshy!" of the
seniors, and felt the mighty rush of the freshman hosts; since the
"rah, rah, rah, Landers!" had shook the old amphitheatre and the
dozens of welcoming hands had greeted him; and then--the darkness--the
hesitating leave-taking of the building, and the lingering walk across
the deserted campus toward his room--the walk he knew so well he would
take no more. A brief time of waiting--a blank--and then the bitter,
thumping ride across two States toward his home, when he could only
think, and think, and try to adjust himself--and fail; and at last the
end. And again, at the little station, when he felt the touch of his
mother's hand, and heard her choking "Guy, my boy--" that spoke so
much of love and of trust; when he heard his own voice answering
cheerily, with a firmness which surprised him even then, speaking that
which all through the long ride he had known he must speak--but could
not: "It's all right, mother; don't worry; I'll not leave you
again!"--it all came back to him now, and he lived it over again and
again.
The big, black tassel danced tantalizingly in front of him. Yes, he
had said that he would never leave again. He dully repeated the words
now to himself: "never again." It was so fitting; quite in accordance
with the rest of the black pageant. His dream of life, his new-felt
ambitions--all were dead, dead, like his father before him, where the
black plume nodded.
They passed up through the little town and the shop-keepers came out
to look. Some were in their shirt sleeves; the butcher had his white
apron tucked up around his belt. They gathered together in twos and
groups, nodding toward the procession, their lips moving as in
pantomime. One man walked out to the crossing, counting aloud as the
teams went by. "One, two, three, four, five, six--" he intoned. To him
it was all a thing to amuse, like a circus parade,--interesting in
proportion to its length.
Landers looked almost curiously at the stolid shopmen. It required no
flush of inspiration to tell him that but a few years of this life
were necessary to make him as impassive as they. He who had sworn to
make the world move would be contentedly sitting on an empty goods
box, diligently numbering a passing procession!
The biting humor of the thought appealed to him. He smiled grimly to
himself.
VI
Once more on an early evening, a man turned out from a weather-stained
prairie farm-house, through the frosted grass, arriving presently at
the dusty public road. As before, he walked slowly along between the
tall cottonwoods; but not, as on a memorable former occasion, because
it would be for the last time. He was tired, tired with that absolute
abandon of youth that sees no hope in the future, and has no
philosophy to support it. Only thirty odd days since he went that way
before! That many years would not add more to his life in the future.
Unconsciously he searched along the way for the landmarks he had
watched with so much interest the past summer. He found the nest
where the quail had reared their brood, empty now, and covered thick
with the scattered dust of passing teams. Forgetful that he was weary
he climbed well up the bole of a shaggy old friend, to peep in at the
opening of a deserted woodpecker's home. He came to the big tree at
whose roots, on that other night he remembered so well, he had thrown
himself hopelessly. With a stolid sort of curiosity he looked down at
the spot. Yes, there was the place. A few fallen leaves were scattered
upon the earth where his body had pressed tightly against the
tree-trunk, and there were the hollows where his clenched hands had
found hold. A dull rebellion crept over him as he looked. It had been
needless to torture him so!
He came in sight of the familiar little farm-house and turned in
slowly at the break between the trees. It was growing dark now, but
the odor of tobacco was on the air, and looking closely, he could
catch the gleam from a glowing pipe-bowl in the doorway. He passed his
hand across his brow, almost doubting--it was all so like--before--
A light step came tapping quickly down the pathway toward him. "Guy!"
a voice called softly. "Guy, is that you?"
The voice was quite near him now, and he stopped short, a big maple
above him.
"Yes, Faith."
She came up close, peering into the shadow.
"Guy--" she repeated, "Guy, where are you?"
He reached out and clasped her hand; then again, and took both hands.
Her breath came quickly. Slowly his arm slipped about her waist, she
struggling a little against her own will; then her head fell forward
on his breast, and he could feel her whole body tremble.
The man looked out through the rifts in the half-naked trees; into the
sky, clear and sparkling beyond; on his face an expression of sadness,
of joy, of abandon--all blended indescribably.
Two soft arms crept gently about his neck, and a mass of fluffy hair
caressed his face.
"Oh! Guy! Guy!" sobbed the girl, "it's wicked, I know, but I'm so
glad--so glad--"
THE DOMINANT IMPULSE
I
Calmar Bye was a writer. That is to say, writing was his vocation and
his recreation as well.
As yet, unfortunately, he had been unable to find publishers; but for
that deficiency no reasonable person could hold him responsible. He
had tried them all--and repeatedly. A certain expressman now smiled
when he saw the long, slim figure approaching with a package under his
arm, which from frequent reappearances had become easily recognizable;
but as a person becomes accustomed to a physical deformity, Calmar Bye
had ceased to notice banter.
Of but one thing in his life he was positively certain; and that was
if Nature had fashioned him for any purpose in particular, it was to
do the very thing he was doing now. The reason for this certainty was
that he could do nothing else with even moderate satisfaction. He had
tried, frequently, to break away, and had even succeeded for a month
at a time in an endeavor to avoid writing a word; but inevitably there
came a relapse and a more desperate debauch in literature. Try as he
might he could not avoid the temptation. An incident, a trifle out of
the ordinary in his commonplace life, a sudden thrill at the reading
of another man's story, a night of insomnia, and resolution was in
tatters, and shortly thereafter Calmar Bye's pencil would be coursing
with redoubled vigor over a sheet of virgin paper.
To be sure, Calmar did other things besides write. Being a normal man
with a normal appetite, he could not successfully evade the demands of
animal existence, and when his finances became unbearably low, he
would proceed to their improvement by whatever means came first to
hand. Book-keeping, clerical work, stenography--anything was grist for
his mill at such times, and for a period he would work without rest.
No better assistant could be found anywhere--until he had satisfied
his few creditors and established a small surplus of his own. Then,
presto, change!--and on the surface reappeared Bye, the long, slender,
blue-eyed, dreaming, dawdling, irresponsible writer.
Being what he was, the tenor of Calmar's life was markedly uneven. At
times the lust to write, the spirit of inspiration, as he would have
explained to himself in the privacy of his own study, would come upon
him strong, and for hours or days life would be a joyous thing, his
fellow-men dear brothers of a happy family, the obvious unhappiness
and injustice about him not reality, but mere comedy being enacted for
his particular delectation.
Then at last, his work finished, would come inevitable reaction. The
product of his hand and brain, completed, seemed inadequate and
commonplace. He would smile grimly as with dogged persistence he
started this latest child of his fancy out along the trail so thickly
bestrewn with the skeletons of elder offspring. In measure, as
badinage had previously passed him harmlessly by, it now cut deeply.
No one in the entire town thought him a more complete failure than he
considered himself. Skies, from being sunny, grew suddenly sodden; not
a tenement or alley but thrust obtrusively forward its tale of
misery.
"Think of me," he confided to his friend Bob Wilson one evening as
during his transit through a particularly dismal slough of despond
they in company were busily engaged in blazing the trail with empty
bottles; "One such as I, a man of thirty and of good health, without a
dollar or the prospect of a dollar, an income or the prospect of an
income, a home or the prospect of a home, following a cold scent like
the one I am now on!" He snapped his finger against the rim of his
thin drinking glass until it rang merrily.
"The idea, again, of a man such as I, untravelled, penniless,
self-educated, thinking to compete with others who journey the world
over to secure material, and who have spent a fortune in preparation
for this particular work." He excitedly drained the contents of the
glass.
"It's preposterous, childlike!"--he brought the frail trifle down to the
table with an emphasis which was all but its destruction--"imbecile!
I tell you I'm going to quit.
"Quit for good," he repeated at the expression on the other's face.
Bob Wilson scrutinized his companion with a critical eye.
"Waiter," he said, speaking over his shoulder, "waiter, kindly tax our
credit further to the extent of a couple of Havanas."
"Yes, sah," acknowledged the waiter.
Silence fell; but Bob's observation of his friend continued.
"So you are going to quit the fight?" he commented at last.
"I am,"--decidedly.
Wilson lit his cigar.
"You have completed that latest--production on which you were engaged,
I suppose?"
The writer scratched a match.
"This afternoon."
"And sent it on?"
A nod. "Yes, on to the furnace room."
A smile which approached a grin formed over Bob's big face.
"You have hope of its acceptance, I trust?"
Calmar Bye blew a cloud of smoke far toward the ceiling, and the
smile, a shade grim, was reflected.
"More than hope," laconically. "I have certainty at last."
Another pause followed and slowly the smile vanished from the faces of
both.
"Bob," and the long Calmar straightened in his chair, "I've been an
ass. It's all apparent, too apparent, now. I've tried to compete with
the entire world, and I'm too small. It's enough for me to work
against local competition." He meditatively flicked the ash from his
cigar with his little finger.
"I realize that a lot of my friends--women friends particularly--will
say they always knew I had no determination, wouldn't stay in the game
until I won. They're all alike in this one particular, Bob; all
sticklers for the big lower jaw.
"But I don't care. I've been shooting into a covey of publishers for
twelve years and never have touched a feather. Perseverance is a good
quality, but there is such a thing as insanity." He stared
unconsciously at the portieres of the booth.
"Once and for all, I tell you I'm through," he repeated.
"What are you going at?" queried Bob, sympathetically, a shade
quizzically.
The long Calmar reached into his pocket with deliberation.
"Read that." He tossed a letter across the tiny table.
Bob poised the epistle in his hand gingerly.
"South Dakota," he commented, as he observed the postmark. "Humph, I
can't make out the town."
"It's not a town at all, only a postoffice. Immaterial anyway,"
explained Calmar, irritably.
The round-faced man unfolded the letter slowly and read aloud:--
"MY DEAR SIR:--
"Your request, coming from a stranger, is rather unusual; but if
you really mean business, I will say this: Provided you're
willing to take hold and stay right with me, I'll take you in
and at the end of a half-year pay $75.00 per month. You can then
put into the common fund whatever part of your savings you wish
and have a proportionate interest in the herd. Permit me to
observe, however, that you will find your surroundings somewhat
different from those amid which you are living at present, and I
should advise you to consider carefully before you make the
change.
"Very truly yours,
"E. J. DOUGLASS."
Bob slowly folded the sheet, and tossed it back.
"In what particular portion of that desert, if I may ask, does your
new employer reside?" There was uncertainty in the speaker's voice,
as of one who spoke of India or the islands of the Pacific.
"Likewise--pardon my ignorance--is that herd he mentions--buffalo?"
Calmar imperturbably returned the letter to his pocket.
"I'm serious, Robert. Douglass is a cattle man west of the river."
"The river!" apostrophized Bob. "The man juggles with mysteries. What
river, pray?"
"The Missouri, of course. Didn't you ever study geography?"
"I beg your pardon," in humble apology. "Is that," vaguely, "what they
call the Bad Lands?"
Bye looked across at his friend, of a mind to be indignant; then his
good-nature triumphed.
"No, it's not so bad as that," with a feeble attempt at a pun. He
paused to light a cigar, and absent-minded as usual, continued in
digression.
"I've dangled long enough, old man; too long. I'm going to do
something now. I start to-morrow."
Bob Wilson the skeptic, looked at his friend again critically.
Resolutions of reconstruction he had heard before--and later watched
their downfall; but this time somehow there was a new element
introduced. Perhaps, after all--
"Waiter," he called, "we'll trifle with another quart of extra-dry, if
you please."
"To your success," he added to his companion across the table, when
the waiter had returned from his mission.
II
A year passed around, as years have a way of doing, and found
Calmar Bye, the city man, metamorphosed indeed. Bronzed, bearded,
corduroy-clothed, cigarette-smoking,--for cigars fifty miles from a
railroad are a curiosity,--as the seasons are dissimilar, so was he
unlike his former inconsequent self. In his every action now was a
directness and a purpose of which he had not even a conception in
his former existence.
Very, very thin upon us all is the veneer of civilization; very, very
swift is the reversion to the primitive when opportunity presents.
Only twelve short months and this man, end product of civilization,
doer of nothing practical, dreamer of dreams and recorder of fancies,
had become a positive force, a contributor to the world's food supply,
a producer of meat. What a satire, in a period of time of which the
shifting seasons could be counted upon one hand, to have vibrated
from manuscript to beef, and for the change to be seemingly
unalterable!
To be sure there had been a struggle; a period of travail while
readjustment was being established; a desperate sense of homesickness
at first view of the undulating, grass-covered, horizon-bounded
prairies; an insatiable need of the shops, the theatres, the
telephones, the _cafes_, the newspapers, all of which previously had
constituted everything that made life worth living. But these emotions
had passed away. What evolvement of civilization could equal the
beauty of a dew-scented, sun-sparkling prairie morning, or the
grandeur of a soundless, star-dotted prairie night, wherein the very
limitlessness of things, their immensity, was a never ending source of
wonder? Verily, all changes and conditions of life have their
compensations.
Calmar Bye, the one time listless, had learned many things in this
unheard-of world.
First of all, most insistent of all, he was impressed with the
overwhelming predominance of the physical over the mental. Later, in
practical knowledge, he grew inured to the "feel" of a native bucking
broncho and the sound of mocking, human laughter after a stunning
fall; in direct evolution, the method of throwing a steer and the odor
of burnt hair and hide which followed the puff of smoke where the
branding iron touched ceased to be cruel.
Last of all, highest evolvement of all, came the absorption of
revolver-lore under the instruction of experts who made but pastime of
picking a jack-rabbit in its flight, or bringing a kite, soaring high
in air, tumbling precipitate to earth. A wild life it was and a rough,
but fascinating nevertheless in its demonstration of the overwhelming
superiority of man, the animal, in nerve and endurance over every
other live thing on earth.
At the end of the year, with the hand of winter again pressed firmly
upon the land, it seemed time could do no more; that the adaptation of
the exotic to his new surroundings was complete. Already the past life
seemed a thing interesting but aloof from reality, like the fantastic
exploits of a hero of fiction, and the present, the insistently
active, vital present, the sole consideration of importance.
In the appreciation of the stoic indifference of the then West it was
a slight incident which overthrew. One cowboy, "Slim" Rawley, had a
particularly vicious broncho, which none but he had ever been able to
control, and which in consequence, he prized as the apple of his eye.
During his temporary absence from the ranch one day a _confrere_,
"Stiff" Warwick, had, in a spirit of bravado, roped the "devil" and
instituted a contest of wills. The pony was stubborn, the man
likewise, and a battle royal followed. As a buzzard scents carrion,
other cowboys anticipated sport, and a group soon gathered. Ere
minutes had passed the blood of the belligerents was up, and they were
battling as for life, with a dogged determination which would have
lasted upon the part of either, the man or the beast, until death.
Rough scenes and inhuman, Bye had witnessed until _blase_; but nothing
before like this. The man used quirt, rowel, and profanity like a
fiend. The pony, panting, quivering, bucking, struggling, covered with
foam and streaming with blood, shrilled with the impotent anger of a
demon. Even the impassive cowboy spectators from chaffing lapsed into
silence.
Of a sudden, loping easily over the frost-bound prairie and following
the winding trail of a cowpath, appeared the approaching figure of a
horse and rider. It came on steadily, clear to the gathered group, and
stopped. An instant and the newcomer understood the scene and a curse
sprang to his lips. Another instant and his own mustang was spurred in
close by the strugglers. His right hand raised in air and bearing a
heavy quirt, descended; not upon the broncho, but far across the
cursing, devilish face of the man, its rider. Then swift as thought
and simultaneously as twin machines, the hands of the intruder and of
the struggling "buster" went to their hips.
The spectators held their breaths; not one stirred. Before them they
saw the hands which had gone to hips flash up and forward like pistons
from companion cylinders, and they saw two puffs of smoke like
escaping steam.
Smoothly, as a scene in a rehearsed play, the reports mingled, the
riders, scarcely ten feet apart, tottered in their saddles, and
slowly, unconsciously resistant even in death, the two bodies slipped
to earth.
[Illustration: They saw the hands which had gone to hips flash up and
forward like pistons, and two puffs of smoke like escaping steam.]
But there the unison ended. The mustang which "Slim" Rawley rode stood
still in its tracks; but before the spectators could rush in, the
"devil" broncho, relieved of the hand upon the curb, sprang away, and
with the "buster's" foot caught fast in the stirrup ran squealing,
kicking, crazy mad out over the prairie, dragging by its side the limp
figure of its unseated enemy.
Calmar Bye watched the whole spectacle as in a dream. So swift had
been the action, so fantastic the denouement, that he could not at
first reconcile it all with reality. He went slowly over to the
prostrate "Slim" Rawley, whom the others had laid out decently upon
the ground, half expecting him to leap up and laugh in their faces;
but the already stiffening figure with the fiendish scowl upon its
face, was convincing.
Besides,--gods, the indifference of these men to death! The party of
onlookers were already separating--one division, mounted, starting in
pursuit of the escaping broncho, along the narrow trail made by the
dragged man; the others impassively reconnoitring for spades and
shovels, were stolidly awaiting the breaking of the lock of
frost-bound earth at the hands of a big, red-shirted cowboy with a
pick!
"Here, Bye," suggested one toiler, "you're an eddicated man; say a
prayer er something, can't ye, before we plant old 'Slim.' He wa'nt
sech a bad sort."
The tenderfoot complied, and said something--he never knew just
what--as the dry clods thumped dully upon the huddled figure in the
old gunny sack. What he said must have been good, for those present
resisted with difficulty a disposition to applaud.
This labor complete, the cowboys scattered, miles apart, each to his
division of the herd, which for better range had been distributed over
a wide territory. Bye was in charge of the home bunch, and sat long
after the others had left, upon the new-formed mound in the ranch
dooryard.
Far over the broad, rolling prairies, as yet bare and frost-bound, the
sun shone brightly. A half-mile away he could see his own herd
scattered and grazing. The stillness after the sudden excitement was
almost unbelievable. Minutes passed by which dragged into an hour.
Over the face of the sun a faint haze began to form and, unnoticeable
to one not prairie-trained, the air took on a sympathetic feel, almost
of dampness. A native would have sensed a warning; but Calmar Bye, one
time writer, paid no heed. An instinct of his life, one he had thought
suppressed, a necessity imperative as hunger, was gathering upon him
strongly--the overwhelming instinct to portray the unusual.
Under its guidance, as in a maze, he made his way into the rough,
unplastered shanty. Automatically he found a pencil and collected some
scraps of coarse wrapping paper. Already the opening words of the tale
he had to tell were in his mind, and sitting down by the greasy
pine-board table, he began to write.
Hours passed. Over the sun the haze thickened. The whole sky grew
sodden, the earth a corresponding grayish hue. Now and anon puffs of
wind, like sudden breaths, stirred the dull air, and the short
buffalo grass trembled in anticipation. The puffs increased until
their direction became definite, and at last here and there big,
irregular feathers of snow drifted languidly to earth.
Within the shanty the man wrote unceasingly. Many fragments he covered
and deposited, an irregular heap, at his right hand. At his left an
adolescent mound of cigarette stumps grew steadily larger. A cloud of
tobacco smoke over his head, driven here and there by vagrant currents
of air, gathered denser and denser.
As the light failed, the writer unconsciously moved the rough table
nearer and nearer the window until, blocked, it could go no farther.
To one less preoccupied the grating over the uneven floor would have
been startling. Once just outside the door the waiting pony neighed
warningly--and again. Upon the ledge beneath the window-pane a tiny
mound of snowflakes began to take form; around the shanty the rising
wind mourned dismally.
The light failed by degrees, until the paper was scarcely visible,
and, brought to consciousness, the man rose to light a lamp. One look
about and he passed his hand over his forehead, absently. Striding to
the door, he flung it wide open.
"Hell!" he muttered in complex apostrophe.
To put on hat and top-coat was the act of a moment. To release the
tethered pony the work of another; then swift as a great brown shadow,
out across the whitening prairie to the spot he remembered last to
have seen the herd, the delinquent urged the willing broncho--only to
find emptiness; not even the suggestion of a trail.
Back and forth, through miles and miles of country, in semi-circles
ever widening, through a storm ever increasing and with daylight
steadily diminishing, Calmar Bye searched doggedly for the departed
herd; searched until at last even he, ignorant of the supreme terrors
of a South Dakota blizzard, dared not remain out longer.
That he found his way back to the ranch yard was almost a miracle. As
it was, groping at last in utter darkness, blinded by a sleet which
cut like dull knives, and buffeted by a wind like a hurricane, more
dead than alive he stumbled upon the home shanty and opening the door
drew the weary broncho in after him. Man and beast were brothers on
such a night.
Of the hours which followed, of moaning wind and drifting sleet,
nature kindly gave him oblivion. Dead tired, he slept. And morning,
crisp, smiling, cloudless, was about him when he awoke.
Rising, and scarcely stopping for a lunch, the man again sallied forth
upon his search, wading through drifts blown almost firm enough to
bear the pony's weight and alternate spots wind-swept bare as a floor;
while all about, gorgeous as multiple rainbows, flashed mocking bright
the shifting sparkle from innumerable frost crystals.
All the morning he searched, farther and farther away, until the
country grew rougher and he was full ten miles from home. At last,
stopping upon a small hill to reconnoitre, the searcher heard far in
the distance a sound he recognized and which sent his cheek pale--the
faint dying wail of a wounded steer. It came from a deep draw between
two low hills, one cut into a steep ravine by converged floods and
hidden by the tall surrounding weeds. Bye knew the place well and the
significance of the sound he heard. In a cattle country, after a
sudden blizzard, it could have but one meaning, and that the terror of
all time to animals wild or domestic--the end of a stampede.
Only too soon thereafter the searcher found his herd. Upon the
brow of a hill overlooking the ravine he stopped. Below him,
bellowing, groaning, struggling, wounded, dying, and dead--a great
mass of heavy bodies, mixed indiscriminately--bruised, broken,
segmented, blood-covered, horrible, lay the observer's trust, the
wealth of his employer, his own hope of regeneration, worse now than
worthless carrion. And the cause of it all, the sole excuse for
this delinquency, lay back there upon a greasy table in the
shanty--a short scrawling tale scribbled upon a handful of scrap
paper!
III
"Yes, I'm back, Bob."
The tall, thin Calmar Bye leaned back in his chair and looked
listlessly about the familiar _cafe_, without a suggestion of emotion.
It seemed to him hardly credible that he had been away from it all for
a year and more. Nothing was changed. Across the room the same mirrors
repeated the reflections he had observed so many times before. Nearby
were the same booths and from within them came the same laughter and
chatter and suppressed song. Opposite the tiny table the same man with
the broad, good-natured face was making critical, smiling observation,
as of yore. As ever, the look recalled the visionary to the present.
"Back for good, Bob," he repeated slowly.
The speaker's attitude was far from being that of a conquering hero
returned; the sympathies of the easy-going Robert, ever responsive,
were roused.
"What's the matter, old man?" he queried tentatively. "Weren't you a
success as a broncho-buster?"
"A success!" Calmar Bye stroked a long, thin face with a long, thin
hand. "A success!" he repeated. "I couldn't have been a worse
failure, Bob." He paused a moment, smoothing the table-cloth absently
with his finger tips.
"Success!" once more, bitterly. "I'm not even a mediocre at anything
unless it is at what I'm doing now, dangling and helping spend the
money some one else has worked all day to earn." He looked his
astonished friend fair in the eyes.
"You don't know what an idiot, a worse than idiot, I've made of
myself," and he began the story of the past year.
Monotonously, unemotionally he told the tale, omitting nothing, adding
nothing; while about him the sounds of the restaurant, the tinkling of
glassware, the ring of silver, the familiar muffled pop of extracted
corks, played a soft accompaniment. Occasionally Bob would make a
comment or ask explanation of something to him entirely new; but that
was all until near the end,--where the delinquent herder, coming
swiftly to the brow of the hill, looked down upon the scene in the
ravine below. Then Bob, the care-free, the pleasure-seeking, raised a
hand in swift protest.
"Don't describe it, please, old man," he requested. "I'd rather not
hear."
The speaker's voice ceased; over his thin features fell the light of a
queer little half-smile which, instead of declaring itself, only
provoked Bob Wilson's curiosity. In the silence Bye, with a hand
unaccustomed to the exercise, made the familiar gesture that brought
one of the busy attendants to his side.
"And the story you wrote--?" suggested Wilson while they waited.
For answer Calmar Bye drew an envelope from his pocket and tossed it
across the table to his friend. Wilson first noted that it bore the
return address of one of the country's foremost magazines; he then
unfolded the letter and read aloud:
"DEAR MR. BYE:--
"The receipt of your two stories, 'Storm and Stampede' and 'The
Lonely Grave,' has settled a troublesome question for us,
namely: What has become of Mr. Calmar Bye?
"No doubt you will recall that our criticisms of the material
which you have submitted from time to time in the past,
were directed chiefly against faults arising out of your
unfamiliarity with your subjects. The present manuscripts
bear the best testimony that you have been gathering your
material at first hand. We have the feeling, as we read, that
every sentence flows straight from the heart.
"Now we want just such vivid, gripping, red-blooded cross-sections
of life as these, your two latest accomplishments; in fact, we
can't get enough of them. Therefore, instead of making you a cash
offer for these two stories, we suggest that you first call at
our office at your earliest convenience. If agreeable, we should
like to arrange for a series of Western stories and articles, the
evolving of which should keep you engaged for some time to come.
"Cordially,
"------"
The hands of the two friends clasped across the table. No word
disturbed the silence until the forgotten waiter broke in impatiently:
"Yo' o'der, sahs?"
"Champagne"--this time it was Calmar Bye who gave it--"a quart. And
be lively about it, too."
"Well, well!" Bob Wilson's admiration burst forth. "It is worth a
whole herd of steers."
THE STUFF OF HEROES
Springtime on the prairies of South Dakota. It is early morning,
the sun is not yet up, but all is light and even and soft and
all-surrounding, so that there are no shadows. In every direction
the gently rolling country is dotted brown and white from the
incomplete melting of winter's snows. In the low places tiny
streams of snow-water, melted yesterday, sing low under the
lattice-work blanket the frost has built in the night. Nearby and in
the distance prairie-chickens are calling, lonely, uncertain. Wild
ducks in confused masses, mere specks in the distance, follow low
over the winding curves of the river. High overhead, flocks of geese
in regular black wedges, and brant, are flying northward, and the
breezy sound of flapping wings and of voices calling, mingle in the
sweetest of all music to those who know the prairies--Nature's
morning song of springtime.
"What a country! Look there!" The big man in the front seat of the
rough, low wagon pointed east where the sun rose slowly from the lap
of the prairie. The other men cleared their throats as if to speak,
but said nothing.
"And I've lived sixty years without knowing," continued the first
voice, musingly.
"I've never been West before, either," admitted De Young, simply.
They drove on, the trickling of snow-water sounding around the wagon
wheels.
The third man, Clark, pointed back in the direction they had come.
"Did any one back there inquire what we were doing?" he asked.
"A fellow 'lowed,' with a rising inflection, that we were hunting
ducks," said De Young. "I temporized; made him forget that I hadn't
answered. You know what will happen once the curiosity of the natives
is aroused."
"I wasn't approached," Morris joined in, without turning. The corners
of the big man's mouth twitched, as the suggested picture formed
swiftly in his mind.
After a pause, De Young spoke again.
"I gave the postmaster a specially good tip to see that we got our
mail out promptly."
"So did I," Clark admitted.
The face of the serious man lighted; and, their eyes meeting, the
three friends smiled all together.
The sun rose higher, without a breath of wind from over the prairies,
and one after another the men removed their top-coats. The horses'
hoofs splashed at each step in slush and running water, sending drops
against the dashboard with a sound like rain.
The trail which they were following could now scarcely be seen, except
at intervals on higher ground, where hoof-prints and the tracks of
wheels were scored in the soft mud, and with each mile these marks
grew deeper and broader as the partly frozen earth softened.
The air of solemnity which had hung about the men for days, and which
lifted from time to time only temporarily, now silenced them again.
Indeed, had there been anybody present to observe, he doubtless would
have been impressed most of all with the unwonted soberness of the
wagon's occupants, a gravity strangely at variance with the rampant,
fecund season.
And the object of their journeying into this unknown world was in all
truth a matter for silence rather than speech; its influence was
toward deep and earnest meditation, to which the joyous, awakening
world could do no more than chant in a minor key a melancholy
accompaniment. Never did a soldier advancing upon a breach in the
enemy's breastworks more certainly confront the grinning face of
Death, than did this trio in their progress across the singing
prairie; but where the plaudits of the world spelled glory for the
one, the three in the wagon knew that for them Death meant oblivion,
extinction, a blotting out that must needs be utter and inevitable.
The thoughts of each dwelt upon some aspect of two scenes which had
happened only a brief fortnight previously. There had been a notable
convention of physicians in a city many miles to the east. One
delegate, a man young, slender, firm of jaw, his face shining with
zeal and the spirit which courts self-immolation, had addressed the
body. His speech had made a profound impression--after its first
effect of sensation had subsided--upon the hundreds gathered there,
who hearkened amazedly; but of those hundreds only two had been moved
to lay aside the tools of their calling and follow him.
And whither was he leading them? Into the Outer Darkness, each firmly
believed. For them the future was spelled _nihil_; for the world,
salvation--perhaps.
The inspired voice still rang in memory.
"Gentlemen, I repeat, it is a challenge.... The flag of the enemy is
hung up boldly, flauntingly, in every public place.... Are we to
permit this? Are we to sit idle and acknowledge ourselves beaten in
the great struggle against Death? No, no, no! The Nation--yea, the
whole civilized world--shrinks and shudders in terror before the sound
of one dread word--_tuberculosis_!
"Our professional honor--our personal honor as well, gentlemen--is at
stake. A solemn charge is laid upon us.... We must die if need be;
but we must conquer this monstrous scourge, which is the single cause
of more than one death in every ten."
And then, the deep silence which had marked the closing words:
"Gentlemen, I can cure consumption," came the simple declaration. "If
there are those among you who value Science more than gain; who are
willing to dare with me, willing to pay the extreme price, if
necessary--if there are any such among you, and I believe there are,
meet with me in my rooms this evening."
To the eight who accepted that invitation, Dr. De Young disclosed the
details of his Great Experiment. It included, among many other things
which no one but a physician can appreciate, the lending of their
bodies to the Experiment's exemplification. Of the eight, two had
agreed to follow him to the end. Each of the three had placed his
house in order, and here they were, nearing that end, whatever it was
to be.
An hour passed, and now ahead in the distance a rough shanty came into
view. It was the only house in sight, and the three men knew it was
to be theirs. In silence they drew up where the men were unpacking
their goods.
"Good morning for ducks--saw a big flock of mallards back here in a
pond," observed the man who took their team.
The three doctors alighted without answering, and watching them, the
man stroked a stubby red whisker in meditation.
"Lord, they're a frost!" he commented.
* * * * *
Night had come, and the stars shone early from a sky yet light and
warm. In the low places the waters sang louder than before, with the
increase of a day's thawing. Looking away, the white spots were
smaller and the brown patches larger; otherwise, all was the same, the
prairie of yesterday, of to-day, and to-morrow.
Tired with a day of settling, the three men stood in the doorway and
for the first time viewed the country at night. They were not talkers
at best, and now the immensity of the broad prairies held them silent.
The daily struggle of life, the activity and rivalry and ambition
which before to-night had seemed so great to these city-bred men, here
alone with Nature and Nature's God, where none other might see,
assumed their true worth. The tangled web of life loosened and many
foreign things caught and held therein, fell out. Man, introspecting,
saw himself at his real worth, and was not proud.
The absolute quiet, so unusual, made them wakeful, and though tired,
they sat long in the doorway, smoking, thinking. Small talk seemed to
them profanation, and of that which was uppermost in each man's mind,
none cared first to speak. A subtle understanding, called telepathy,
was making of their several minds a thing united.
"No, not to-night, it's too beautiful," said De Young at length, and
the protesting voice sounded to his own ears as that of a stranger.
The men started at the sound, and the glowing tips of three cigars
described partial arcs in the half light as they turned each to each.
No one answered. They were face to face with fundamentals at last.
Minutes, an hour, passed. The cigars burned out, and as the pleasant
odor of tobacco died away, there came the chill night air of the
prairie. The two older men rose stiffly, and with a low good-night,
stumbled into the darkness of the shanty.
De Young sat alone in the doorway. He realized that it was the supreme
hour of his life. In his mind, memory of past and hope of future met
on the battlefield of the present, and meeting, mingled in chaos.
Thoughts came crowding upon each other thick--the thoughts which come
to few more than once in life, to multitudes, never; the thoughts
which writers in every language, during all time, have sought words to
express, and in vain.
Everywhere the snow-streams sang lower and lower. A fog, dense,
penetrating, born of early morning, wrapped all things about, uniting
and at the same time setting apart. Shivering, he shut the door on the
night and the damp, and as by instinct crept into bed. Listening in
the darkness, the sound of the sleepers soothed him. Happier thoughts
came, thoughts which made his heart beat more swiftly and his eyes
grow tender; for he was yet young, and love untold ever dwelleth near
heaven. Thus he fell asleep with a smile.
"Choose, please. We'll take our turns in the order of length," said De
Young, holding up the ends of three paper strips. Each man drew, and
in the silence that followed, without a word Morris turned away,
preparing swiftly for the operation.
"Give me chloroform," he said, stretching himself horizontally,--adding
as the others bent over him, "Inoculate deep, please. Let's not
waste time."
Swiftly, with the precision of absolute knowledge, the two physicians
did their work. A mist was over their eyes, so that all the room
looked dim, as to old men; and hands which had not known a tremor for
years, shook as they emptied the contents of the little syringe,
teeming with tiny, unseen, living rods. Clark's forehead was damp with
a perspiration that physical pain could not have brought, and on De
Young's face, time marked those minutes as months.
It was all done with the habit of years. The two doctors carefully
sterilized their instruments and replaced them in cases, then,
silently, drawn nearer together than ever before, the two friends
watched the return of consciousness. And Morris awakening, things
real and of dreamland still confused to his senses, heard the soft
voice which a legion of patients had thus heard and blessed, saying
cheerily, "Wake up! wake up, my friend!"
Thus the day passed. In turn, the men, hours apart, with active
brains, and eyes wide open, sent their challenges to Death--each man
his own messenger.
The months slipped by. Suns became torrid hot, and cooled until it
seemed there was light but not heat on earth. Days grew longer, and in
unison, earth waxed greener; then in descending scale, both together
waned. Migratory wings fluttering at night, and passing voices calling
in the darkness--most lonely sounds of earth--gave place to singers of
the day. The robin, the meadow-lark, the ubiquitous catbird, all born
of prairie and of summer, came and went. Blackbirds in countless
flocks followed. Again the calling of prairie-chickens was heard at
eve and morning, and anon frost glistened in the air.
At last throughout the land no sound of animal voice was heard, for
winter bound all things firm and white. Another cycle was complete;
yet, almost ere the record could be made, there appeared, moving far
in the distance, a black triangle. Passing swiftly, with the sound of
wings and calling voices, there sprang anew in all things animate a
mixed feeling of gladness and unrest, which was the spirit of returned
spring.
Thus twice the cycle of the seasons passed, and again the sun of early
spring, shining bright, set the tiny snow-streams singing. It
glistened over the prairie on snow-drift and frost; it lit up the few
scattered shingled roofs of settlers newly come; and shone in at the
open door of a rough cabin we know, touching without pity the faces of
the two men who watched its rise. Shining low, even with the prairie,
it touched in vivid contrast an oblong mound of fresh earth, heaped up
target distance from the cabin door.
The mound had not been there long; neither snow or rain had yet
touched it; it was still strange to the men in the doorway, who saw it
vividly now, at time of sunrise. Though thus early, each man sat idly
smoking, an open book reversed on the knee.
De Young first broke the silence.
"We must do something, or else decide to do nothing about Clark's
mail." He shifted in his seat, looking away from the open door.
"I don't know--whether--it would be kinder to tell them or not."
A coughing fit shook Morris, and answering, a twitch as of pain
tightened the corners of his companion's eyes. Minutes passed, and
Morris sat limply in his chair, before he answered,
"I thought at first we'd better write; now it seems different. Let's
wait until we go back."
Neither of the men looked at the other. They seldom did now; it
was useless pain. Filled with the incomparable optimism of the
consumptive, neither man realized his own condition, but marked the
days of his friend. Morris, unbelieving, spoke of his friend's
return; yet, growing weaker each day himself, spoke in all hope and
conviction of his future work, recording each day his mode of
successful treatment, despite interruptions of coughing which left
him breathless and trembling for minutes. De Young saw, and in
pity marvelled; yet, seeing, and as a physician knowing, he not for a
moment applied the gauge to himself.
Nature, in sportive mood, commands the Angel of Death, who with
matchless legerdemain, keeps the mirror of illusion, unsuspected,
before the consumptive's eyes; and, seeing, in derision the satirist
smiles.
Unavoidably acting parts, the two friends found a barrier of
artificiality separating them, making each happier when alone. Thus
day after day, monotonous, unchanging, went by. Not another person
entered their door. From the little town a man at periods brought
provisions and their mail, but the house was acquiring an uncanny
reputation. They were not understood, and such are ever foreign. With
the passage of time and the coming of the mound in the dooryard, the
feeling had developed into positive fear, and travellers avoided the
place as though warned by a scarlet placard.
Morris grew weaker daily. At last the disillusionment that precedes
death came to him. The artificial slipped from both men and a
nearness like that of brothers, joined them. They spoke not of the
future but of the past. Years slipped aside and left them back in the
midst of active, brain-satisfying practice. Over again they performed
operations, where life and death were separated but by a hair's width.
Again, with eyes that brightened and breath that came more quickly,
they lived their successes, and hand in hand, as children in the dark,
told of their failures, and the tale was long, for they were but men.
The end came quietly. A hemorrhage, a big spot of blood on the cover,
a firm hand pressure, and Morris's parting words,
"Save my notes."
That night De Young knew no sleep. "I must finish the work," he said,
in lame excuse. Well he knew there could be no rest for him that
night. He did his task thoroughly, making record of things that had
passed, with the precision of a physician who knows a patient but as
material.
A tramp, who, unknowing, had taken shelter in an outbuilding, waking
in the night, saw the light. Moved by curiosity, he crawled up softly
in the darkness, and peeped in at the window. In the half light he saw
on the bed a thin, white face motionless in the expression which even
he knew was death; and at the table, writing rapidly with manuscript
all about, a man whose eyes shone with the brilliancy of disease, and
with a face as pale as the face on the pillow. In the blank,
unreasoning terror of superstition, he fled until Nature rebelled and
would carry him no farther. Next day to all he saw, he told the tale
of supernatural things which lingers yet around a prairie ruin, in
whose dooryard are mounds built of man.
The mail carrier calling next day saw a man with spots of scarlet
heightening the contrast of a face pale as death, digging in the
dooryard. The man worked slowly, for he coughed often and must rest.
In kindness the carrier offered help, but was refused with words that
brought to the listener's eyes a moisture unknown since boyhood, and
the thought of which in days that followed, kept him silent concerning
what he had seen.
Summer, with the breath of warm life and the odor of growing things;
with days made dreamy and thoughtful by the purring of the soft wind
and the droning of insects; and nights when all was good; with stars
above and crickets singing below--summer had come and was passing.
De Young could no longer deceive himself. The personal faith that had
upheld him so long--when friends had failed--could fight the
inevitable no longer. With eyes wide open, he saw at last clearly,
and, seeing, realized the end. He cared not for death; he was too
strong for that; but it must needs be that, now, with the shadow of
defeat lying dark over the future, the problem of motive, the great
"why," should come uppermost in his mind demanding an answer.
Once before, at the time when other men read from their lives, he
caught glimpses of something beyond. Now again the mood returned, and
he knew why he was as he was; that with him love was, and had been,
stronger than Science and all else beside. He knew that whatever he
might have done, the entering into his life of The Woman, and the
knowledge that followed her coming, had inspired the supreme motive
that thenceforth drove him forward. With this realization came a new
life, a happier and a sadder life, in which all things underwent
readjustment.
Regret came as sadness, regret that he had not told this woman
all; that in his blind confidence he had not written, but had
waited--waited for this. He would wait no longer. He would tell
her now. A thousand new thoughts came to his mind; a thousand new
feelings surged over him as a flood, and he poured them out on paper.
The man himself, not the physician, was unfolded for the first time in
his life, and the writing of that letter which told all, his life,
his love, that ended with a good-bye which was forever, was the
sweetest labor of his life. He sealed the letter and sat for hours
looking at it, dreaming.
It was summer and the nights were short, so that with the writing and
the dreams, morning had come. He could scarce wait that day for the
carrier; time to him had become suddenly a thing most precious; and
when at last the man appeared. De Young twice exacted the promise
that the letter should be mailed special delivery.
The reaction was on and all the world was dark. Fool that he was, two
years had passed since he had heard from her. She also was a
consumptive; might not--?
The very thought was torture; perspiration started at every pore, and
with the little strength that was left he paced up and down the room
like a caged animal. A fit of coughing, such as he had never known
before, seized him, and he dropped full length upon the bed.
The limit was reached; he slept.
As he had worked one night before to forget, so he spent the following
days. It was the end, and he knew it; but he no longer cared. His
future was centred on one event--the coming of a letter. Beyond that
all was shadow, and he cared not to explore. He worked all that Nature
would allow, carrying to completion his observations, admitting his
mistake with a candor which now caused no personal pain. He spent much
time at his journal, writing needless things: his actions, his very
thoughts,--things which could not have been wrung from him before;
but he was lonely and desperate. He must not think--'t was madness. So
he wrote and wrote and wrote.
He watched for the carrier all the daylight hours. His mail was light,
and the coming infrequent. There had been time for an answer, and the
watcher could no longer compose himself to write. All day he sat in
the doorway, looking across the two mounds, down the road whence the
carrier would come.
And at last he came. Far down the road toward town one morning a
familiar moving figure grew distinct. De Young watched as though
fascinated. He wanted to shout, to laugh, to cry. With an effort that
sent his finger nails deep into his palms, he kept quiet, waiting.
A letter was in the carrier's hand. Struck by the look on De Young's
face, the postman did not turn, but stood near by watching. The exile,
once the immovable, seized the missive feverishly, then paused to
examine. It was a man's writing he held, and he winced as at a blow,
but with a hand that was nerved too high to tremble, he tore open the
envelope. He read the few words, and read again; then in a motion of
weariness and hopelessness indescribable, hands and paper dropped.
"My God! And she never knew," he whispered.
When next the carrier came, he shaped the third mound.
ARCADIA IN AVERNUS
"_For they have sown the wind, and
they shall reap the whirlwind._"
CHAPTER I--PRELUDE
Silence, the silence of double doors and of padded walls was upon the
private room of the down-town office. Across the littered, ink-stained
desk a man and a woman faced each other. Threads of gray lightened the
hair of each. Faint lines, delicate as pencillings, marked the
forehead of the woman and radiated from the angles of her eyes. A deep
fissure unequally separated the brows of the man, and on his shaven
face another furrow added firmness to the mouth. Their eyes met
squarely, without a motion from faces imperturbable in middle age and
knowledge of life.
The man broke silence slowly.
"You mean," he hesitated, "what that would seem to mean?"
"Why not?" A shade of resentment was in the answering voice.
"But you're a woman--"
"Well--"
"And married--"
The note of resentment became positive. "What difference does that
make?"
"It ought to." The man spoke almost mechanically. "You took oath
before man and higher than man--"
The woman interrupted him shortly.
"Another took oath with me and broke it." She leaned gracefully
forward in the big chair until their eyes met. "I'm no longer bound."
"But I--"
"I love you!" she interjected.
The man's eyebrows lifted.
"Love?" he inflected.
"Yes, love. What is love but good friendship--and sex?"
The man was silent.
A strong white hand slid under the woman's chin and her elbow met the
desk.
"I meant what you thought," she completed slowly.
"But I cannot--"
"Why?"
"It destroys all my ideas of things. Your promise to another--"
"I say he's broken his promise to me."
"But your being a woman--"
"Why do you expect more of me because I'm a woman? Haven't I feelings,
rights, as well as you who are a man?" She waited until he looked up.
"I ask you again, won't you come?"
The man arose and walked slowly back and forth across the narrow room.
At length he stopped by her chair.
"I cannot."
In swift motion his companion stood up facing him.
"Don't you wish to?" she challenged.
The hand of the man dropped in outward motion of deprecation.
"The question is useless. I'm human."
"Why shouldn't we do what pleases us, then?" The voice was insistent.
"What is life for if not for pleasure?"
"Would it be pleasure, though? Wouldn't the future hold for us more
of pain than of pleasure?"
"No, never." The words came with a slowness that meant finality. "Why
need to-morrow or a year from now be different from to-day unless we
make it so?"
"But it would change unconsciously. We'd think and hate ourselves."
"For what reason? Isn't it Nature that attracts us to each other and
can Nature be wrong?"
"We can't always depend upon Nature," commented the man absently.
"That's an artificial argument, and you know it." A reprimand was in
her voice. "If you can't depend upon Nature to tell you what is right,
what other authority can you consult?"
"But Nature has been perverted," he evaded.
"Isn't it possible your judgment instead is at fault?"
"It can't be at fault, here." The voice was neutral as before.
"Something tells us both it would be wrong--to do--as we want to
do."
Once more they sat down facing each other, the desk between them as at
first.
"Artificial convention, I tell you again." In motion graceful as
nature the woman extended her hand, palm upward, on the polished desk
top. "How could we be other than right? What do we mean by right,
anyway? Is there any judge higher than our individual selves, and
don't they tell us pleasure is the chief aim of life and as such must
be right?"
The muscles at the angle of the man's jaw tightened involuntarily.
"But pleasure is not the chief end of life."
"What is, then?"
"Development--evolution."
"Evolution to what?" she insisted.
"That we cannot answer as yet. Future generations must and will give
answer."
"It's for this then that you deny yourself?" A shade almost of
contempt was in the questioning voice.
The taunt brought no change of expression to the man's face.
"Yes."
The woman walked over to a bookcase, and, drawing out a volume,
turned the pages absently. Without reading a word, she came back and
looked the man squarely in the face.
"Will denying yourself help the world to evolve?"
"I think so."
"How?"
"My determination makes me a positive force. It is my Karma for good,
that makes my child stronger to do things."
"But you have no child,"--swiftly.
Their eyes met again without faltering.
"I shall have--sometime."
Silence fell upon them.
"Where were you a century ago?" digressed the woman.
"I wasn't born."
"Where will your child be a hundred years from now?"
"Dead likewise, probably; but the force for good, the Karma of the
life, will be passed on and remain in the world."
Unconsciously they both rose to their feet.
"Was man always on the earth?" she asked.
The question was answered almost before spoken.
"No."
"Will he always be here?"
"Science says 'no.'"
The woman came a step forward until they almost touched.
"What then becomes of your life of denial?" she challenged.
"You make it hard for me," said the man, simply.
"But am I not right?" She came toward him passionately. "I come near
you, and you start." She laid her hand on his. "I touch you, and your
eyes grow warm. Both our hearts beat more quickly. Look at the
sunshine! It's brighter when we're so close together. What of life?
It's soon gone--and then? What of convention that says 'no'? It's but
a farce that gives the same thing we ask--at the price of a few words
of mummery. Our strongest instincts of nature call for each other. Why
shouldn't we obey them when we wish?" She hesitated, and her voice
became tender. "We would be very happy together. Won't you come?"
The man broke away almost roughly.
"Don't you know," he demanded, "it's madness for us to be talking like
this? We'll be taking it seriously, and then--"
The woman made a swift gesture of protest.
"Don't. Let's be honest--with each other, at least. I'm tired of
pretending to be other than I am. Why did you say 'being true to my
husband'? You know it's mockery. Is it being true to live with a man I
hate because man's law demands it, rather than true to you whom
Nature's law sanctions? Don't speak to me of society's right and
wrong! I despise it. There is no other tribunal than Nature, and
Nature says 'Come.'"
The man sat down slowly and dropped his head wearily into his hands.
"I say again, I cannot. I respect you too much. We're intoxicated now
being together. In an hour, after we're separate--"
She broke in on him passionately.
"Do you think a woman says what I have said on the spur of the moment?
Do you think I merely happened to see you to-day, merely happened to
say what I've said? You know better. This has been coming for months.
I fought it hard at first; with convention, with your idea of right
and wrong. Now I laugh at them both. Life is life, and short, and
beyond is darkness. Think what atoms we are; and we struggle so hard.
Our life that seems to us so short--and so long! A thousand, perhaps
ten thousand such, end to end, and we have the life of a world. And
what is that? A cycle! A thing self-created, self-destructive: then of
human life--nothingness. Oh, it's humorous! Our life, a ten thousandth
part of that nothingness; and so full of tiny--great struggles and
worries!" She was silent a moment, her throat trembling, a multitude
of expressions shifting swiftly on her face.
"Do you believe in God?" she questioned suddenly.
"I hardly know. There must be--"
"Don't you suppose, then, He's laughing at us now?" She hesitated
again and then went on, almost unconsciously. "I had a dream a few
nights ago." The voice was low and very soft. "It seemed I was alone
in a desert place, and partial darkness was about me. I was conscious
only of listening and wondering, for out of the shadow came sounds of
human suffering. I waited with my heart beating strangely. Gradually
the voices grew louder, until I caught the meaning of occasional words
and distinctly saw coming toward me the figure of a man and a woman
bearing a great burden, a load so great that both together bent
beneath the weight and sweat stood thick upon their brows. The edges
of the burden were very sharp so that the hands of the man and the
woman bled from the wounds and their shoulders were torn grievously
where the load had shifted: those of the woman more than the man, for
she bore more of the weight. I marvelled at the sight.
"Suddenly an intense brightness fell about me and I saw, near and
afar, other figures each bearing similar burdens. The light passed
away, and I drew near the man and questioned him.
"'What rough load is that you carry?' I asked.
"'The burden of conventionality,' answered the man, wearily and with a
note of surprise in his voice.
"'Why do you bear it needlessly?' I remonstrated.
"'We dare not drop it,' said the woman, hopelessly, 'lest that light,
which is the searchlight of public opinion, return, showing us
different from the others.'
"Even as she spoke the illumination again fell upon us, and by its
brightness I saw a drop of blood gather slowly from the wounds on the
woman's hand and fall into the dust at her feet."
A silence fell upon the inmates of the tiny muffled office.
"But the burden isn't useless," said the man, gently. "The condemnation
of society is an hourly reality. From the patronage of others we live.
The sun burns us, but we submit, for in return it gives life."
The woman arose with an abrupt movement, and looked down at him
coldly.
"Are you a man, and use those arguments?" An expression akin to
contempt formed about her mouth. "Are you afraid of a united voice the
individuals of which you despise?"
The first hint of restrained passion was in the answering voice.
"You taunt me in safety, for you know I love you." He looked up at her
unhesitatingly. "Man's law is artificial, that I know; but it's made
for conditions which are artificial, and for such it's right. Were we
as in the beginning, Nature's law, which beside the law of man is no
law, would be right; but we're of the world as it is now. Things are
as they are, and we must conform or pay the price." He hesitated. His
face settled back into a mask. "And that price of non-conformity is
too high," he completed steadily.
The eyes of the woman blazed and her hands tightened convulsively.
"Oh, you're frozen--fossilized, man! I called you man! You're not a
man at all, but a nineteenth century machine! You're run like a motor,
from a power house; by the force of conventional thought, over wires
of red tape. Fie on you! I thought to meet a human being, not a
lifeless thing." She looked at him steadily, her chin in the air, a
world of scorn in her face. "Go on sweating beneath the useless load!
Go on building your structure of artificiality that ends centuries
from now in nothingness! Here's happiness to you in your empty life of
self-effacement, with your machine prompted acts, years considered!"
Without looking at him, one hand made scornful motion of dismissal.
"Good-bye, ghost of man; I wash my hands of you."
"Wait, Eleanor!" The man sprang to his feet, the mask lifting from his
face, and there stood revealed a multitude of emotions, unseen of the
world, that flashed from the depths of his brown eyes and quivered in
the angles of his mouth. He came quickly over and took her hand
between his own.
"I'm proud of you,"--a world of tenderness was in his voice--"unspeakably
proud--for I love you. I've done my best to keep us apart, yet all the
time I believed with you. Nature is higher than man, and no power on
earth can prove it otherwise." He looked into the softest of brown
eyes, and his voice trembled. "Beside you the world is nothing. Its
approval or its condemnation are things to be laughed at. With you I
challenge conventionality--society--everything." He bent over her hand
almost reverently and touched it softly with his lips.
"Farewell--until I come," he said.
CHAPTER II--THE LEAP
A man and a woman emerged from the dilapidated day-car as it drew up
before the tiny, sanded station which marked the terminus of the
railway. The man was tall, clean-shaven, quick of step and of glance.
The woman was likewise tall, well-gloved, and, strange phenomenon at a
country station, carried no parcels.
Though easily the centre of attention, the couple were far from being
alone. On the contrary, the car and platform fairly swarmed with
humanity. Men mostly composed the throng that alighted--big,
weather-stained fellows in rough jeans and denims. In the background,
as spectators moved or lounged a sprinkling of others: thinner,
lighter, enveloped in felt, woollen and buckskin, a fringe of heavy
hair peeping out at their backs beneath the broad hat-brims. A few
women were intermingled. Coarsely gowned, sun-browned, they stood;
themselves like suns, but each the centre of a system of bleach-haired
minor satellites. It was into this heterogeneous mass that the tall
man elbowed his way, a neat grip in either hand; the woman following
closely in his wake, her skirts carefully lifted.
Clear of the out-flowing stream the man put down the satchels, and
looked over the heads of the motley crowd into the still more motley
street beyond. Two short rows of one-story buildings, distinctive by
the brightness of new lumber on their sheltered side, bordered a
narrow street, half clogged by the teams of visiting farmers. Not the
faintest clue to a hostelry was visible, and the eyes of the man
wandered back, interrupting by the way another pair of eyes frankly
inquisitive.
The curious one was short; by comparison his face was still shorter,
and round. From his chin a tiny tuft of whiskers protruded, like the
handle of a gourd. Never was countenance more unmistakably labelled
good-humored, Americanized German.
The eyes of the tall man stopped.
"Is there a hotel in this"--he groped for a classification--"this
city?" he asked.
A rattling sound, startlingly akin to the agitated contents of
over-ripe vegetables, came from somewhere in the internal mechanism of
the small man. Inferentially, the inquiry was amusing to the
questioned, likewise the immediately surrounding listeners who became
suddenly silent, gazing at the stranger with the wonder of young
calves.
At length the innate spirit of courtesy in the German triumphed over
his amusement.
"Hans Becher up by the postoffice takes folks in." The inward
commotion showed indications of resumption. "I never heard, though,
that he called his place a hotel!"
"Thank you," and the circle of silence widened.
The man and the woman walked up the street. Beneath their feet the
cottonwood sidewalk, despite its newness, was warped in agony under
sun and storm. Big puddles of water from a recent rain stood in the
hollows of the roadway, side by side with tufts of native grasses
fighting bravely for life against the intruder--Man. A fresh,
indescribable odor was in their nostrils; an odor which puzzled them
then, but which later they learned to recognize and never forgot--the
pungent scent of buffalo grass. A stillness, deeper than of Sabbath,
unbelievable to urban ears, wrapped all things, and united with an
absence of broken sky line, to produce an all-pervading sense of
loneliness.
Hans Becher did not belie his name. He was very German. Likewise the
little woman who courtesied at his side. Ditto the choice assortment
of inquisitive tow-heads, who stared wide-eyed from various corners.
He shook hands at the door with each of his guests,--which action also
was unmistakably German.
"You would in my house--put up, you call it?" he inquired in labored
English, while the little woman polished two speckless chairs with her
apron, and with instinctive photographic art placed them stiffly side
by side for the visitors.
"Yes, we'd like to stay with you for a time," corroborated the tall
man.
The little German ran his fingers uncertainly through his hair for a
moment; then his round face beamed.
"We should then become to each other known. Is it not so?" Without
pausing for an answer, he put out a big hand to each in turn. "I am
Hans Becher, and this"--with elaborate indications--"this my wife
is--Minna."
Minna courtesied dutifully, lower than before. The little Bechers were
not classified, but their connection was apparent. They calmly sucked
their thumbs.
The lords of creation obviously held the rostrum. It was the tall man
who responded.
"My name is Maurice, Ichabod Maurice." He looked at the woman, his
companion, from the corner of his eye. "Allow me, Camilla, to present
Mr. Becher." Then turning to his hosts, "Camilla Maurice: Mr. and Mrs.
Becher."
The tall lady shook hands with each.
"Pleased to meet you," she said, and smiled a moment into their eyes.
Thus Camilla Maurice made friends.
There were a few low-spoken words in German and Minna vanished.
"She will dinner make ready," Hans explained.
The visitors sat down in their chairs, with Hans opposite studying
them narrowly; singly and together.
"The town is very new," suggested Ichabod.
"One year ago it was not." The German's short legs crossed each other
nervously and their owner seized the opportunity to make further
inspection. "It is very new," he repeated absently.
Camilla Maurice stood up.
"Might we wash, Mr. Becher?" she asked.
The ultimate predicament was all at once staring the little man in the
face.
"To be sure.... I might have known.... You will a room--desire." ...
He ran his fingers through his hair, and inspiration came. "Mr.
Maurice," he motioned, "might I a moment with you--speak?"
"Certainly, Mr. Becher."
The German saw light, and fairly beamed as he sought the safe
seclusion of the doorway.
"She is your sister or cousin--_nein_?" he asked.
There was the faintest suggestion of a smile in the corners of
Ichabod's mouth.
"No, she is neither my sister nor my cousin, Mr. Becher."
Hans heaved a sigh of relief: it had been a close corner.
"She is your wife. One must know," and he mopped his brow.
"Certainly--one must know," very soberly.
Alone together in the little unfinished room under the rafters, the
woman sat down on the corner of the bed, physical discomfort forgotten
in feminine curiosity.
"Those names--where did you get them?" she queried.
"They came to me--at the moment," smiled the man.
"But the cold-blooded horror of them!... Ichabod!"
"The glory has departed."
His companion started, and the smile left the man's face.
"And Camilla?"--slowly.
"Attendant at a sacrifice."
Of a sudden the room became very still.
Ichabod, exploring, discovered a tiny wash basin and a bucket of
water.
"You wished to wash, Camilla?"
The woman did not move.
"They were very kind"--she looked through the window with the tiny
panes: "have we any right to--lie to them?"
"We have not lied."
"Tacitly."
"No. I'm Ichabod Maurice and you're Camilla Maurice. We have not
lied."
"But--"
"The past is dead, dead!"
The woman's face dropped into her hands. Woman ever weeps instinctively
for the dead.
"You are sorry that it is--so?" There was no bitterness in the man's
voice, but he did not look at her, and Camilla misunderstood.
"Sorry!" She came close, and a soft warm face pressed tightly against
his face. "Sorry!" Her arms were around him. "Sorry!" again repeated.
"No! No! No! No, without end! I'm not sorry. I'm Camilla Maurice, the
happiest woman in the world!"
Later they utilized the tin basin and the mirror with a crack across
its centre. Dinner was waiting when they went below.
To a casual observer, Hans had been very idle while they were gone. He
sat absently on the doorstep, watching the grass that grew almost
visibly in the warm spring sun. Occasionally he tapped his forehead
with his finger tips. It helped him to think, and just now he sadly
needed assistance.
"Who were these people, anyway?" he wondered. Not farmers, certainly.
Farmers did not have hands that dented when you pressed them, and
farmers' wives did not lift their skirts daintily from behind. Hans
had been very observant as his visitors came up the muddy street. No,
that was not the way of farmers' wives: they took hold at the sides
with both hands, and splashed right through on their heels.
Hans pulled the yellow tuft on his chin. What could they be, then? Not
summer boarders. It was only early spring; and, besides, although the
little German was an optimist, even he could not imagine any one
selecting a Dakota prairie for an outing. Yet ... No, they could not
be summer boarders.
But what then? In his intensity Hans actually forgot the grass and,
unfailing producer of inspiration, ran his fingers frantically through
his mane.
"Ah--at last--of course!" The round face beamed and a hard hand smote
a harder knee, joyously. That he had not remembered at once! It was
the new banker, to be sure. He would tell Minna, quite as a matter of
fact, for there could be no mistake. Hank Judge, the machine agent,
and Eli Stevens, the proprietor of the corner store, had said only
yesterday there was to be a bank. Looking up the street the little man
spied a familiar figure, and sprang to his feet as though released by
a spring, his hand already in the air. There was Hank Judge, now, and
he didn't know--
"Dinner, Hans," announced Minna at his elbow.
Holding the child of his brain hard in both hands lest it should
escape prematurely, the little German went inside to preside over a
repast, the distinctively German incense of which ascended most
appetizingly.
Hans, junior, in a childish treble, spoke an honest little German
blessing, beginning "_Mein Vater von Himmel_," and emphasized by the
raps of Hans senior's knuckles on certain other small heads to keep
their owners quiet.
"Fresh lettuce and radishes!" commented Camilla, joyously.
"Raised in our own garden _hinein_," bobbed Minna, in ecstasy.
"And sauerkraut--" began Ichabod.
"From cabbages so large," completed Hans, spreading his arms to
designate an imaginary vegetable of heroic proportions.
"They must have grown very fast to be so large in May," commented
Camilla.
Hans and Minna exchanged glances--pitying, superior glances--such as
we give behind the backs of the infirm, or the very old; and the
subject of vegetables dropped.
"A great country for a bank, this," commented Mr. Becher, with
infinite _finesse_ and between intermittent puffs at a hot potato.
"Is that so?"
Hans nodded violent confirmation, then words, English words, being
valuable to him, he came quickly to the test.
"You will build for the bank yourself, is it not so?"
It was not the German and Minna who exchanged glances this time.
"No, I shall not build for the bank myself, Mr. Becher."
"You will rent, perhaps?" Hans's faith was beautiful.
"No, I shall not rent."
The German's face fell. To have wasted all that thought; for after all
it was not the banker!
Minna, senior, stared in surprise, and her attention being diverted,
Minna the younger seized the opportunity to inundate herself with a
cup of hot coffee.
The spell was broken.
"I'm going to take a homestead," explained Ichabod.
Hans's fork paused in mid-air and his mouth forgot to close. At the
point where the German struck, the earth was very hard.
"So?" he interrogated, weakly.
At this juncture the difference between the two Minnas, which had been
transferred from the table to the kitchen, was resumed; and although
Ichabod ate the remaining kraut to the last shred, and Camilla talked
to Hans of the _Vaterland_ in his native German, each knew the
occasion was a failure. An ideal had been raised, the ideal of a
Napoleon of finance, a banker; and that ideal materializing, lo there
stood forth a farmer! _Ach Gott von Himmel!_
After dinner Hans stood in the doorway and pointed out the land-office.
Ichabod thanked him, and under the impulse of habit felt in his
pocket for a cigar. None was there, and all at once he remembered
Ichabod Maurice did not smoke. Strange he should have such an
abominable inclination to do so just then; but nevertheless the fact
remained. Ichabod Maurice never had smoked.
He started up the street.
A small man, with very high boots and a very long moustache, sat
tipped back in the sun in front of the land-office. He was telling a
story; a good one, judging from the attention of the row of listeners.
He grasped the chair tightly with his left hand while his right,
holding a cob pipe, gesticulated actively. The story halted abruptly
as Ichabod came up.
"Howdy!" greeted the little man.
Maurice nodded.
"Don't let me interrupt you," he temporized.
"Not at all," courtesied the teller of stories, as he led the way
inside. "I've told that one until I'm tired of it, anyway." He tapped
the ashes from his pipe-bowl, meditatively. "A fellow has to kill the
time some way, though, you know."
"Yes, I know," acquiesced Ichabod.
The agent took a chair behind the battered pine desk, and pointed to
another opposite.
"Any way I can help you?" he suggested.
"Yes," answered Maurice. "I'm thinking of taking a homestead."
The agent looked his visitor up and down and back again; then, being
native born, his surprise broke forth in idiom.
"Well, I'm jiggered!" he avowed.
It was Ichabod's turn to make observation.
"I believe you; you look it," he corroborated at length.
Again the little man stared; and in the silence following, a
hungry-looking bird-dog thrust his thin muzzle in at the door, and
sniffed.
"Get out," shouted the owner at the intruder, adding in extenuation:
"I'm busy." He certainly was "jiggered."
Ichabod came to the rescue.
"I called to learn how one goes at it to take a claim," he explained.
"The _modus operandi_ isn't exactly clear in my mind."
The agent braced up in his chair.
"I suppose you'll say it's none of my business," he commented, "but as
a speculation you'd do a lot better to buy up the claims of poor
cusses who have to relinquish, than to settle yourself."
"I'm not speculating. I expect to build a house, and live here."
"As a friend, then, let me tell you you'll never stand it." A stubby
thumb made motion up the narrow street. "You see this town. I won't
say what it is--you realize for yourself; but bad as it is, it's
advanced civilization alongside of the country. You'll have to go ten
miles out to get any land that's not taken." He stopped and lit his
pipe. "Do you know what it means to live alone ten miles out on the
prairie?"
"I've never lived in the country."
"I'll tell you, then, what it means." He put down his pipe and looked
out at the open door. His face changed; became softer, milder,
younger. His voice, when he spoke, added to the impression of
reminiscence, bearing an almost forgotten tone of years ago.
"The prairie!" he apostrophized. "It means the loneliest place on
God's earth. It means that living there, in life you bury yourself,
your hopes, your ambitions. It means you work ever to forget the
past--and fail. It means self, always; morning, noon, night; until the
very solitude becomes an incubus. It means that in time you die, or,
from being a man, become as the cattle." The speaker turned for the
first time to the tall man before him, his big blue eyes wide open and
round, his voice an entreaty.
"Don't move into it, man. It's death and worse than death to such as
you! You're too old to begin. One must be born to the life; must
never have known another. Don't do it, I say."
Ichabod Maurice, listening, read in that appeal, beneath the words,
the wild, unsatisfied tale of a disappointed human life.
"You are dissatisfied, lonesome--There was a time years ago
perhaps--"
"I don't know." The glow had passed and the face was old again, and
heavy. "I remember nothing. I'm dead, dead." He drew a rough map from
his pocket and spread it out before him.
"If you'll move close, please, I'll show you the open lands."
For an hour he explained homesteads, preemptions and tree claims, and
the method of filing and proving up. At parting, Ichabod held out his
hand.
"I thank you for your advice," he said.
The man behind the desk puffed stolidly.
"But don't intend to follow it," he completed.
Instinctively, metaphor sprang to the lips of Ichabod Maurice.
"A small speck of circumstance, which is near, obliterates much that
is in the distance." He turned toward the door. "I shall not be
alone."
The little agent smoked on in silence for some minutes, gazing
motionless at the doorway through which Ichabod had passed out. Again
the lean bird-dog thrust in an apologetic head, dutifully awaiting
recognition. At length the man shook his pipe clean, and leaned back
in soliloquy.
"Man, woman, human nature; habit, solitude, the prairie." He spoke
each word slowly, and with a shake of his head. "He's mad, mad; but I
pity him"--a pause--"for I know."
The dog whined an interruption from the doorway, and the man looked
up.
"Come in, boy," he said, in recognition.
CHAPTER III--THE WONDER OF PRAIRIE
Ichabod and Camilla selected their claim together. A fair day's drive
it was from the little town; a half-mile from the nearest neighbor, a
Norwegian, without two-score English words in his vocabulary. Level it
was, as the surface of a lake or the plane of a railroad bed.
Together, too, they chose the spot for their home. Camilla sobbed over
the word; but she was soon dry-eyed and smiling again. Afterwards,
side by side, they did much journeying to and from the nearest
sawmill--each trip through a day and a night--thirty odd miles away.
The mill was a small, primitive affair, almost lost in the straggling
box-elders and soft maples that bordered the muddy Missouri,
producing, amid noisy protestations, the most despisable of all lumber
on the face of the globe--twisting, creeping, crawling cottonwood.
Having the material on the spot, Ichabod built the house himself,
after a plan never before seen of man; joint product of his and
Camilla's brains. It took a month to complete; and in the meantime,
each night they threw their tired bodies on the brown earth,
indifferent to the thin canvas, which alone was spread between them
and the stars.
Too utterly weary for immediate sleep, they listened to the sounds of
animal life--wholly unfamiliar to ears urban trained--as they stood
out distinct by contrast with a silence otherwise absolute as the
grave.
... The sharp bark of the coyote, near or far away; soft as an echo,
the gently cadenced tremolo of the prairie owl. To these, the mere
opening numbers of the nightly concerts, the two exotics would listen
wonderingly; then, of a sudden, typical, indescribable, lonely as
death, there would boom the cry which, as often as it was repeated,
recalled to Ichabod's mind the words of the little man in the
land-office, "loneliest sound on earth"--the sound which, once heard,
remains forever vivid--the night call of the prairie rooster. Even
now, new and fascinating as it all was, at the last wailing cry the
two occupants of the tent would reach out in the darkness until their
hands met. Not till then would they sleep.
In May, they finished and moved their few belongings into the odd
little two-room house. True to instinct, Ichabod had built a
fireplace, though looking in any direction until the earth met the
sky, not a tree was visible; and Camilla had added a cozy reading
corner, which soon developed into a sleeping corner,--out-of-door
occupations in sun and wind being insurmountable obstacles to mental
effort.
But what matter! One straggling little folio, the local newspaper,
made its way into the corner each week--and that was all. They had cut
themselves off from the world, deliberately, irrevocably. It was but
natural that they should sleep. All dead things sleep!
Month after month slipped by, and the first ripple of local excitement
and curiosity born of their advent subsided. Ichabod knew nothing of
farming, but to learn was simple. It needed only that he watch what
his neighbors were doing, and proceed to do likewise. He learned soon
to hold a breaking-plough in the tough prairie sod, and to swear
mightily when it balked at an unusually tough root. As well, he came
to know the oily feel of flax as he scattered it by hand over the
brown breaking. Later he learned the smell of buckwheat blossoms, and
the delicate green coloring of sod corn, greener by contrast with its
dark background.
Nor was Camilla idle. The dresses she had brought with her, dainty
creations of foreign make, soon gave way to domestic productions of
gingham and print. In these, the long brown hands neatly gloved, she
struggled with a tiny garden, becoming in ratio as passed the weeks,
warmer, browner, and healthier.
"Are you happy?" asked Ichabod, one day, observing her thus amid the
fruits of her hands.
Camilla hesitated. Catching her hand, Ichabod lifted her chin so that
their eyes met.
"Tell me, are you happy?" he repeated.
Another pause, though her eyes did not falter.
"Happier than I ever thought to be." She touched his sleeve tenderly.
"But not completely so, for--" she was not looking at him now,--"for
I love you, and--and--I'm a woman."
They said no more; and though Ichabod went back to his team, it was
not to work. For many minutes he stood motionless, a new problem of
right and wrong throbbing in his brain.
Fall came slowly, bringing the drowsy, hazy days of so-called Indian
Summer. It was the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse
of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the
stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the
prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous
odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, again bearing resemblance in
that, once heard, memory would reproduce the sound until recollection
was no more.
Winter followed, and they, who had thought the earth quiet before,
found it still now indeed. Even the voice of the prairie-chicken was
hushed; only the sharp knife-like cutting of spread wings told of a
flock's passage at night. The level country, mottled white with
occasional drifts, and brown from spots blown bare by the wind,
stretched out seemingly interminable, until the line of earth and sky
met.
Idle perforce, the two exotics would stand for hours in the sunshine
of their open doorway, shading their eyes from the glare and looking
out, out into the distance that was as yet only a name--and that the
borrowed name of an Indian tribe.
"What a country!" Camilla would say, struck each time anew with a
never-ending wonder.
"Yes, what a country," Ichabod would echo, unconscious that he had
repeated the same words in the same way a score of times before.
In January, a blizzard settled upon them, and for two days and nights
they took turns keeping the big kitchen stove red hot. The West knows
no such storms, now. Man has not only changed the face of the earth,
but, in so doing, has annihilated that terror of the past--the Dakota
blizzard.
In those days, though, it was very real, as Ichabod learned. He had
prepared for winter, by hauling a huge pile of cordwood and stacking
it, as a protection to windward, the full length of the little cabin,
thinking the spot always accessible; but he had builded in ignorance.
The snow first commenced falling in the afternoon. By the next morning
the tiny house was buried to the window sashes. Looking out, there
could be seen but an indistinct slanting white wall, scarcely ten feet
away: a screen through which the sunlight filtered dimly, like the
solemn haze of a church. The earth was not silent, now. The falling of
the sleet and snow was as the striking of fine shot, and the sound of
the wind a steady unceasing moan, resembling the sigh of a big dynamo
at a distance.
Slowly, inch by inch, during that day the snow crept up the window
panes until, before the coming of darkness without, it fell within.
Banked though they were on three sides, on the fourth side,
unprotected, the cold penetrated bitterly,--a cold no living thing
could withstand without shelter. Then it was that Ichabod and Camilla
feared to sleep, and that the long vigil began.
By the next morning there was no light from the windows. The snow had
drifted level with the eaves. Ichabod stood in the narrow window
frame, and, lowering the glass from the top, beat a hole upward with a
pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the
dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood
revealed a slanting drab wall,--a condensed milky way.
The storm was yet on, and he closed the window. To get outside for
fuel that day was impossible, so with an axe Ichabod chopped a hole
through the wall into the big pile, and on wood thus secured sawed
steadily in the tiny kitchen, while the kerosene lamp at his side
sputtered, and the fire crackled in a silence, like that surrounding a
hunted animal in its den.
Many usual events had occurred in the lives of the wandering Ichabod
and Camilla, which had been forgotten; but the memory of that day, the
overwhelming, incontestible knowledge of the impotency of wee,
restless, inconsequent man, they were never to forget.
"Tiny, tiny, mortal!" laughed the storm. "To think you would combat
Nature, would defy her, the power of which I am but one of many, many
manifestations!" And it laughed again. The two prisoners, listening,
their ears to the tunnel, heard the sound, and felt to the full its
biting mockery.
Next day the siege was raised, and the sun smiled as only the sun can
smile upon miles and miles of dazzling snow crystals. Ichabod climbed
out--by way of the window route--and worked for hours with a shovel
before he had a channel from the tiny, submerged shanty to the light
of day beyond. Then together he and Camilla stood side by side in the
doorway, as they had done so many times before, looking about them at
the boundless prairie, drifted in waves of snow like the sea: the
wonder of it all, ever new, creeping over them.
"What a country!" voiced Camilla.
"What a country, indeed," echoed Ichabod.
"Lonely and mysterious as Death."
"Yes, as Death or--Life."
CHAPTER IV--A REVELATION
Time, unchanging automaton, moved on until late spring. Paradox of
nature, the warm brown tints of chilly days gave place under the heat
of slanting suns to the cool green of summer. All at once, sudden as
though autochthonal, there appeared meadow-larks and blackbirds: dead
weeds or man-erected posts serving in lieu of trees as vantage points
from which to sing. Ground squirrels whistled cheerily from newly
broken fields and roadways. Coveys of quail, tame as barn-yard fowls,
played about the beaten paths, and ran pattering in the dust ahead of
each passing team. Again, from its winter's rest, lonely, uncertain as
to distance, came the low, booming call of the prairie rooster. Nature
had awakened, and the joy of that awakening was upon the land.
Of a morning in May the faded, dust-covered day-coach drew in at the
tiny prairie village. A little man alighted. He stood a moment on the
platform, his hands deep in his pockets, a big black cigar between his
teeth, and looked out over the town. The coloring of the short
straggling street was more weather-stained than a year ago, yet still
very new, and the newcomer smiled as he looked; a big broad smile that
played about his lips, turning up the corners of his brown moustache,
showing a flash of white teeth, and lighting a pair of big blue eyes
which lay, like a woman's, beneath heavy lashes. In youth, that smile
would have been a grin; but it was no grin now. The man was far from
youth, and about the mouth and eyes were deep lines, which told of one
who knew of the world.
Slowly the smile disappeared, and as it faded the little man puffed
harder at the cigar. Evidently something he particularly wished to
explain would not become clear to his mind.
"Of all places," he soliloquized, "to have chosen--this!"
He started up the street, over the irregular warping sidewalk.
"Hotel, sir-r?" The formula was American, the trilling r's distinctly
German.
The traveller turned at the sound, to make acquaintance with Hans
Becher; for it was Hans Becher, very much metamorphosed from the
retiring German of a year ago. He made the train regularly now.
The small man nodded and held out his grip; together they walked up
the street. In front of the hotel they stopped, and the stranger
pulled out his watch.
"Is there a livery here?" he asked.
"Yes; at the street end--the side to the left hand."
"Thanks. I'll be back with you this evening."
Hans Becher stared, open-mouthed, as the man moved off.
"You will not to dinner return?"
The little man stopped, and smiled without apparent reason.
"No. Keep the grip. I expect to lunch," again he smiled without
provocation, "elsewhere. By the way," he added, as an afterthought,
"can you tell me where Mr. Maurice--Ichabod Maurice--lives?"
The German nodded violent confirmation of a direction indicated by his
free hand.
"Straight out, eight miles. Little house with _paint_"--strong
emphasis on the last--"_white_ paint."
"Thanks."
Hans saw the escape of an opportunity.
"They are friends of yours, perhaps?"--he grasped at it.
The little man did not turn, but the smile that seemed almost a habit,
sprang to his face.
"Yes, they're--friends of mine," he corroborated.
Hans, personification of knowledge, stood bobbing on the doorstep,
until the trail of smoke vanished from sight, then brought the satchel
inside and set it down hard.
"Her brother has come," he announced to the wide-eyed Minna.
"_Wessen Bruder?_" Minna was obviously excited, as attested by the
lapse from English.
"Are we not now Americans naturalized?" rebuked Hans, icily. Suddenly
he thawed. "Whose brother! The brother of Camilla Maurice, to be
sure."
Minna scrutinized the bag, curiously.
"Did he so--inform you?" she questioned unadvisedly.
"It was not necessary. I have eyes."
Offended masculine dignity clumped noisily toward the door;
instinctive feminine diplomacy sprang to the rescue.
"You are so wise, Hans!"
And Peace, sweet Peace, returned to the household of Becher.
Meanwhile the little man had secured a buggy, and was jogging out into
the country. He drove very leisurely, looking about him curiously. Of
a sudden he threw down his cigar, and sniffed at the air.
"Buffalo grass, I'll wager! I've heard of it," and in the instinctive
action of every newcomer he sniffed again.
Camilla Maurice sat in front of her tiny house, the late morning sun
warm about her; one hand supported a book, slanted carefully to avoid
the light, the other held the crank of a barrel-churn. As she read,
she turned steadily, the monotonous _chug!_ _chug!_ of the tumbling
cream drowning all other sounds.
Suddenly the shadow of a horse passed her and a rough livery buggy
stopped at her side. She looked up. Instinctively her hand dropped the
crank, and her face turned white; then equally involuntarily she
returned to her work, and the _chug!_ _chug!_ continued.
"Does Ichabod Maurice," drawling emphasis on the name, "live here?"
asked a voice.
"He does." Camilla's chin was trembling; her answer halted abruptly.
The man looked down at her, genuine amusement depicted upon his face.
"Won't you please stop your work for a moment, Camilla?"
With the name, one hand made swift movement of deprecation. "Pardon if
I mistake, but I take it you're Camilla Maurice?"
"Yes, I'm Camilla Maurice."
"Quite so! You see, Ichabod and I were old chums together in
college--all that sort of thing; consequently I've always wanted to
meet--"
The woman stood up. Her face still was very white, but her chin did
not tremble now.
"Let's stop this farce," she insisted. "What is it you wish?"
The man in the buggy again made a motion of deprecation.
"I was just about to say, that happening to be in town, and
incidentally hearing the name, I wondered if it were possible.... But,
pardon, I haven't introduced myself. Allow me--" and he bowed
elaborately. "Arnold, Asa Arnold.... You've heard Ichabod mention my
name, perhaps?"
The woman held up her hand.
"Again I ask, what do you wish?"
"Since you insist, first of all I'd like to speak a moment with
Ichabod." His face changed suddenly. "For Heaven's sake, Eleanor, if
he must alter his name, why did he choose such a barbaric substitute
as Ichabod?"
"Were he here"--evenly--"he'd doubtless explain that himself."
"He's not here, then?" No banter in the voice now.
"Never fear"--quickly--"he'll return."
A moment they looked into each other's eyes; challengingly, as they
had looked unnumbered times before.
"As you suggest, Eleanor," said the man, slowly, "this farce has gone
far enough. Where may I tie this horse? I wish to speak with you."
Camilla pointed to a post, and silently went toward the house. Soon
the man followed her, stopping a moment to take a final puff at his
cigar before throwing it away.
Within the tiny kitchen they sat opposite, a narrow band of warm
spring sunshine creeping in at the open door separating them. The
woman looked out over the broad prairie, her color a trifle higher
than usual, the lids of her eyes a shade nearer together--that was
all. The man crossed his legs and waited, looking so small that he
seemed almost boyish. In the silence, the drone of feeding poultry
came from the back-yard, and the sleepy breathing of the big collie on
the steps sounded plainly through the room.
A minute passed. Neither spoke. Then, with a shade of annoyance, the
man shifted in his chair.
"I thought, perhaps, you'd have something you wished to say. If not,
however--" He paused meaningly.
"You said a moment ago, you wished to speak to _me_."
"As usual, you make everything as difficult as possible." The shade of
annoyance became positive. "Such being the case, we may as well come
to the point. How soon do you contemplate bringing this--this incident
to a close?"
"The answer to that question concerns me alone."
An ordinary man would have laughed; but Asa Arnold was not an ordinary
man--not at this time.
"As your husband, I can't agree with you."
Camilla Maurice took up his words, quickly.
"You mistake. You're the husband of Eleanor Owen. I'm not she."
The man went on calmly, as though there had been no interruption.
"I don't want to be hard on you, Eleanor. I don't think I have been
hard on you. A year has passed, and I've known you were here from the
first day. But this sort of thing can't go on indefinitely; there's a
limit, even to good nature. I ask you again, when are you coming
back?"
The woman looked at her companion, for the first time steadily. Even
she, who knew him so well, felt a shade of wonder at the man who could
adjust all the affairs of his life in the same voice with which he
ordered his dinner. Before, she had always thought this attitude of
his pure affectation. Now she knew better, knew it mirrored the man
himself. He had done this thing. Knowing her whereabouts all the time,
he had allotted her the past year, as an employer would grant a
holiday to an assistant. Now he asked her to return to the old life,
as calmly as one returns in the fall to the city home after an outing!
Only one man in the world could have done that thing, and that man was
before her--her husband by law--Asa Arnold!
The wonder of it all crept into her voice.
"I'm not coming back, can't you understand? I'm never coming back,"
she repeated.
The man arose and stood in the doorway.
"Don't say that," he said very quietly. "Not yet. I won't begin, now,
after all these years to make protestations of love. The thing called
Love we've discussed too often already, and without result. Anyway,
that's not the point. We never pretended to be lovers, even when we
were married. We were simply useful, very useful to each other."
Camilla started to interrupt him, but, preventing, he held up his
hand.
"We talked over a certain possibility--one now a reality--before we
were married." He caught the look upon her face. "I don't say it was
ideal. It simply _was_," he digressed slowly in answer, then hurried
on: "That was only five years ago, Eleanor, and we were far from
young." He looked at her, searchingly. "You've not forgotten the
contract we drew up, that stood above the marriage obligation, above
everything, supreme law for you and me?" Instinctively his hand went
to an inner pocket, where the rustle of a paper answered his touch.
"Remember; it's not a favor I ask of you, but the fulfilment of your
own word. Think a moment before you say you'll never return."
Camilla Maurice found an answer very difficult. Had he been angry, or
abusive, it would have been easy; but as it was--
"You overlook the fact of change. A lifetime isn't required for
that."
"I overlook nothing." The man went back to his chair. "You remember,
as well as I, that we considered the problem of change--and laughed at
it. I repeat, we're no longer in swaddling clothes."
"Be that as it may, I tell you the whole world looks different to me
now." The speaker struggled bravely, but the ghastliness of such a
discussion wore on her nerves, and her face twitched. "No power on
earth could make me keep that contract since I've changed."
The suggestion of a smile played about the man's mouth.
"You've succeeded, perhaps, in finding that for which we searched so
long in vain, an aesthetic, non-corporeal love?"
"I refuse to answer a question which was intended as an insult."
The words out of her mouth, the woman regretted them.
"Though quick yourself to take offence, you seem at no great pains to
avoid giving affront to another." The man voiced the reprimand
without the twitch of an eyelid, and finished with another question:
"Have you any reason for doing as you've done, other than the one you
gave?"
"Reason! Reason!" Camilla Maurice stared again. "Isn't it reason
enough that I love him, and don't love you? Isn't it sufficient reason
to one who has lived until middle life in darkness that a ray of light
is in sight? Of all people in the world, you're the one who should
understand the reason best!"
"Would any of those arguments be sufficient to break another
contract?"
"No, but one I didn't mention would. Even when I lived with you, I was
of no more importance than a half-dozen other women."
"You didn't protest at time of the agreement. You knew then my belief
and," Arnold paused meaningly, "your own."
A memory of the past came to the woman; the dark, lonely past, which,
even yet, after so many years, came to her like a nightmare; the time
when she was a stranger in a strange town, without joy of past or hope
of future; most lonely being on God's earth, a woman with an
ambition--and without friends.
"I was mad--I see it now--lonely mad. I met you. Our work was alike,
and we were very useful to each other." One white hand made motion of
repugnance at the thought. "I was mad, I say."
"Is that your excuse for ignoring a solemn obligation?" Arnold looked
her through. "Is that your excuse for leaving me for another, without
a word of explanation, or even the conventional form of a divorce?"
"It was just that explanation--this--I wished to avoid. It's hard for
us both, and useless."
"Useless!" The man quickly picked up the word. "Useless! I don't like
the suggestion of that word. It hints of death, and old age, and
hateful things. It has no place with the living."
He drew a paper from his pocket, slowly, and spread it on his knee.
"Pardon me for again recalling past history, Eleanor; but to use
a word that is dead!... You must have forgotten--" The writing,
a dainty, feminine hand, was turned toward her, tauntingly,
compellingly.
The man waited for some response; but Camilla Maurice was silent. That
bit of paper, the shadow of a seemingly impossible past, made her, for
the time, question her identity, almost doubt it.
Five years ago, almost to the day, high up in a city building, in a
dainty little room, half office, half _atelier_, a man and a woman had
copied an agreement, each for the other, and had sworn an oath ever to
remain true to that solemn bond.... She had brought nothing to him,
but herself; not even affection. He, on the other hand, had saved her
from a life of drudgery by elevating her to a position where, free of
the necessity of struggling for a bare existence, she might hope to
consummate the fruition of at least a part of her dreams. On her
part....
"_Witnesseth: The said Eleanor Owen is at liberty to follow her own
inclinations as she may see fit; she is to remain free of any and all
responsibilities and restrictions such as customarily attach to the
supervision of a household, excepting as she may elect to exercise her
wifely prerogatives; being absolutely free to pursue whatsoever
occupation or devices she may desire or choose, the same as if she
were yet a spinster...._
"_In Consideration of Which: The said Eleanor Owen agrees never so to
comport herself that by word or conduct will she bring ridicule....
dishonor upon the name...._"
Recollection of it all came to her with a rush; but the words ran
together and swam in a maddening blur--the roar from the street below,
dull with distance; the hum of the big building, with its faint
concussions of closing doors; the air from the open window, not like
the sweet prairie air of to-day, but heavy, smoky, typical breath of
the town, yet pregnant with the indescribable throb of spring,
impossible to efface or to disguise! The compelling intimacy and
irrevocability of that memory overwhelmed her, now; a dark, evil flood
that blotted out the sunshine of the present.
The paper rustled, as the man smoothed it flat with his hand.
"Shall I read?" he asked.
The woman's face stood clear--cruelly clear--in the sunlight; about
her mouth and eyes there was an expression which, from repetition, we
have learned to associate with the circle surrounding a new-made
grave: an expression hopelessly desperate, desperately hopeless.
Of a sudden her chin trembled and her face dropped into her hands.
"Read, if you wish"; and the smooth brown head, with its thread of
gray, trembled uncontrollably.
"Eleanor!" with a sudden vibration of tenderness in his voice.
"Eleanor," he repeated.
But the woman made no response.
The man had taken a step forward; now he sat down again, looking
through the open doorway at the stretch of green prairie, with the
road, a narrow ribbon of brown, dividing it fair in the middle. In the
distance a farmer's wagon was rumbling toward town, a trail of fine
dust, like smoke, suspended in the air behind. It rattled past, and
the big collie on the step woke to give furious chase in its wake,
then returned slowly, a little conscious under the stranger's eye, to
sleep as before. Asa Arnold sat through it all, still as one
devitalized; an expression on his face no man had ever seen before;
one hopeless, lonely, akin to that of the woman.
"Read, if you wish," repeated Camilla, bitterly.
For a long minute her companion made no motion.
"It's unnecessary," he intoned at last. "You know as well as I that
neither of us will ever forget one word it contains." He hesitated and
his voice grew gentle. "Eleanor, you know I didn't come here to
insult you, or to hurt you needlessly;--but I'm human. You seem to
forget this. You brand me less than a man, and then ask of me the
unselfishness of a God!"
Camilla's white face lifted from her hands.
"I ask nothing except that you leave me alone."
For the first time the little man showed his teeth.
"At last you mention the point I came here to arrange. Were you
alone, rest assured I shouldn't trouble you."
"You mean--"
"I mean just this. I wouldn't be human if I did what you ask--if I
condoned what you've done and are still doing." He was fairly started
now, and words came crowding each other; reproachful, tempestuous.
"Didn't you ever stop to think of the past--think what you've done,
Eleanor?" He paused without giving her an opportunity to answer. "Let
me tell you, then. You've broken every manner of faith between man and
woman. If you believe in God, you've broken faith with Him as well.
Don't think for a moment I ever had respect for marriage as a divine
institution, but I did have respect for you, and at your wish we
conformed. You're my wife now, by your own choosing. Don't interrupt
me, please. I repeat, God has no more to do with ceremonial marriage
now than he had at the time of the Old Testament and polygamy. It's a
man-made bond, but an obligation nevertheless, and as such, at the
foundation of all good faith between man and woman. It's this good
faith you've broken." A look of bitterness flashed over his face.
"Still, I could excuse this and release you at the asking, remaining
your friend, your best friend as before; but to be thrown aside
without even a 'by your leave,' and that for another man--" He
hesitated and finished slowly:
"You know me well enough, Eleanor, to realize that I'm in earnest when
I say that while I live the man has yet to be born who can take
something of mine away from me."
Camilla gestured passionately.
"In other words: while growling hard at the dog who approached your
bone, you have no hesitation in stealing from another!" The
accumulated bitterness of years of repression spoke in the taunt.
Across the little man's face there fell an impenetrable mask, like the
armor which dropped about an ancient ship of war before the shock of
battle.
"I'm not on trial. I've not changed my name--" he nodded significantly
toward the view beyond the open door,--"and sought seclusion."
Again the bitterness of memory prompted Camilla to speak the harshest
words of her life.
"No, you hadn't the decency. It was more pleasure to thrust your shame
daily in my face."
Arnold's color paled above the dark beard line; but the woman took no
heed.
"Why did you wait a year," continued the bitter voice, "to end
in--this? If it must have been--why not before?"
"I repeat, I'm not on trial. If you've anything to say, I'll listen."
Something new in the man's face caught Camilla's attention, softened
the tone of her voice.
"I've only this to say. You've asked for an explanation and a promise;
but I can give you neither. If there ever comes a time when I feel
they're due you, and I'm able to comply, I'll give them both gladly."
The absent look of the past returned to her eyes. "Even if I wished, I
couldn't give you an explanation now. I can't make myself understand
the contradiction. Somehow, knowing you so long, your beliefs crept
insistently into my loneliness. It seems hideous now, but I was honest
then. I believed them, too. I don't blame you; I only pity you. You
were the embodiment of protest against the established, of the
non-responsibility of the individual, of skepticism in everything.
Your eternal 'why' covered my horizon. Every familiar thing came to
bear a question I couldn't answer. My whole life seemed one eternal
doubt. One thing I'd never known, and I questioned it most of all; the
one thing I know now to be the truth,--the greatest truth in the
world." For an instant the present crowded the past from Camilla's
mind, but only for an instant. "Whatever I was at the time, you'd made
me--with your deathless 'why.' When I signed the obligation of that
day, I believed it was of my own free will; but I know now it was you
who wrote it for both of us--you, with your perpetual interrogation. I
don't accuse you of doing this deliberately, maliciously. We were both
deceived; but none the less the fact remains." A shadow, almost of
horror, passed over her face.
"Time passed, and though you didn't know, I was in Hell. Reason told
me I was right. Instinct, something, called me a drag. I tried to
compromise, and we were married. Then, for the first time, came
realization. We were the best of friends,--but only friends."
"You wonder how I knew. I didn't tell you then. I couldn't. I could
only feel, and that not clearly. The shadow of your 'why' was still
dark upon me. What I vaguely felt then, though, I know now; as I
recognize light or cold or pain." Her voice assumed the tone of one
who speaks of mysteries; slow, vibrant. "In every woman's mind the
maternal instinct should be uppermost; before everything, before
God,--unashamed, inevitable. It's unmistakably the distinction of a
good woman from a bad. The choosing of the father of her child is a
woman's unfailing test of love."
The face of the man before her dropped into his hands, but she did not
notice.
"Gropingly I felt this, and the knowledge came almost as an
inspiration. It gave a clue to--"
"Stop!" The man's eyes blazed, as he leaped from his chair. "Stop!"
He took a step forward, his hand before him, his face twitching
uncontrollably. The collie on the step awoke, and seeing his mistress
threatened, growled ominously.
"Stop, I tell you!" Arnold choked for words. This the man of "why,"
whom nothing before could shake!
Camilla paled as her companion arose, and the dog, bristling, came
inside the room.
"Get out!" blazed the man, with a threatening step, and the collie
fled.
The interruption loosed words which came tumbling forth in a torrent,
as Arnold returned to face her.
"You think I'm human, and yet tell me that to my face?" His voice was
terrible. "You women brand men cruel! No man on earth would speak as
you have spoken to a woman he'd lived with for four years!" The
sentences crowded over each other, like water over a fall--his eyes
flashing like a spray.
"I told you before, I'm not on trial; that it was not my place to
defend. I don't do so now; but since you've spoken, I'll answer your
question. You ask why I didn't come a year ago, hinting that I wanted
to be more cruel. God! the blindness and injustice of you women!
Because we men don't show--Bah!... I was paying my own price. We
weren't living by the marriage vow; it was but a farce. Our own
contract was the vital thing, and it had said--But I won't repeat.
God, it was bitter! But I thought you'd come back. I loved you still."
He paused for words, breathing hard.
"You say, I'll never know what love is. Blind! I've always loved you
until this moment, when you killed my love. You say I was untrue. It's
false. I swear it before--you, as you were once,--when you were my
god. Had you trusted me, as I trusted you, there'd have been no
thought of unfaithfulness in your mind."
The woman sank back in the chair, her face covered, her whole body
trembling; but Asa Arnold went on like the storm.
"Yes, I was ever true to you. From the first moment we met, and
against my own beliefs. You didn't see. You expected me to protest it
daily: to repeat the tale as a child repeats its lesson for a comfit.
Blind, I say, blind! You'll charge that I never told you that I loved
you. You wouldn't have believed me, even had I done so. Besides, I
didn't realize that you doubted, until the time when you were
learning--" he walked jerkily across the room and took up his
hat,--"learning the thing you threw in my face." He started to leave,
but stopped in the doorway, without looking back. "You tell me you've
suffered. For the first time in my life I say to another human being:
I hope so." He turned, unsteadily, down the steps.
"Wait," pleaded the woman. "Wait!"
The man did not stop, or turn.
Camilla Maurice sank back in the chair, weak as one sick unto death,
her mind a throbbing, whirling chaos,--as of a patient under an
anaesthetic. Something she knew she ought to do, intended doing, and
could not. She groped desperately, but overwhelming, insistent, there
had developed in her a sudden, preventing tumult--in paradox, a
confusion in rhythm--like the beating of a great hammer on an anvil,
only incredibly more swift than blows from human hands. Over and over
again she repeated to herself the one word: "wait," "wait," "wait,"
but mechanically now, without thought as to the reason. Then, all at
once, soft, all-enfolding, kindly Nature wrapped her in darkness.
She awoke with the big collie licking her hand, and a numbness of
cramped limbs that was positive pain. A long-necked pullet was
standing in the doorway, with her mouth open; others stood wondering,
beyond. The sun had moved until it no longer shone in at the tiny
south windows, and the shadow of the house had begun to lengthen.
Camilla stood up in the doorway; uncertain, dazed. A great lump was on
her forehead, which she stroked absently, without surprise at its
presence. She looked about the yard, and, her breath coming more
quickly, at the prairie. A broad green plain, parted by the road
squarely in the centre, smiled at her in the sunlight. That was all.
She stepped outside and shaded her eyes with her hand. Not a wagon nor
a human being was in sight.
Again the weakness and the blackness came stealing over her; she sank
down on the doorstep.
"O God, what have I done!" she wailed.
The hens returned to their search for bugs; but the big collie stayed
by her side, whimpering and fondling her hand.
CHAPTER V--THE DOMINANCE OF THE EVOLVED
The keen joy of life was warmly flooding Ichabod Maurice this
spring day. Not life for the sake of an ambition or a duty, but
delight in the mere animal pleasure of existence. He had risen
early, and, a neighbor with him, they had driven forth: stars all
about, perpendicular, horizontal, save in the reddening east, upon
their long day's drive to the sawmill. The two teams plodded along
steadily, their footfall muffled in the soft prairie loam; the
earth elsewhere soundless, with a silence which even yet was a
marvel to the city man.
The majesty of it held him silent until day dawned, and with the
coming of the sun there woke in unison the chorus of joyous animal
life. Then Ichabod, his long legs dangling over the dashboard, lifted
up a voice untrained as the note of a loon, and sang lustily, until
his companion on the wagon ahead,--boy-faced, man-bodied,--grinned
perilously.
The long-visaged man was near happiness that morning,--unbelievably
near. By nature unsocial, by habit, city inbred, artificially
taciturn, there came with the primitive happiness of the moment
the concomitant primitive desire for companionship. He smiled
self-tolerantly when, obeying an instinct, he wound the lines around
the seat, and went ahead to the man, who grinned companionably as
he made room beside him.
"God's country, this." Ichabod's hand made an all-including gesture,
as he seated himself comfortably, his hat low over his eyes.
"Yes, sir," and the grin was repeated.
The tall man reflected. Sunburned, roughly dressed, unshaven as he,
Maurice, was, this boy-man never failed the word of respect. Ichabod
examined him curiously out of his shaded lids. Big brown hands; body
strong as a bull; powerful shoulders; neck turned like a model; a soft
chin under a soft, light beard; gentle blue eyes--all in all, a face
so open that its very legibility seemed a mark. It reddened now,
under the scrutiny.
"Pardon," said Ichabod. "I was thinking how happy you are."
"Yes, sir." And the face reddened again.
Ichabod smiled.
"When is it to be, Ole?"
The big body wriggled in blissful embarrassment.
"As soon as the house is built,"--confusedly.
"You're building very fast, eh?"
The Swede grinned confirmation. Words were of value to Ole.
"I see the question was superfluous," and Ichabod likewise smiled in
genial comradery. A moment later, however, the smile vanished.
"You're very content as it is, Ole," he digressed, equivocally;
"but--supposing--Minna were already the wife of a friend?"
The Swede stared in breathless astonishment.
"She isn't, though" he gasped at length in startled protest.
"But supposing--"
"It would be so. I couldn't help it."
"You'd do nothing?" rank anarchy in the suggestion.
"What would there be to do?"
Ichabod temporized.
"Supposing again, she loved you, and didn't love her husband?" Ole
scratched his head, seeing very devious passages beyond. "That would
be different," and he crossed his legs.
Ichabod smiled. The world over, human nature is fashioned from one
mould.
"Supposing, once more, it's a year from now,--five years from now.
You've married Minna, but you're not happy. She's grown to hate
you,--to love another man?"
Ole's faith was beautiful.
"It's not to be thought of. It's impossible!"
"But supposing," urged Ichabod.
The boy-man was silent for a very long minute; then his face darkened,
and the soft jaw grew hard.
"I don't know--" he said slowly,--"I don't know, but I think I kill
that man."
Ichabod did not smile this time.
"We're all much alike, Ole. I think you would."
They drove on; far past the town, now; the sun high in the sky; dew
sparkling like prisms innumerable; the prairie colorings soft as a
rug--its varied greens of groundwork blending with the narrow line of
fresh breaking rolling at their feet.
"You were born in this country?" asked Ichabod suddenly.
"In Iowa. It's much like this--only rougher."
"You'll live here, always?"
The Swede shook his head and the boy's face grew older.
"No; some day, we're going to the city--Minna and I. We've planned."
Ichabod was thoughtful a minute.
"I'm a friend of yours, Ole."
"A very good friend," repeated the mystified Swede.
"Then, listen, and don't forget." The voice was vibrant, low, but the
boy heard it clearly above the noise of the wagon. "Don't do it, Ole;
in God's name, don't do it! Stay here, you'll be happy." He looked the
open-mouthed listener deep in the eyes. "If you ever say a prayer,
let it be the old one, even though it be an insult to a just
God:--'Lead us not into temptation.' Avoid, as you would avoid death,
the love of money, the fever of unrest, the desire to become greater
than your fellows, the thirst to know and to taste all things, which
is the spirit of the city. Live close to Nature, where all is equal
and all is good; where sleep comes in the time of sleep, and work when
it is day. Do that labor which comes to you at the moment, leaving
to-morrow to Nature." He crossed his long legs, and pressed his hat
down over his eyes. "Accept life as Nature gives it, day by day. Don't
question, and you'll find it good." He repeated himself slowly.
"That's the secret. Don't doubt, or question anything."
In the Swede's throat there was a rattling, which presaged speech, but
it died away.
"Do you love children, Ole?" asked Ichabod, suddenly.
The boy face flushed. Ole was very young.
"I--" he lagged.
"Of course you do. Every living human being does. It's the one good
instinct, which even the lust of gain doesn't down. It's the tie that
binds,--the badge of brotherhood which makes the world one." He gently
laid his hand on the broad shoulder beside him.
"Don't be ashamed to say you love children, boy, though the rest of
the world laugh,--for they're laughing at a lie. They'll tell you the
parental instinct is dying out with the advance of civilization; that
the time will come when man will educate himself to his own
extinction. It's false, I tell you, absolutely false." Ichabod had
forgotten himself, and he rushed on, far above the head of the gaping
Swede.
"There's one instinct in the world, the instinct of parenthood,
which advances eternal, stronger, infinitely, as man's mind grows
stronger. So unvarying the rule that it's almost an index of
civilization itself, advancing from a crude instinct of the
body-base and animal--until it reaches the realm of the mind: the
highest, the holiest of man's desires: yet stronger immeasurably, as
with the educated, things of the mind are stronger than things of
the body. Those who deny this are fools, or imposters,--I know not
which. To do so is to strike at the very foundation of human
nature,--but impotently,--for in fundamentals, human nature is
good." Unconsciously, a smile flashed over the long face.
"Talk about depopulating the earth! All the wars of primitive man were
inadequate. The vices of civilization have likewise failed. Even man's
mightiest weapon, legislation, couldn't stay the tide for a moment, if
it would. While man is man, and woman is woman, that long, above
government, religion,--life and death itself,--will reign supreme the
eternal instinct of parenthood."
Ichabod caught himself in his own period and stopped, a little ashamed
of his earnestness. He sat up in the seat preparatory to returning to
his own wagon, then dropped his hand once more on the boy's shoulder.
"I'm old enough to be your father, boy, and have done, in all things,
the reverse of what I advised you. Therefore, I know I was wrong. We
may sneer and speak of poetry when the words proceed from another, my
boy; but, as inevitable as death, there comes to every man the
knowledge that he stands accursed of Nature, who hasn't heard the
voice of his own child call 'father!'"
He clambered down, leaving the speechless Ole sprawling on the
wagon-seat. Back in his own wagon, he smiled broadly to himself.
"Strange, how easily the apple falls when it's ripe," he soliloquized.
They drove on clear to the mill without another word; without even a
grin from the broad-faced Ole, who sat in ponderous thought in the
wagon ahead. To a nature such as his the infrequency of a new idea
gives it the force of a cataclysm; during its presence, obliterating
everything else.
It was nearly noon when they reached the narrow fringe of trees and
underbrush--deciduous and wind-tortured all--which bordered the big,
muddy, low-lying Missouri; and soon they could hear the throb of the
engine at the mill, and the swish of the saw through the green lumber;
a sound that heard near by, inevitably carries the suggestion of
scalpel and living flesh. Nothing but green timber was sawed
thereabout in those days. The country was settling rapidly, lumber
was imperative, and available timber very, very limited.
Returning, the heavy loads grumbled slowly along, so slowly that it
was nearly evening, and their shadows preceded them by rods when they
reached the little prairie town. They stopped to water their teams;
and Ole, true to the instincts of his plebeian ancestry, went in
search of a glass of beer. He returned, quickly, his face very red.
"A fellow in there is talking about--about Mrs. Maurice," he blurted.
"In the saloon, Ole?"
The Swede repeated the story, watching the tall man from the corner of
his eye.
A man, very drunk, was standing by the bar, and telling how, in coming
to town, he had seen a buggy drive away from the Maurice home very
fast. He had thought it was the doctor's buggy and had stopped in to
see if any one was sick.
The fellow had grinned here and drank some more, before finishing the
story; the surrounding audience winking at each other meanwhile, and
drinking in company.
Then he went on to tell how Camilla Maurice had sat just inside the
doorway, her face in her hands, sobbing,--so hard she hadn't noticed
him; and--and--it wasn't the doctor who had been there at all!
Ichabod had been holding a pail of water so that a horse might drink.
At the end he motioned Ole very quietly, to take his place.
"Finish watering them, and--wait for me, please."
It was far from what the Swede had expected; but he accepted the task,
obediently.
The only saloon of the town stood almost exactly opposite Hans
Becher's place, flush with the street. A long, low building,
communicating with the outer world by one door--sans glass--its single
window in front and at the rear lit it but imperfectly at midday, and
now at early evening made faces almost indistinguishable, and cast
kindly shadow over the fly specks and smoke stains of a low roof. A
narrow pine bar, redolent of tribute absorbed from innumerable passing
"schooners," stretched the entire length of the room at one side; and
back of it, in shirt sleeves and stained apron, presided the typical
bar-keeper of the frontier. All this Ichabod saw as he stepped inside;
then, himself in shadow, he studied the group before him.
Railroad and cattle men, mostly, made up the gathering, with a scant
sprinkling of farmers and others unclassified. A big, ill-dressed
fellow was repeating the tale of scandal for the benefit of a
newcomer; the narrative moving jerkily over hiccoughs, like hurdles.
"--I drew up to th' house quick, an' went up th' path quiet
like,"--he tapped thunderously on the bar with a heavy glass for
silence--"quiet--sh-h--like; an' when I come t' th' door, ther' 't
was open, an'--as I hope--hope t' die,... drink on me, b'ys, aller
y'--set 'm up, Barney ol' b'y, m' treat,... hope t' die, ther' she
sat, like this--" He looked around mistily for a chair, but none was
convenient, and he slid flat to the floor in their midst, his face
in his hands, blubbering dismally in imitation.... "Sat (hic) like
this; rockin' an' moanin' n' callin' his name: Asa--Asa--Asa--(hic)
Arnold--'shure 's I'm a sinner she--"
He did not finish. Very suddenly the surrounding group had scattered,
and he peered up through maudlin tears to learn the cause. One man
alone stood above him. The room had grown still as a church.
The drunken one blinked his watery eyes and showed his yellow teeth in
a convivial grin.
"G'd evnin', pard.... Serve th'--th' gem'n, Barney; m' treat." Again
the teeth obtruded. "Was jes'--"
"Get up!"
He of the story winked harder than before.
"Bless m'--" He paused for an expletive, hiccoughed, and forgetting
what had caused the halt, stumbled on:--"Didn' rec'gniz' y'
b'fore. Shake, ol' boy. S--sh-sorry for y'." Tears rose copiously.
"Tough--when feller's wife--"
Interrupting suddenly a muffled sound like the distant exhaust of a
big engine--the meeting of a heavy boot with an obstacle on the floor.
"Get up!"
A very mountain of human brawn resolved itself upward; a hand on its
hips; a curse on its lips.
[Illustration: "You'll apologize."]
"You damned lantern-faced--" No hiccough now, but a pause from pure
physical impotence, pending a doubtful struggle against a half-dozen
men.
"Order, gentlemen!" demanded the bar-keeper, adding emphasis by
hammering a heavy bottle on the bar.
"Let him go," commanded Ichabod very quietly; but they all heard
through the confusion. "Let him go."
The country was by no means the wild West of the story-papers, but it
was primitive, and no man thought, then, of preventing the obviously
inevitable.
Ichabod held up his hand, suggestively, imperatively, and the crowd
fell back, silent,--leaving him facing the big man.
"You'll apologize!" The thin jaw showed clear, through the shade of
brown stubble on Ichabod's face.
For answer, the big man leaning on the bar exhibited his discolored
teeth and breathed hard.
"How shall it be?" asked Ichabod.
A grimy hand twitched toward a grimier hip.
"You've seen the likes of this--"
Ichabod turned toward the spectators.
"Will any man lend me--"
"Here--"
"Here--"
"And give us a little light."
"Outside," suggested the saloon-keeper.
"We're not advertising patent medicine," blazed Ichabod, and the lamps
were lit immediately.
Once more the long-visaged man appealed to the group lined up now
against the bar.
"Gentlemen--I never carried a revolver a half-hour in my life. Is it
any more than fair that I name the details?"
"Name 'm and be quick," acquiesced his big opponent before the others
could speak.
"Thanks, Mr. Duggin," with equal swiftness. "These, then, are the
conditions." For three seconds, that seemed a minute, Ichabod looked
steadily between his adversary's bushy eyebrows. "The conditions," he
repeated, "are, that starting from opposite ends of the room, we don't
fire until our toes touch in the middle line."
"Good!" commended a voice; but it was not big Duggin who spoke.
"I'll see that it's done, too,"--added a listening cattleman, grasping
Ichabod by the hand.
"And I."
The building had been designed as a bowling-alley and was built the
entire length of the lot. With an alacrity born of experience, the
long space opposite the bar was cleared, and the belligerents
stationed one at either end, their faces toward the wall. Midway
between them a heavy line had been drawn with chalk, and beside it
stood a half-dozen grim men, their hands resting suggestively on their
hips. The room was again very quiet, and from out-of-doors penetrated
the shrill sound of a schoolboy whistling "Annie Laurie" with original
variations. So exotic seemed the entire scene in its prairie setting,
that it might have been transferred bodily from the stage of a distant
theatre and set down here,--by mistake.
"Now," directed a voice. "You understand, men. You're to face and walk
to the line. When your feet touch--fire; and," warningly--"remember,
not before. Ready, gentlemen. Turn."
Ichabod faced about, the cocked revolver in his hand, the name Asa
Arnold singing in his ears. A terrible cold-white anger was in his
heart against the man opposite, who had publicly caused the
resurrection of this hated, buried thing. For a moment it blotted
out all other sensations; then, rushing, crowding came other
thoughts,--vision from boyhood down. In the space of seconds, faded
scenes of the dead past took on sudden color and as suddenly
vanished. Faces, he had forgotten for years, flashed instantaneously
into view. Voices long hushed in oblivion, re-embodied, spoke in
accents as familiar as his own. Inwardly he was seething with the
myriad shifting pictures of a drowning man. Outwardly he walked
those half-score steps to the line, unflinchingly; came to certain
death,--and waited: personification of all that is cool and
deliberate--of the sudden abundant nerve in emergencies which comes
only to the highly evolved.
Duggin, the big man, turned likewise at the word and came part way
swiftly; then stopped, his face very pale. Another step he took, with
another pause, and with great drops of perspiration gathering on his
face, and on the backs of his hands. Yet another start, and he came
very near; so near that he gazed into the blue of Ichabod's eyes. They
seemed to him now devil's eyes, and he halted, looking at them,
fingering the weapon in his hand, his courage oozing at every pore.
Out of those eyes and that long, thin face stared death; not hot,
sudden death, but nihility, cool, deliberate, that waited for one! The
big beads on his forehead gathered in drops and ran down his cheeks.
He tried to move on, but his legs only trembled beneath him. The
hopeless, unreasoning terror of the frightened animal, the raw
recruit, the superstitious negro, was upon him. The last fragment of
self-respect, of bravado even, was in tatters. No object on earth, no
fear of hereafter, could have made him face death in that way, with
those eyes looking into his.
The weapon shook from Duggin's hand to the floor,--with a sound like
the first clatter of gravel on a coffin lid; and in abasement
absolute he dropped his head; his hands nerveless, his jaw
trembling.
"I beg your pardon--and your wife's," he faltered.
"It was all a lie? You were drunk?" Ichabod crossed the line, standing
over him.
A rustle and a great snort of contempt went around the room; but
Duggin still felt those terrible eyes upon him.
"I was very drunk. It was all a lie."
Without another word Ichabod turned away, and almost immediately the
other men followed, the door closing behind them. Only the bar-keeper
stood impassive, watching.
That instant the red heat of the liquor returned to the big man's
brain and he picked up the revolver. Muttering, he staggered over to
the bar.
"D--n him--the hide-faced--" he cursed. "Gimme a drink, Barney.
Whiskey, straight."
"Not a drop."
"What?"
"Never another drop in my place so long as I live."
"Barney, damn you!"
"Get out! You coward!"
"But, Barney--"
"Not another word. Go."
Again Duggin was sober as he stumbled out into the evening.
* * * * *
Ichabod moved slowly up the street, months aged in those last few
minutes. Reaction was inevitable, and with it the future instead of
the present, stared him in the face. He had crowded the lie down the
man's throat, but well he knew it had been useless. The story was
true, and it would spread; no power of his could prevent. He could not
deceive himself, even. That name! Again the white anger born of
memory, flooded him. Curses on the name and on the man who had spoken
it! Why must the fellow have turned coward at the last moment? Had
they but touched feet over the line--
Suddenly Ichabod stopped, his hands pressed to his head. Camilla,
home--alone! And he had forgotten! He hurried back to the waiting
Swede, an anathema that was not directed at another, hot on his
lips.
"All ready, Ole," he announced, clambering to the seat.
The boy handed up the lines lingeringly.
"Here, sir." Then uncontrollable, long-repressed curiosity broke the
bounds of deference. "You--heard him, sir?"
"Yes."
Ole edged toward his own wagon.
"It wasn't so?"
"Duggin swore it was a lie."
"He--"
"He swore it was false, I say."
They drove out into the prairie and the night; the stars looking down,
smiling, as in the morning which was so long ago, the man had
smiled,--looking upward.
"Tiny, tiny mortal," they twinkled, each to the other. "So small and
hot, and rebellious. Tiny, tiny, mortal!"
But the man covered his face with his hands, shutting them out.
CHAPTER VI--BY A CANDLE'S FLAME
Asa Arnold sat in the small upstairs room at the hotel of Hans Becher.
It was the same room that Ichabod and Camilla had occupied when they
first arrived; but he did not know that. Even had he known, however,
it would have made slight difference; nothing could have kept them
more constantly in his mind than they were at this time. He had not
slept any the night before; a fact which would have spoken loudly to
one who knew him well; and this morning he was very tired. He lounged
low in the oak chair, his feet on the bed, the usual big cigar in his
mouth.
This morning, the perspective of the little man was anything but
normal. Worse than that, he could not reduce it to the normal, try as
he might.
His meeting with Camilla yesterday had produced a deep and abiding
shock; for either of them to have been so moved signified the
stirring of dangerous forces. They--and especially himself--who had
always accepted life, even crises, so calmly; who had heretofore
laughed at all display of emotion--for them to have acted as they had,
for them to have spoken to each other the things they had spoken, the
things they could not forget, that he never could forgive--it was
unbelievable! It upset all the established order of things!
His anger of yesterday against Camilla had died out. She was not to
blame; she was a woman, and women were all alike. He had thought
differently before; that she was an exception; but now he knew better.
One and all they were mere puppets of emotion, and fickle.
In a measure, though, as he had excused Camilla he had incriminated
Ichabod. Ichabod was the guilty one, and a man. Ichabod had filched
from him his possession of most value; and without even the form of a
by-your-leave. The incident of last evening at the saloon (for he had
heard of it in the hour, as had every one in the little town) had but
served to make more implacable his resentment. By the satire of
circumstances it had come about that he again, Asa Arnold, had been
the cause of another's defending the honor of his own wife,--for she
was his wife as yet,--and that other, the defender, was Ichabod
Maurice!
The little man's face did not change at the thought. He only smoked
harder, until the room was blue; but though he did not put the feeling
in words even to himself, he knew in the depths of his own mind that
the price of that last day was death. Whether it was his own death, or
the death of Ichabod, he did not know; he did not care; but that one
of them must die was inevitable. Horrible as was the thought, it had
no terror for him, now. He wondered that it did not have; but, on the
contrary, it seemed to him very ordinary, even logical--as one orders
a dinner when he is hungry.
He lit another cigar, calmly. It was this very imperturbability of the
little man which made him terrible. Like a great movement of Nature,
it was awful from its very resistlessness; its imperviability to
appeal. Steadily, as he had lit the cigar, he smoked until the air
became bluer than before. In a ghastly way, he was trying to decide
whose death it should be,--as one decides a winter's flitting, whether
to Florida or California; only now the question was: should it be
suicide, or,--as in the saloon yesterday,--leave the decision to
Chance? For the time the personal equation was eliminated; the man
weighed the evidence as impartially as though he were deciding the
fate of another.
He sat long and very still; until even in the daylight the red
cigar-end grew redder in the haze. Without being conscious of the
fact, he was probably doing the most unselfish thinking of his life.
What the result of that thought would have been no man will ever know,
for of a sudden, interrupting, Hans Becher's round face appeared in
the doorway.
"Ichabod Maurice to see you," coughed the German, obscured in the
cloud of smoke which passed out like steam through the opening.
It cannot be said that Asa Arnold's face grew impassive; it was that
already. Certain it was, though, that behind the mask there occurred,
at that moment, a revolution. Born of it, the old mocking smile sprang
to his lips.
"The devil fights for his own," he soliloquized. "I really believe
I,"--again the smile,--"I was about to make a sacrifice."
"Sir?"
"Thank you, Hans."
The German's jaw dropped in inexpressible surprise.
"Sir?" he repeated.
"You made a decision for me, then. Thank you."
"I do not you understand."
"Tell Mr. Maurice I shall be pleased to see him."
The round face disappeared from the door.
"_Donnerwetter!_" commented the little landlord in the safe seclusion
of the stairway. Later, in relating the incident to Minna, he tapped
his forehead, suggestively.
Ichabod climbed the stair alone. "To your old room," Hans had said;
and Ichabod knew the place well. He knocked on the panel, a voice
answered: "Come," and he opened the door. Arnold had thrown away his
cigar and opened the window. The room was clearing rapidly.
Ichabod stepped inside and closed the door carefully behind him. A
few seconds he stood holding it, then swung it open quickly and
glanced down the hallway. Answering, there was a sudden, scuttling
sound, not unlike the escape of frightened rats, as Hans Becher
precipitately disappeared. The tall man came back and for the second
time slowly closed the door.
Asa Arnold had neither moved nor spoken since that first word,--"come";
and the self-invited visitor read the inaction correctly. No man, with
the knowledge Ichabod possessed, could have misunderstood the challenge
in that impassive face. No man, a year ago, would have accepted that
challenge more quickly. Now--But God only knew whether or no he
would forget,--now.
For a minute, which to an onlooker would have seemed interminable, the
two men faced each other. Up from the street came the ring of a heavy
hammer on a sweet-voiced anvil, as Jim Donovan, the blacksmith,
sharpened anew the breaking ploughs which were battling the prairie
sod for bread. In the street below, a group of farmers were swapping
yarns, an occasional chorus of guffaws interrupting to punctuate the
narrative. The combatants heard it all, as one hears the drone of the
cicada on a sleepy summer day; at the moment, as a mere colorless
background which later, Time, the greater adjuster, utilizes to
harmonize the whole memory.
Ichabod had been standing; now he sat down upon the bed, his long legs
stretched out before him.
"It would be useless for us to temporize," he initiated. "I've
intruded my presence in order to ask you a question." The long fingers
locked slowly over his knees. "What is your object here?"
The innate spirit of mockery sprang to the little man's face.
"You're mistaken," he smiled; "so far mistaken, that instead of your
visit being an intrusion, I expected you"--an amending memory came to
him--"although I wasn't looking for you quite so soon, perhaps." He
paused for an instant, and the smile left his lips.
"As to the statement of object. I think"--slowly--"a disinterested
observer would have put the question you ask into my mouth." He
stared his tall visitor up and down critically, menacingly. Of a
sudden, irresistibly, a very convulsion shot over his face. "God, man,
you're brazen!" he commented cumulatively.
Ichabod had gambled with this man in the past, and had seen him lose
half he possessed without the twitch of an eyelid. A force which now
could cause that sudden change of expression--no man on earth knew,
better than Ichabod, its intensity. Perhaps a shade of the same
feeling crept into his own answering voice.
"We'll quarrel later, if you wish,"--swiftly. "Neither of us can
afford to do so now. I ask you again, what are your intentions?"
"And I repeat, the question is by right mine. It's not I who've
changed my name and--and in other things emulated the hero of the
yellow-back."
Ichabod's face turned a shade paler, though his answer was calm.
"We've known each other too well for either to attempt explanation or
condemnation. You wish me to testify first." The long fingers
unclasped from over his knee. "You know the story of the past year:
it's the key to the future."
A smile, sardonic, distinctive, lifted the tips of Arnold's big
moustaches.
"Your faith in your protecting gods is certainly beautiful."
Ichabod nursed a callous spot on one palm.
"I understand,"--very slowly. "At least, you'll answer my question
now, perhaps," he suggested.
"With pleasure. You intimate the future will be but a repetition of
the past. It'll be my endeavor to give that statement the lie."
"You insist on quarrelling?"
"I insist on but one thing,"--swiftly. "That you never again come into
my sight, or into the sight of my wife."
One of Ichabod's long hands extended in gesture.
"And I insist you shall never again use the name of Camilla Maurice as
your wife."
The old mocking smile sprang to Asa Arnold's face.
"Unconsciously, you're amusing," he derided. "The old story of the
mouse who forbids the cat.... You forget, man, she is my wife."
Ichabod stood up, seemingly longer and gaunter than ever before.
"Good God, Arnold," he flashed, "haven't you the faintest element of
pride, or of consistency in your make-up? Is it necessary for a woman
to tell you more than once that she hates you? By your own statement
your marriage, even at first, was merely of convenience; but even if
this weren't so, every principle of the belief you hold releases her.
Before God, or man, you haven't the slightest claim, and you know
it."
"And you--"
"I love her."
Asa Arnold did not stir, but the pupils of his eyes grew wider, until
the whole eye seemed black.
"You fool!" he accented slowly. "You brazen egoist! Did it never occur
to you that others than yourself could love?"
Score for the little man. Ichabod had been pinked first.
"You dare tell me to my face you loved her?"
"I do."
"You lie!" blazed Ichabod. "Every word and action of your life gives
you the lie!"
Not five minutes had passed since he came in and already he had
forgotten!
Asa Arnold likewise was upon his feet and they two faced each
other,--a bed length between; in their minds the past and future a
blank, the present with its primitive animal hate blazing in their
eyes.
"You know what it means to tell me that." Arnold's voice was a full
note higher than usual. "You'll apologize?"
"Never. It's true. You lied, and you know you lied."
The surrounding world turned dark to the little man, and the dry-goods
box with the tin dipper on its top, danced before his eyes. For the
first time in his memory he felt himself losing self-control, and by
main force of will he turned away to the window. For the instant all
the savage of his nature was on the surface, and he could fairly feel
his fingers gripping at the tall man's throat.
A moment he stood in the narrow south window, full in the smiling
irony of Nature's sunshine; but only a moment. Then the mocking smile
that had become an instinctive part of his nature spread over his
face.
"I see but one way to settle this difficulty," he intimated.
A taunt sprang to Ichabod's tongue, but was as quickly repressed.
"There is but one, unless--" with meaning pause.
"I repeat, there is but one."
Ichabod's long face held like wood.
"Consider yourself, then, the challenged party."
They were both very calm, now; the immediate exciting cause in the
mind of neither. It seemed as if they had been expecting this time for
years, had been preparing for it.
"Perhaps, as yesterday, in the saloon?" The points of the big
moustaches twitched ironically. "I promise you there'll be no
procrastination as--at certain cases recorded."
The mockery, malice inspired, was cleverly turned, and Ichabod's big
chin protruded ominously, as he came over and fairly towered above the
small man.
"Most assuredly it'll not be as yesterday. If we're going to reverse
civilization, we may as well roll it away back. We'll settle it alone,
and here."
Asa Arnold smiled up into the blue eyes.
"You'd prefer to make the adjustment with your hands, too, perhaps?
There'd be less risk, considering--" He stopped at the look on the
face above his. No man _vis-a-vis_ with Ichabod Maurice ever made
accusation of cowardice. Instead, instinctive sarcasm leaped to his
lips.
"Not being of the West, I don't ordinarily carry an arsenal with me,
in anticipation of such incidents as these. If you're prepared,
however,--" and he paused again.
Ichabod turned away; a terrible weariness and disgust of it all--of
life, himself, the little man,--in his face. A tragedy would not be so
bad, but this lingering comedy of death--One thing alone was in his
mind: to have it over, and quickly.
"I didn't expect--this, either. We'll find another way."
He glanced about the room. A bed, the improvised commode, a chair, a
small table with a book upon it, and a tallow candle--an idea came to
him, and his search terminated.
"I may--suggest--" he hesitated.
"Go on."
Ichabod took up the candle, and, with his pocket-knife, cut it down
until it was a mere stub in the socket, then lit a match and held the
flame to the wick, until the tallow sputtered into burning.
"You can estimate when that light will go out?" he intimated
impassively.
Asa Arnold watched the tall man, steadily, as the latter returned the
candle to the table and drew out his watch.
"I think so," _sotto voce_.
Ichabod returned to his seat on the bed.
"You are not afraid, perhaps, to go into the dark alone?"
"No."
"By your own hand?"
"No," again, very slowly. Arnold understood now.
"You swear?" Ichabod flashed a glance with the question.
"I swear."
"And I."
A moment they both studied the sputtering candle.
"It'll be within fifteen minutes," randomed Ichabod.
Arnold drew out his watch slowly.
"It'll be longer."
That was all. Each had made his choice; a trivial matter of one second
in the candle's life would decide which of these two men would die by
his own hand.
For a minute there was no sound. They could not even hear their
breathing. Then Arnold cleared his throat.
"You didn't say when the loser must pay his debt," he suggested.
Ichabod's voice in answer was a trifle husky.
"It won't be necessary." A vision of the future flashed, sinister,
inevitable. "The man who loses won't care to face the necessity
long."
Five minutes more passed. Down the street the blacksmith was hammering
steadily. Beneath the window the group of farmers had separated; their
departing footsteps tapping into distance and silence.
Minna went to the street door, calling loudly for Hans, Jr., who had
strayed,--and both men started at the sound. The quick catch of their
breathing was now plainly audible.
Arnold shifted in his chair.
"You swear--" his voice rang unnaturally sharp, and he paused to
moisten his throat,--"you swear before God you'll abide by this?"
"I swear before God," repeated Ichabod slowly.
A second, and the little man followed in echo.
"And I--I swear, I, too, will abide."
Neither man remembered that one of this twain, who gave oath before
the Deity, was an agnostic, the other an atheist!
A lonely south wind was rising, and above the tinkle of the
blacksmith's hammer there sounded the tap of the light shade as
it flapped in the wind against the window-pane. Low, drowsy,
moaning,--typical breath of prairie,--it droned through the
loosely built house, with sound louder, but not unlike the perpetual
roar of a great sea-shell.
Ten minutes passed, and the men sat very still. Both their faces were
white, and in the angle of the jaw of each the muscles were locked
hard. Ichabod was leaning near the candle. It sputtered and a tiny
globule of hot tallow struck his face. He winced and wiped the drop
off quickly. Observing, Arnold smiled and opened his lips as if to
make comment; then closed them suddenly, and the smile passed.
Two minutes more the watches ticked off; very, very slowly. Neither of
the men had thought, beforehand, of this time of waiting. Big drops of
sweat were forming on both their faces, and in the ears of each the
blood sang madly. A haze, as from the dropping of a shade, seemed to
have formed and hung over the room, and in unison sounds from without
acquired a certain faintness, like that born of distance. Through it
all the two men sat motionless, watching the candle and the time, as
the fascinated bird watches its charmer; as the subject watches the
hypnotist,--as if the passive exercise were the one imperative thing
in the world.
"Thirteen minutes."
Unconsciously, Arnold was counting aloud. The flame was very low, now,
and he started to move his chair closer, then sank back, a smile,
almost ghastly, upon his lips. The blaze had reached the level of the
socket, and was growing smaller and smaller. Two minutes yet to burn!
He had lost.
He tried to turn his eyes away, but they seemed fastened to the spot,
and he powerless. It was as though death, from staring him in the
face, had suddenly gripped him hard. The panorama of his past life
flashed through his mind. The thoughts of the drowning man, of the
miner who hears the rumble of crumbling earth, of the prisoner
helpless and hopeless who feels the first touch of flame,--common
thought of all these were his; and in a space of time which, though
seeming to him endless, was in reality but seconds.
Then came the duller reaction and the events of the last few minutes
repeated themselves, impersonally, spectacularly,--as though they
were the actions of another man; one for whom he felt very sorry. He
even went into the future and saw this same man lying down with a tiny
bottle in his hand, preparing for the sleep from which there would be
no awakening,--the sleep which, in anticipation, seemed so pleasant.
Concomitant with this thought the visionary shaded into the real, and
there came the determination to act at once, this very afternoon, as
soon as Ichabod had gone. He even felt a little relief at the
decision. After all, it was so much simpler than if he had won, for
then--then--He laughed gratingly at the thought. Cursed if he would
have known what to have done, then!
The sound roused him and he looked at his watch. A minute had passed,
fourteen from the first and the flame still sputtered. Was it possible
after all--after he had decided--that he was not to lose, that the
decision was unnecessary? There was not in his mind the slightest
feeling of personal elation at the prospect, but rather a sense of
injury that such a scurvy trick should be foisted off upon him. It
was like going to a funeral and being confronted, suddenly, with the
grinning head of the supposed dead projecting through the coffin lid.
It was unseemly!
Only a minute more: a half now--yes, he would win. For the first time
he felt that his forehead was wet, and he mopped his face with his
handkerchief jerkily; then sank back in the chair, instinctively
shooting forward his cuffs in motion habitual.
"Fifteen seconds." There could be no question now of the result; and
the outside world, banished for the once, returned. The blacksmith was
hammering again, the strokes two seconds apart, and the fancy seized
the little man to finish counting by the ring of the anvil.
"Twelve, ten, eight," he counted slowly. "Six" was forming on the tip
of the tongue when of a sudden the tiny flame veered far over toward
the holder, sputtered and went out. For the first time in those
interminable minutes, Arnold looked at his companion. Ichabod's face
was within a foot of the table, and in line with the direction the
flame had veered. Swift as thought the small man was on his feet,
white anger in his face.
"You blew that candle!" he challenged.
Ichabod's head dropped into his hands. An awful horror of himself fell
crushingly upon him; an abhorrence of the selfishness that could have
forgotten--what he forgot; and for so long,--almost irrevocably long.
Mingled with this feeling was a sudden thanksgiving for the boon of
which he was unworthy; the memory at the eleventh hour, in time to do
as he had done before his word was passed. Arnold strode across the
room, his breath coming fast, his eyes flashing fire. He shook the
tall man by the shoulder roughly.
"You blew that flame, I say!"
Ichabod looked up at the furious, dark face almost in surprise.
"Yes, I blew it," he corroborated absently.
"It would have burned longer."
"Perhaps--I don't know."
Arnold moved back a step and the old smile, mocking, maddening, spread
over his face; tilting, perpendicular, the tips of the big
moustaches.
"After all--" very slowly--"after all, then, you're a coward."
The tall man stood up; six-feet-two, long, bony, immovable: Ichabod
himself again.
"You know that's a lie."
"You'll meet me again,--another way, then?"
"No, never!"
"I repeat, you're a cursed coward."
"I'd be a coward if I did meet you," quickly.
Something in Ichabod's voice caught the little man's ear and held him
silent, as, for a long half-minute, the last time in their lives, the
two men looked into each other's eyes.
"You'll perhaps explain." Arnold's voice was cold as death. "You have
a reason?"
Ichabod walked slowly over to the window and leaned against the frame.
Standing there, the spring sunshine fell full upon his face, drawing
clear the furrows at the angles of his eyes and the gray threads of
his hair. He paused a moment, looking out over the broad prairie
shimmering indistinctly in the heat, and the calm of it all took hold
of him, shone in his face.
"I've a reason," very measuredly, "but it's not that I fear death, or
you." He took up his hat and smoothed it absently. "In future I shall
neither seek, nor avoid you. Do what you wish--and God judge us both."
Without a glance at the other man, he turned toward the door.
Arnold moved a step, as if to prevent him going.
"I repeat, it's my right to know why you refuse." His feet shifted
uneasily upon the floor. "Is it because of another--Eleanor?"
Ichabod paused.
"Yes," very slowly. "It's because of Eleanor--_and_ another."
The tall man's hand was upon the knob, but this time there was no
interruption. An instant he hesitated; then absently, slowly, the door
opened and closed. A moment later indistinct, descending steps sounded
on the stairway.
Alone, Asa Arnold stood immovable, looking blindly at the closed door,
listening until the tapping feet had passed into silence. Then, in a
motion indescribable, of pain and of abandon, he sank back into the
single chair.
His dearest enemy would have pitied the little man at that moment!
CHAPTER VII--THE PRICE OF THE LEAP
In the chronology of the little town, day followed day, as monotonously
as ticks the tall clock on the wall. Only in multiple they merged
into the seasons which glided so smoothly, one into the other, that
the change was unnoticed, until it had taken place.
Thus three months passed by, and man's work for the year was nearly
done. The face of the prairie had become one of many colors; eternal
badge of civilization as opposed to Nature, who paints each season
with its own hue. Beside the roadways great, rank sunflowers turned
their glaring yellow faces to the light. In every direction stretched
broad fields of flax; unequally ripening, their color scheme ranging
from sky blue of blossoms to warm browns of maturity. Blotches of sod
corn added here and there a dash of green to the picture. Surrounding
all, a setting for all, the unbroken virgin prairie, mottled green and
brown, stretched, smiling, harmonious, beneficent; a land of promise
and of plenty for generations yet unborn.
All through the long, hot summer Asa Arnold had stayed in town,
smoking a big pipe in front of the hotel of Hans Becher. Indolent,
abnormally indolent, a stranger seeing him thus would have commented;
but, save Hans the confiding, none other of the many interested
observers were deceived. No man merely indolent sleeps neither by
night nor by day; and it seemed the little man never slept. No man
merely indolent sits wide-eyed hour after hour, gazing blankly at the
earth beneath his feet--and uttering never a word. Brooding, not
dreaming, was Asa Arnold; brooding over the eternal problem of right
and wrong. And, as passed the slow weeks, he moved back--back on the
trail of civilization, back until Passion and not Reason was the god
enthroned; back until one thought alone was with him morning, noon,
and night,--and that thought preponderant, overmastering, deadly
hate.
Observant Curtis, the doctor, shrugged his shoulders.
"The old, old trail," he satirized.
It was to Bud Evans, the little agent, that he made the observation.
"Which has no ending," completed the latter.
The doctor shrugged afresh.
"That has one inevitable termination," he refuted.
"Which is--"
"Madness--sheer madness."
The agent was silent a moment.
"And the end of that?" he suggested.
Curtis pursed his lips.
"Tragedy, or a strait-jacket. The former, in this instance."
Evans was silent longer than before.
"Do you really mean that?" he queried at last, significantly.
"I've warned Maurice,"--sententiously. "I can do no more."
"And he?" quickly.
"Thanked me."
"That was all?"
"That was all."
The two friends looked at each other, steadily; yet, though they said
no more, each knew the thought of the other, each knew that in future
no move of Asa Arnold's would pass unnoticed, unchallenged.
Again, weeks, a month, passed without incident. It was well along in
the fall and of an early evening that a vague rumor of the unusual
passed swiftly, by word of mouth, throughout the tiny town. Only a
rumor it was, but sufficient to set every man within hearing in
motion.
On this night Hans Becher had eaten his supper and returned to the
hotel office, as was his wont, for an evening smoke, when, without
apparent reason, Bud Evans and Jim Donovan, the blacksmith, came
quietly in and sat down.
"Evening," they nodded, and looked about them.
A minute later Dr. Curtis and Hank Judge, the machine man, dropped
unostentatiously into chairs. They likewise muttered "Evening," and
made observation from under their hat-brims. Others followed rapidly,
until the room was full and dark figures waited outside. At last
Curtis spoke.
"Your boarder, Asa Arnold, where is he, Hans?"
The unsuspecting German blew a cloud of smoke.
"He a while ago went out." Then, as an afterthought: "He will return
soon."
Silence once more for a time, and a steadily thickening haze of smoke
in the room.
"Did he have supper, Hans?" queried Bud Evans, impatiently.
Again the German's face expressed surprise.
"No, it is waiting for him. He went to shoot a rabbit he saw."
The men were on their feet.
"He took a gun, Hans?"
"A rifle, to be sure." The mild brown eyes glanced up reproachfully.
"A man does not go hunting without--... What is this!" he completed in
consternation, as, finding himself suddenly alone, he hurried outside
and stood confusedly scratching his bushy poll, in the block of light
surrounding the open doorway.
The yard was deserted. As one snuffs a candle, the men had vanished.
Hans' pipe had gone out and he went inside for a match. Though the
stars fell, the German must needs smoke. Only a minute he was gone,
but during that time a group of horsemen had gathered in the street.
Others were coming across lots, and still others were emerging from
the darkness of alleys. Some were mounted; some led by the rein, wiry
little bronchos. Watching, it almost seemed to the German that they
sprang from the ground.
"Are you all ready?" called a voice, Bud Evans' voice.
"Here--"
"Here--"
"All ready?"
"Yes--"
"We're off, then."
There was a sudden, confused trampling, as of cattle in stampede; a
musical creaking of heavy saddles; a knife-like swish of many quirts
through the air; a chorus of dull, chesty groans as the rowels of long
spurs bit the flanks of the mustangs, and they were gone--down the
narrow street, out upon the prairie, their hoof beats pattering
_diminuendo_ into silence; a cloud of dust, grayish in the starlight,
marking the way they had taken.
Jim Donovan, the blacksmith, came running excitedly up from a side
street. He stopped in front of the hotel, breathlessly. Holding his
sides, he followed with his eyes the trail of dust leading out into
the night.
"Have they gone?" he panted. "I can't find another horse in town."
"Where is it to?" sputtered the German.
"Have they gone, I say?"
Hans gasped.
"Yes, to be sure."
"They'll never make it." The blacksmith mopped his brow with
conviction. "He has an hour's start."
Hans grasped the big man by the coat.
"Who is too late?" he emphasized. "Where are they going?"
Jim Donovan turned about, great pity for such density in his eyes.
"Is it possible you don't understand? It's to Ichabod Maurice's
they're going, to tell him of Arnold." The speaker mopped his face
anew. "It's useless though. They're too late," he completed.
"But Arnold is not there," protested the German. "He went for a
rabbit, out on the breaking. He so told me."
"He lied to you. He's mad. I tell you they're too late," repeated the
smith, obstinately.
Hans clung tenaciously to the collar.
"Some one knew and told them?" He pointed in the direction the dust
indicated.
"Yes, Bud Evans; but they wouldn't believe him at first,
and"--bitterly--"and waited." Donovan shook himself free, and started
down the walk. "I'm going to bed," he announced conclusively.
Meanwhile the cloud of dust was moving out over the prairie like the
wind. The pace was terrific, and the tough little ponies were soon
puffing steadily. Small game, roused from its sleep by the roadside,
sprang winging into the night. Once a coyote, surprised, ran a
distance confusedly ahead in the roadway; then, an indistinct black
ball, it vanished amongst the tall grass.
Well out on the prairie, Bud Evans, the leader, raised in his stirrups
and looked ahead. There was no light beyond where the little cottage
should be. The rowels of his spur dug anew at the flank of his pony as
he turned a voice like a fog-horn back over his shoulder.
"The place is dark, boys," he called. "Hurry."
Answering, a muttering sound, not unlike an approaching storm, passed
along the line, and in accompaniment the quirts cut the air anew.
Silent as the grave was the little farmstead when, forty odd minutes
from the time of starting, they steamed up at the high fence bounding
the yard. One of Ichabod's farm horses whinnied a lone greeting from
the barn as they hastily dismounted and swarmed within the inclosure.
"We're too late," prophesied a voice.
"I'm glad my name's not Arnold, if we are," responded another,
threateningly.
Hurrying up the path in advance, the little land-agent stumbled over a
soft, dark object, and a curse fell from his lips as he recognized the
dead body of the big collie.
"Yes, we're too late," he echoed.
The door of the house swung ajar, creaking upon its hinges; and, as
penetrates the advance wave of a flood, the men swarmed through the
doorway inside, until the narrow room was blocked. Simultaneously,
like torches, lighted matches appeared aloft in their hands, and the
tiny whitewashed room flashed into light. As simultaneously there
sprang from the mouth of each man an oath, and another, and another.
Waiting outside, not a listener but knew the meaning of that sound;
and big, hairy faces crowded tightly to the one small window.
For a moment not a man in the line stirred. Death was to them no
stranger; but death such as this--
In more than one hand the match burned down until it left a mark like
charcoal, and without calling attention. One and all they stood
spellbound, their eyes on the floor, their lips unconsciously uttering
the speech universal of anger and of horror, the instinctive language
of anathema.
On the floor, sprawling, as falls a lifeless body, lay the long
Ichabod. On his forehead, almost geometrically near the centre, was a
tiny, black spot, around it a lighter red blotch; his face otherwise
very white; his hair, on the side toward which he leaned, a little
matted; that was all.
Prostrate across him, in an attitude of utter abandon, reposed the
body of a woman, soft, graceful, motionless now as that of the man:
the body of Camilla Maurice. One hand had held his head and was
stained dark. On her lips was another stain, but lighter. The meaning
of that last mark came as a flash to the spectators, and the room grew
still as the figures on the floor.
Suddenly in the silence the men caught their breath, with the quick
guttural note that announces the unexpected. That there was no
remaining life they had taken for granted--and Camilla's lips had
moved! They stared as at sight of a ghost; all except Curtis, the
physician.
"A lamp, men," he demanded, pressing his ear to Camilla's chest.
"Help me here, Evans," he continued without turning. "I think she's
fainted is all," and together they carried their burden into the tiny
sleeping-room, closing the door behind.
That instant Ole, the Swede, thrust a curious head in at the outer
doorway. He had noticed the light and the gathering, and came to
ascertain their meaning. Wondering, his big eyes passed around
the waiting group and from them to the floor. With that look
self-consciousness left him; he crowded to the front, bending
over the tall man and speaking his name.
"Mr. Maurice," he called. "Mr. Maurice."
He snatched off his own coat, rolling it under Ichabod's head, and
with his handkerchief touched the dark spot on the forehead. It was
clotted already and hardening, and realization came to the boy Swede.
He stood up, facing the men, the big veins in his throat throbbing.
"Who did this?" he thundered, crouching for a spring like a great dog.
"Who did this, I say?"
It was the call to action. In the sudden horror of the tragedy the big
fellows had momentarily forgotten their own grim epilogue. Now, at the
words, they turned toward the door. But the Swede was in advance,
blocking the passage.
"Tell me first who did this thing," he challenged, threateningly.
A hand was laid gently upon his shoulder.
"Asa Arnold, my boy," answered a quiet voice, which continued, in
response to a sudden thought, "You live near here; have you seen him
to-night?"
The Swede dropped the bar.
"The little man who stays with Hans Becher?"
The questioner nodded.
"Yes, a half-hour ago." The boy-man understood now. "He stopped at my
house, and--"
"Which direction did he go?"
Ole stepped outside, his arm stretched over the prairie, white now in
the moonlight.
"That way," he indicated. "East."
As there had been quiescence before, now there was action. No charge
of cavalry was ever more swift than their sudden departure.
"East, toward Schooner's ranch," was called and repeated as they made
their way back to the road; and, following, the wiry little bronchos
groaned in unison as the back cinch to each one of the heavy saddles,
was, with one accord, drawn tight. Then, widening out upon the
reflected whiteness of prairie, there spread a great black crescent. A
moment later came silence, broken only by the quivering call of a lone
coyote.
Ole watched them out of sight, then turned back to the door; the mood
of the heroic passed, once more the timid, retiring Swede. But now he
was not alone. Bud Evans was quietly working over the body on the
floor, laying it out decently as the quick ever lay out the dead.
"Evans," called the doctor from the bedroom. As the agent responded,
Ole heard the smothered cry of a woman in pain.
The big boy hesitated, then sat down on the doorstep. There was
nothing now for him to do, and suddenly he felt very tired. His head
dropped listlessly into his hands; like a great dog, he waited,
watching.
Minutes passed. On the table the oil lamp sputtered and burned lower.
Out in the stable the horse repeated its former challenging whinny.
Once again through the partition the listener caught the choking wail
of pain, and the muffled sound of the doctor's voice in answer.
At last Bud Evans came to the door, his face very white. "Water," he
requested, and Ole ran to the well and back. Then, impassive, he sat
down again to wait.
Time passed, so long a time it seemed to the watcher that the riders
must soon be returning. Finally Evans emerged from the side room,
walking absently, his face gray in the lamplight.
The Swede stood up.
"Camilla Maurice, is she hurt?" he asked.
The little agent busied himself making a fire.
"She's dead," he answered slowly.
"Dead, you say?"
"Yes, dead,"--very quietly.
The fire blazed up and lit the room, shining unpityingly upon the face
of the man on the floor.
Evans noticed, and drawing off his own coat spread it over the face
and hands, covering them from sight; then, uncertain, he returned and
sat down, mechanically holding his palms to the blaze.
A moment later Dr. Curtis appeared at the tiny bedroom entrance; and,
emerging as the little man had done before him, he closed the door
softly behind. In his arms he carried a blanket, carefully rolled.
From the depths of its folds, as he slowly crossed the room toward the
stove, there escaped a sudden cry, muffled, unmistakable.
The doctor sank down wearily in a chair. Ole, the boy-faced, without a
question brought in fresh wood, laying it down on the floor very, very
softly.
"Will he--live?" asked Bud Evans, suddenly, with an uncertain glance
at the obscuring blanket; and hearing the query, the Swede paused in
his work to listen.
The big doctor hesitated, and cleared his throat.
"I think so; though--God forgive me--I hope not." And he cleared his
throat again.
JOURNEY'S END
I
"Steve!" It was the girl who spoke, but the man did not seem to hear.
He was staring through the window, unseeingly, into the heart of his
bitter foe, Winter. He sat silent, helpless.
"Steve!"
At last he awoke.
"Mollie!--girlie!"
An hour had passed since he left the doctor's office to reel and
stagger drunkenly through the slush and the sleet, and the icy blasts,
which bit cruelly into his very vitals.
Now he and Mollie were alone in the tiny library. Babcock had been
warmed, washed, fed. Seemingly without volition on his part, he was
before the hard-coal blaze, his feet on the fender, the light
carefully shaded from his eyes. Once upon a time--
But Steve Babcock, master mechanic, had not lost his nerve--once upon
a time.
"Steve"--the voice was as soft as the wide brown eyes, as the dainty
oval chin--"Steve, tell me what it is."
The man's hand, palm outward, dropped wearily, eloquently. That was
all.
"But tell me," the girl's chair came closer, so that she might have
touched him, "you went to see the doctor?"
"Yes."
"And he--?"
Again the silent, hopeless gesture, more fear-inspiring than words.
"Don't keep me in suspense, please." A small hand was on the man's
knee, now, frankly unashamed. "Tell me what he said."
For an instant there was silence, then Babcock shrugged awkwardly, in
an effort at nonchalance.
"He said I was--was--" in spite of himself, the speaker paused to
moisten his lips--"a dead man."
"Steve!"
Not a word this time; not even a shrug.
"Steve, you--you're not--not joking with me?"
Lower and lower, still in silence, dropped the man's chin.
"Steve," in a steadier voice, "please answer me. You're not joking?"
"Joking!" At last the query had pierced the fear-dulled brain.
"Joking! God, no! It's real, real, deadly real, that's what ... Oh,
Mollie--!" Instinctively, as a child, the man's head had gone to the
girl's lap. Though never before had they spoken of love or of
marriage, neither noted the incongruity now. "It's all over. We'll
never be married, never again get out into the country together, never
even see the green grass next Spring--at least I won't--never.... Oh,
Mollie, Mollie!" The man's back rose and fell spasmodically. His voice
broke. "Mollie, make me forget; I can't bear to think of it. Can't!
Can't!"
Not a muscle of the girl's body stirred; she made no sound. No one in
advance would have believed it possible, but it was true. Five minutes
passed. The man became quiet.
"Steve," the voice was very even, "what else did the doctor say?"
"Eh?" It was the doddering query of an old man.
The girl repeated the question, slowly, with infinite patience, as
though she were speaking to a child.
"What else did the doctor say?"
Her tranquillity in a measure calmed the man.
"Oh, he said a lot of things; but that's all I remember--what I told
you. It was the last thing, and he kind of tilted back in his chair.
The spring needed oil; it fairly screamed. I can hear it now.
"'Steve Babcock,' said he, 'you've got to go some place where it's
drier, where the air's pure and clean and sweet the year round.
Mexico's the spot for you, or somewhere in the Far West where you can
spend all your time in the open--under the roof of Heaven.'
"He leaned forward, and again that cursed spring interrupted.
"'If you don't go, and go right away,' he said, 'as sure as I'm
talking to you, you're a dead man.'"
Babcock straightened, and, leaden-eyed, looked dully into the blaze.
"Those," he whispered, "were his last words."
"And if you do go?"--very quietly.
"He said I had a chance--a fighting chance." Once more the hopeless,
deprecatory gesture.
"But what's the use? You know, as well as I, that I haven't a hundred
dollars to my name. He might just as well have told me to go to the
moon.
"We poor folks are like rats in a trap when they turn the water
on--helpless. We--"
Babcock had wandered on, forgetting, for the moment, that it was his
own case he was analyzing. Now of a sudden it recurred to him,
cumulatively, crushingly and, as before, his head instinctively sought
refuge.
"We can't do anything but take our medicine, Mollie--just take our
medicine."
_Patter_, _patter_ sounded the sleet against the window-panes,
mingling with the roar of the wind in the chimney, with the short,
quick breaths of the man. In silence he reached out, took one of the
girl's hands captive, and held it against his cheek.
For a minute--five minutes--she did not stir, did not utter a sound;
only the soft oval face tightened until its gentle outlines grew
sharp, and the brown skin almost white.
All at once her lips compressed; she had reached a decision.
"Steve, sit up, please; I can talk to you better so." Pityingly,
protectingly, she placed an arm around him and drew him close; not as
man to maid, but--ah, the pity of it!--as a feeble child to its
mother.
"Listen to what I say. To-day is Thursday. Next Monday you are going
West, as the doctor orders."
"What--what did you say, Mollie?"
"Next Monday you go West."
"You mean, after all, I'm to have a chance? I'm not going to die
like--like a rat?"
For a moment, a swiftly passing moment, it was the old vital Steve who
spoke; the Babcock of a year ago; then, in quick recession, the mood
passed.
"You don't know what you're talking about, girl. I can't go, I tell
you. I haven't the money."
"I'll see that you have the money, Steve."
"You?"
"I've been teaching for eight years, and living at home all the
while."
The man, surprised out of his self centredness, looked wonderingly,
unbelievingly, at her.
"You never told me, Mollie."
"No, I never saw the need before."
The man's look of wonder passed. Another--fearful, dependent, the look
of a child in the dark--took its place.
"But--alone, Mollie! A strange land, a strange people, a strange
tongue! Oh, I hate myself, girl, hate myself! I've lost my nerve. I
can't go alone. I can't."
"You're not going alone, Steve." There was a triumphant note in her
voice that thrilled the man through and through. She continued:
"Only this morning--I don't know why I did it; it seems now like
Providence pointing the way--I read in the paper about the rich farm
lands in South Dakota that are open for settlement. I thought of you
at the time, Steve; how such a life might restore your health; but it
seemed so impossible, so impracticable, that I soon forgot about it.
"But--Steve--we can each take up a quarter-section--three hundred and
twenty acres, altogether. Think of it! We'll soon be rich. There you
will have just the sort of outdoor life the doctor says you need."
He looked at her, marvelling.
"Mollie--you don't mean it--now, when I'm--this way!" He arose, his
breath coming quick, a deep blot of red in the centre of each cheek.
"It can't be true when--when you'd never let me say anything before."
"Yes, Steve, it's true."
She was so calm, so self-possessed and withal so determined, that the
man was incredulous.
"That you'll marry me? Say it, Mollie!"
"Yes, I'll marry you."
"Mollie!" He took a step forward, then of a sudden, abruptly halted.
"But your parents," in swift trepidation. "Mollie, they--"
"Don't let's speak of them,"--sharply. Then in quick contrition, her
voice softened; once more it struck the maternal note.
"Pardon me, I'm very tired. Come. We have a spare room; you mustn't go
home to-night."
The man stopped, coughed, advanced a step, then stopped again.
"Mollie, I can't thank you; can't ever repay you--"
"You mustn't talk of repaying me," she said shyly, her dark face
coloring. It was the first time during the interview that she had
shown a trace of embarrassment.
"Come," she said, meeting his look again, her hand on the door; "it's
getting late. You must not venture out."
A moment longer the man hesitated, then obeyed. Not until he was
very near, so near that he could touch her, did a vestige of his
former manhood appear. He paused, and their eyes were locked in a
soul-searching look. Then all at once his arm was round her waist, his
face beside her face.
"Mollie, girl, won't you--just once?"
"No, no--not that! Don't ask it." Passionately the brown hands flew
to the brown cheeks, covering them protectingly. But at once came
thought, the spirit of sacrifice, and contrition for the involuntary
repulse.
"Forgive me, Steve; I'm unaccountable to-night." Her voice, her manner
were constrained, subdued. She accepted his injured look without
comment, without further defence. She saw the perplexed look on his
thin face; then she reached forward--up--and her two soft hands
brought his face down to the level of her own.
Deliberately, voluntarily, she kissed him fair upon the lips.
II
The sun was just peering over the rim of the prairie, when Mrs. Warren
turned in from the dusty road, picked her way among the browning weeds
to the plain, unpainted, shanty-like structure which marked the
presence of a homesteader. Except to the east, where stood the tents
and shacks of the new railroad's construction gang, not another human
habitation broke the dull, monotonous rolling sea of prairie.
Mrs. Warren pounded vigorously upon the rough boards of the door.
A full half-minute she waited; then she glared petulantly at the
unresponsive barrier, and pounded upon it again.
Ordinarily she would have waited patiently, for the multitude of
duties of one day often found Mrs. Babcock still weary with the
dawning of the next--especially since Steve had allied himself with
Jack Warren's engineering corps.
Funds had run low, and the two valetudinarians had reached the stage
of desperation where they were driven to acknowledge failure, when
Jack Warren happened along, in the van of the new railroad.
The work of home-building, from the raw material, had been too much
for Steve's enfeebled physique; so it happened that Mollie performed
most of his share, as well as all of her own. Yet Steve toiled to the
limit of his endurance, and each day, at sundown, flung himself upon
his blanket, spread beneath the stars, dog-tired, fairly trembling
with weariness. But he soon developed a prodigious appetite, and,
after the first few weeks, slept each night like a dead man, until
sunrise.
This morning Annie Warren was too full of her errand to pause an
instant. She stood a moment listening, one ear to the splintery,
unfinished boards, then--
"Mollie," she ventured, "are you awake?"
No answer.
"Mollie"--more insistent, "wake up and let me in."
Still no response.
"Mollie," for the third time, "it is I, Annie; may I enter?"
"Come." The voice was barely audible.
Within the uncomfortably low, dim room the visitor impetuously crossed
the earthen floor half-way to a rude bunk built against the wall, then
paused, her round, childlike face soberly lengthening.
"Mollie, you have been crying!" she charged, resentfully, as if the
act constituted a personal offence. "You can't deceive me. The pillow
is soaked, and your eyes are red." She came forward, impulsively, and
threw herself on the bed, her arm about the other.
"What is it? Tell me--your friend--Annie."
Beneath the light coverlet, Mollie Babcock made a motion of
deprecation, almost of repugnance.
"It is nothing. Please don't pay any attention to me."
"But it _is_ something. Am I not your friend?"
For a moment neither spoke. Annie Warren all at once became conscious
that the other woman was looking at her in a way she had never done
before.
"Assuredly you are my friend, Annie. But just the same, it's nothing."
The look altered until it became a smile.
"Tell me, instead, why you are here," Mollie went on. "It is not usual
at this time of day."
Annie Warren felt the rebuff, and she was hurt.
"It is nothing." The visitor was on her feet, her voice again
resentful; her chin was held high, while her long lashes drooped.
"Pardon me for intruding, for--"
"Annie!"
No answer save the quiver of a sensitive red lip.
"Annie, child, pardon me. I wouldn't for the world hurt you; but it is
so hard, what you ask." Mollie Babcock rose, now, likewise. "However,
if you wish--"
"No, no!" The storm was clearing. "It was all my fault. I know you'd
rather not." She had grasped Mollie's arms, and was forcing her
backward, toward the bunk, gently, smilingly. "Be still. I've
something to tell you. Are you quite ready to listen?"
"Yes, I'm quite ready."
"You haven't the slightest idea what it is? You couldn't even guess?"
"No, I couldn't even guess."
"I'll tell you, then." The plump Annie was bubbling like a child
before a well-filled Christmas stocking. "It's Jack: he's coming this
very day. A big, fierce Indian brought the letter this morning." She
sat down tailor fashion on the end of the bunk. "He nearly ate up
Susie--Jack christened her Susie because she's a Sioux--because she
wouldn't let him put the letter right into my own hand. That's why
I'm up so early."
She looked slyly at the woman on the bed.
"Who do you suppose is coming with him?" she asked.
"I'm sure I don't know," in a tone of not caring, either.
"Guess, Mollie!"
"Steve?"
"Of course--Steve. You knew all the time, only you wouldn't admit it.
Oh, I'm so glad! I want to hug some one. Isn't it fine?"
"Yes, fine indeed. But you don't mean that you want to hug Steve?"
"No, goose. You know I meant Jack; but I--" She regarded her friend
doubtfully. But Mollie Babcock was dressing rapidly, and her face was
averted.
"And Mollie, I didn't tell you all--almost the best. We're going home,
Jack says; going right away; this very week, maybe."
For a moment the dressing halted. "I am very glad--for you," said
Mollie, in an even voice.
"Glad, for me!" mimickingly, baitingly. "Mollie Babcock, if I didn't
know you better, I'd say you were envious."
Mollie said nothing.
"Or weren't glad your husband is coming."
Still no word.
"Or--or--Mollie, what have I done?" Annie cried in dismay. "Don't cry
so; I was only joking. Of course you know that I didn't mean that you
envied our good luck, or that you wouldn't be crazy to see Steve."
"But it's so. God help me, it's so!"
"Mollie!" Mrs. Warren was aghast. "Forgive me! I'm ashamed of
myself!"
"There's nothing to forgive; it's so."
"Please don't." The two were very close, very tense, but not touching.
"Don't say any more. I didn't hear--"
"You did hear. And you suspected, or you wouldn't have suggested!"
"Mollie, I never dreamed. I--"
Of a sudden the older woman faced about. Seizing the other by the
shoulders, she held her prisoner. She fixed the frightened woman's
eyes with a stern look.
"Will you swear that you never knew--that it was mere chance--what you
said?"
"Yes."
"You swear you didn't?"--the grip tightened--"you swear it?"
"I swear--oh, you're hurting me!"
Mollie Babcock let her hands drop.
"I believe you"--wearily. "It seemed that everybody knew. God help
me!" She sank to the bed, her face in her hands. "I believe I'm going
mad!"
"Mollie--Mollie Babcock! You mustn't talk so--you mustn't!" The
seconds ticked away. Save for the quick catch of suppressed sobs, not
a sound was heard in the mean, austere little room; not an echo
penetrated from the outside world.
Then suddenly the brown head lifted from the pillow, and Mollie faced
almost fiercely about.
"You think I am--am mad already." Then, feverishly: "Don't you?"
Helpless at a crisis, Annie Warren could only stand silent, the pink,
childish under-lip held tight between her teeth to prevent a quiver.
Her fingers played nervously with the filmy lace shawl about her
shoulders.
Mollie advanced a step. "Don't you?"
Annie found her voice.
"No, no, no! Oh, Mollie, no, of course not! You--Mollie--" Instinct
all at once came to her rescue. With a sudden movement she gathered
the woman in her arms, her tender heart quivering in her voice and
glistening in her eyes. "Mollie, I can't bear to have you so! I love
you, Mollie. Tell me what it is--me--your friend, Annie."
Mollie's lips worked without speech, and Annie became insistent.
"Tell me, Mollie. Let me share the ache at your heart. I love you!"
Here was the crushing straw to one very, very heartsick and very
weary. For the first time in her solitary life, Mollie Babcock threw
reticence to the winds, and admitted another human being into the
secret places of her confidence.
"If you don't think me already mad, you will before I'm through." Like
a caged wild thing that can not be still, she was once more on her
feet, vibrating back and forth like a shuttle. "I'm afraid of myself
at times, afraid of the future. It's like the garret used to be after
dark, when we were children: it holds only horrors.
"Child, child!" She paused, her arms folded across her breast, her
throat a-throb. "You can't understand--thank God, you never will
understand--what the future holds for me. You are going back home;
back to your own people, your own life. You've been here but a few
months. To you it has been a lark, an outing, an experience. In a few
short weeks it will be but a memory, stowed away in its own niche, the
pleasant features alone remaining vivid.
"Even, while here, you've never known the life itself. You've had
Jack, the novelty of a strange environment, your anticipation of sure
release. You are merely like a sightseer, locked for a minute in a
prison-cell, for the sake of a new sensation.
"You can't understand, I say. You are this, and I--I am the
life-prisoner in the cell beyond, peering at you through the bars,
viewing you and your mock imprisonment."
Once more the speaker was in motion, to and fro, to and fro, in the
shuttle-trail. "The chief difference is, that the life-prisoner has a
hope of pardon; I have none--absolutely none."
"Mollie"--pleadingly, "you mustn't. I'll ask Jack to give Steve a
place at home, and you can go--"
"Go!" The bitterness of her heart welled up and vibrated in the word.
"Go! We can't go, now or ever. It's death to Steve if we leave. I've
got to stay here, month after month, year after year, dragging my life
out until I grow gray-haired--until I die!" She halted, her arms
tensely folded, her breath coming quick. Only the intensity of her
emotion saved the attitude from being histrionic. In a sudden
outburst, she fiercely apostrophized:
"Oh, Dakota! I hate you, I hate you! Because I am a woman, I hate you!
Because I would live in a house, and not in this endless dreary waste
of a dead world, I hate you! Because your very emptiness and solitude
are worse than a prison, because the calls of the living things that
creep and fly over your endless bosom are more mournful than death
itself, I hate you! Because I would be free, because I respect sex,
because of the disdain for womanhood that dwells in your crushing
silence, I hate--oh, my God, how I hate you!" She threw her arms wide,
in a frantic gesture of rebellion.
"I want but this," she cried passionately: "to be free; free, as I was
at home, in God's country. And I can never be so here--never, never,
never! Oh, Annie, I'm homesick--desperately, miserably homesick! I
wish to Heaven I were dead!"
Annie Warren, child-woman that she was, was helpless, when face to
face with the unusual. Her senses were numbed, paralyzed. One thought
alone suggested itself.
"But"--haltingly--"for Steve's sake--certainly, for him--"
"Stop! As you love me, stop!" Again no suggestion of the histrionic in
the passionate voice. "Don't say that now. I can't stand it. I--oh, I
don't mean that! Forget that I said it. I'm not responsible this
morning. Please leave me."
She was prostrate on the bed at last, her whole body a-tremble.
"But--Mollie--"
"Go--go!" cried Mollie, wildly. "Please go!"
Awed to silence, Annie Warren stared helplessly a moment, then
gathered her shawl about her shoulders, and slipped silently away.
III
Mollie Babcock was listlessly going about some imperative domestic
task, behind the mean structure which represented home for her, when
Steve came upon her.
She was not looking for him. He had been gone so long, out there
somewhere, in that abomination of desolation, building a railroad,
that the morbid fancy had come to dwell with her that the prairie had
swallowed him, and that she would never see him more. So he came upon
her unawares.
The buffalo grass rustled with the passage of her skirts. His eyes
lighted, the man seemed to grow in stature--six feet of sun-blessed,
primitive health. Now was the time--
"Mollie!"
There was a sudden gasp from the woman. With a hand to her throat, she
wheeled swiftly round, confronting him.
"I'm back at last. Aren't you glad to see me?"
She was as pallid as an Easter-lily; pallid, despite the fact that she
had decided, and had nerved herself for his coming.
Steve was puzzled. "Mollie, girl"--he did not advance, merely stood as
he was--"aren't you glad to see me? Won't you--come?"
There was a long space of silence; the woman did not stir. Then a
strange, inarticulate cry was smothered in her throat. Swiftly, all
but desperately, she stumbled blindly forward, although her eyes were
shining with the enchantment of his presence; close to him she came,
flung her arms around his broad chest, and strained him to her with
the abandon of a wild creature.
"Steve!" tensely, "how could you? Glad? You know I'm glad--oh, so
glad! You startled me, that was all."
"Mollie, girlie"--he lifted her at arms' length, joying in this
testimony of his renewed strength and manhood--"I rode all last night
to get here--to see you. Are you happy, girlie, happy?"
"Yes, Steve"--her voice was chastened to a murmur--"I--I'm very
happy."
"That completes my happiness." Drawing her tenderly to him, he kissed
her again and again--hungrily, passionately; then, abruptly, he fell
to scrutinizing her, with a meaning that she was quick to interpret.
"Isn't there something you've forgotten, Mollie?"
"No, I've not forgotten, Steve." She drew the bearded face down to her
own. Had Steve been observant he would have noticed that the lips so
near his own were trembling; but he was not observant, this Steve
Babcock. Once, twice and again she kissed him.
"I think I'll never forget, Steve, man--never!" With one hand she
indicated the prairie that billowed away to the skyline. "This is our
home, and I love it because it is ours. I shall always have you--I
know now, Steve. And I'm the happiest, most contented woman in all
the wide world."
She drew away with a sudden movement, her face aglow with love and
happiness. She was pulling at his arm with all her might.
"Where are you going?" he asked, surprised.
"Over to the camp--to Journey's End. I must tell Annie Warren just as
soon as ever I can find her."
A PRAIRIE IDYL
A beautiful moonlight night early in September, the kind of night one
remembers for years, when the air is not too cold to be pleasant, and
yet has a suggestion of the frost that is to come. A kind of air that
makes one think thoughts which cannot be put into words, that calls up
sensations one cannot describe; an air which breeds restless energy;
an air through which Mother Nature seems to speak, saying--"Hasten,
children; life is short and you have much to do."
It was nearing ten o'clock, and a full moon lit up the rolling prairie
country of South Dakota for miles, when the first team of a little
train of six moved slowly out of the dark shadow blots thrown by the
trees at the edge of the Big Sioux, advancing along a dim trail
towards the main road. From the first wagon sounded the suggestive
rattle of tin cooking-utensils, and the clatter of covers on an old
cook stove. Next behind was a load piled high with a compound heap of
tents, tennis nets, old carpets, hammocks, and the manifold
unclassified paraphernalia which twenty young people will collect for
a three weeks' outing.
These wagons told their own story. "Camp Eden," the fanciful name
given to the quiet, shady spot where the low chain of hills met the
river; the spot where the very waters seemed to lose themselves in
their own cool depths, and depart sighing through the shallows
beyond,--Camp Eden was deserted, and a score of very tired campers
were reluctantly returning to home and work.
Last in the line and steadily losing ground, came a single trap
carrying two people. One of them, a young man with the face of a
dreamer, was speaking. The spell of the night was upon him.
"So this is the last of our good time--and now for work." He stopped
the horse and stood up in the wagon. "Good-bye, little Camp Eden.
Though I won't be here, yet whenever I see the moon a-shining so--and
the air feeling frosty and warm and restless--and the corn stalks
whitening, and the young prairie chickens calling--you'll come back to
me, and I'll think of you--and of the Big Sioux--and of--" His eyes
dropped to a smooth brown head, every coil of the walnut hair
glistening.
It made him think of the many boat rides they two had taken together
in the past two weeks, when he had watched the moonlight shimmering on
rippling, running water, and compared the play of light upon it and
upon that same brown head--and had forgotten all else in the
comparison. He forgot all else now. He sat down, and the horse
started. The noisy wagons ahead had passed out of hearing. The pair
were alone.
He was silent a moment, looking sideways at the girl. The moonlight
fell full upon her face, drawing clear the line of cheek and chin;
bringing out the curve of the drooping mouth and the shadow from the
long lashes. She seemed to the sensitive lad more than human. He had
loved her for years, with the pure silent love known only to such a
nature as his--and never had he loved her so wildly as now.
He was the sport of a multitude of passions; love and ambition were
the strongest, and they were fighting a death struggle with each
other. How could he leave her for years--perhaps never see her
again--and yet how could he ask her to be the wife of such as he was
now--a mere laborer? And again, his college course, his cherished
ambition for years--how could he give it up; and yet he felt--he knew
she loved him, and trusted him.
He had been looking squarely at her. She turned, and their eyes met.
Each knew the thought of the other, and each turned away. He hesitated
no longer; he would tell her all, and she should judge. His voice
trembled a little as he said: "I want to tell you a story, and ask you
a question--may I?"
She looked at him quickly, then answered with a smile: "I'm always
glad to hear stories--and at the worst one can always decline to
answer questions."
He looked out over the prairie, and saw the lights of the little
town--her home--in the distance.
"It isn't a short story, and I have only so long"--he pointed along
the road ahead to the village beyond--"to tell it in." He settled
back in the seat, and began speaking. His voice was low and soft, like
the prairie night-wind.
"Part of the story you know; part of it I think you have guessed; a
little of it will be new. For the sake of that little, I will tell
all."
"Thirteen years ago, what is now a little prairie town--then a very
little town indeed--gained a new citizen--a boy of nine. A party of
farmers found him one day, sleeping in a pile of hay, in the market
corner. He lay so they could see how his face was bruised--and how,
though asleep, he tossed in pain. He awoke, and, getting up, walked
with a limp. Where he came from no one knew, and he would not tell;
but his appearance told its own story. He had run away from somewhere.
What had happened they could easily imagine.
"It was harvest-time and boys, even though minus a pedigree, were in
demand; so he was promptly put on a farm. Though only a child, he had
no one to care for him--and he was made to work ceaselessly.
"Years passed and brought a marked change in the boy. How he lived was
a marvel. It was a country of large families, and no one cared to
adopt him. Summers, he would work for his board and clothes, and in
winter, by the irony of Nature, for his board only; yet, perhaps
because it was the warmest place he knew, he managed to attend
district school.
"When a lad of fifteen he began to receive wages--and life's horizon
seemed to change. He dressed neatly, and in winter came to school in
the little prairie town. He was put in the lower grades with boys of
ten, and even here his blunders made him a laughing-stock; but not for
long, for he worked--worked always--and next year was put in the high
school.
"There he established a precedent--doing four years' work in
two--and graduated at eighteen. How he did it no one but he himself
knew--studying Sundays, holidays, and evenings, when he was so tired
that he had to walk the floor to keep awake--but he did it."
The speaker stopped a moment to look at his companion. "Is this a
bore? Somehow I can't help talking to-night."
"No, please go on," said the girl quickly.
"Well, the boy graduated--but not alone. For two years he had worked
side by side with a brown-haired, brown-eyed girl. From the time he
had first seen her she was his ideal--his divinity. And she had never
spoken with him five minutes in her life. After graduation, the girl
went away to a big university. Her parents were wealthy, and her every
wish was gratified."
Again the speaker hesitated. When he went on his face was hard, his
voice bitter.
"And the boy--he was poor and he went back to the farm. He was the
best hand in the country; for the work he received good wages. If he
had worked hard before, he worked now like a demon. He thought of the
girl away at college, and tried at first to crowd her from his
memory--but in vain. Then he worked in self-defence--and to forget.
"He saw years slipping by--and himself still a farmhand. The thought
maddened him, because he knew he was worthy of something better.
"Gradually, his whole life centred upon one object--to save money for
college. Other boys called him close and cold; but he did not care. He
seldom went anywhere, so intent was he upon his one object. On hot
summer nights, tired and drowsy he would read until Nature rebelled,
and he would fall asleep to dream of a girl--a girl with brown eyes
that made one forget--everything. In winter, he had more time--and the
little lamp in his room became a sort of landmark: it burned for hours
after every other light in the valley had ceased shining.
"Four years passed, and at last the boy had won. In a month he would
pass from the prairie to university life. He had no home, few
friends--who spoke; those who did not were safely packed at the bottom
of his trunk. His going from the little town would excite no more
comment than had his coming. He was all ready, and for the first time
in his life set apart a month--the last--as a vacation. He felt
positively gay. He had fought a hard fight--and had won. He saw the
dawning of a great light--saw the future as a battle-ground where he
would fight; not as he was then, but fully equipped for the
struggle.... But no matter what air-castles he built; they were such
as young men will build to the end of time."
The speaker's voice lowered--stopped. He looked straight out over the
prairie, his eyes glistening.
"If so far the boy's life had been an inferno, he was to be repaid.
The girl--she of the brown eyes--was home once more, and they met
again as members of a camping party." He half-turned in his seat to
look at her, but she sat with face averted, so quiet, so motionless,
that he wondered if she heard.
"Are you listening?" he asked.
"Listening!" Her voice carried conviction, so the lad continued.
"For a fortnight he lived a dream--and that dream was Paradise. He
forgot the past, ignored the future, and lived solely for the
moment--with the joy of Nature's own child. It was the pure love of
the idealist and the dreamer--it was divine.
"Then came the reaction. One day he awoke--saw things as they
were--saw again the satire of Fate. At the very time he left for
college, she returned--a graduate. She was young, beautiful,
accomplished. He was a mere farmhand, without money or education,
homeless, obscure. The thought was maddening, and one day he suddenly
disappeared from camp. He didn't say good-bye to any one; he felt he
had no apology that he could offer. But he had to go, for he felt the
necessity for work, longed for it, as a drunkard longs for liquor."
"Oh!" The exclamation came from the lips of the girl beside him.
"I--we--all wondered why--."
"Well, that was why.
"He fell in with a threshing-crew, and asked to work for his board.
They thought him queer, but accepted his offer. For two days he stayed
with them, doing the work of two men. It seemed as if he couldn't do
enough--he couldn't become tired. He wanted to think it all out, and
he couldn't with the fever in his blood.
"At night he couldn't sleep--Nature was pitiless. He would walk the
road for miles until morning.
"With the third day came relief. All at once he felt fearfully tired,
and fell asleep where he stood. Several of the crew carried him to a
darkened room, and there he slept as a dumb animal sleeps. When he
awoke, he was himself again; his mind was clear and cool. He looked
the future squarely in the face, now, and clearly, as if a finger
pointed, he saw the path that was marked for him. He must go his
way--and she must go hers. Perhaps, after four years or more--but the
future was God's."
The boy paused. The lights of the town were nearing, now; but he still
looked out over the moon-kissed prairie.
"The rest you know. The dreamer returned. The party scarcely knew him,
for he seemed years older. There were but a few days more of camp
life, and he spent most of the time with the girl. Like a malefactor
out on bail, he was painting a picture for the future. He thought he
had conquered himself--but he hadn't. It was the same old struggle.
Was not love more than ambition or wealth? Had he not earned the
right to speak? But something held him back. If justice to himself,
was it justice to the girl? Conscience said 'No.' It was hard--no one
knows how hard--but he said nothing."
Once more he turned to his companion, in his voice the tenderness of a
life-long passion.
"This is the story: did the boy do right?" A life's work--greater than
a life itself, hung on the answer to that question.
The girl understood it all. She had always known that she liked him;
but now--now--As he had told his story, she had felt, first, pity, and
then something else; something incomparably sweeter; something that
made her heart beat wildly, that seemed almost to choke her with its
ecstasy.
He loved her--had loved her all these years! He belonged to her--and
his future lay in her hands.
His future! The thought fell upon her new-found happiness with the
suddenness of a blow. She could keep him, but had she the right to do
so? She saw in him something that he did not suspect--and that
something was genius. She knew he had the ability to make for himself
a name that would stand among the great names of the earth.
Then, did his life really belong to her? Did it not rather belong to
himself and to the world?
She experienced a struggle, fierce as he himself had fought. And the
boy sat silent, tense, waiting for her answer.
Yes, she must give him up; she would be brave. She started to speak,
but the words would not come. Suddenly she buried her face in her
hands, while the glistening brown head trembled with her sobs.
It was the last drop to the cup overflowing. A second, and then, his
arms were around her. The touch was electrifying--it was oblivion--it
was heaven--it was--but only a young lover knows what.
"You have answered," said the boy. "God forgive me--but I can't go
away now."
Thus Fate sported with two lives.
THE MADNESS OF WHISTLING WINGS
CHAPTER I--SANDFORD THE EXEMPLARY
Ordinarily Sandford is sane--undeniably so. Barring the seventh, upon
any other day of the week, fifty-one weeks in the year, from nine
o'clock in the morning until six at night--omitting again a scant
half-hour at noon for lunch--he may be found in his tight little box
of an office on the fifth floor of the Exchange Building, at the
corner of Main Avenue and Thirteenth Street, where the elevated makes
its loop.
No dog chained beside his kennel is more invariably present, no caged
songster more incontestably anchored. If you need his services, you
have but to seek his address between the hours mentioned. You may do
so with the same assurance of finding him on duty that you would feel,
if you left a jug of water out of doors over night in a blizzard,
that the jug, as a jug, would be no longer of value in the morning. He
was, and is, routine impersonate, exponent of sound business
personified; a living sermon against sloth and improvidence, and easy
derelictions of the flesh.
That is to say, he is such fifty-one weeks out of the fifty-two. All
through the frigid winter season, despite the lure of California
limiteds or Havana liners, he holds hard in that den of his, with its
floor and walls of sanitary tiling and its ceiling of white enamel,
and hews--or grinds rather, for Sandford is a dental surgeon--close to
the line.
All through the heat of summer, doggedly superior to the call of
Colorado or the Adirondacks or the Thousand Islands, he comes and
departs by the tick of the clock. Base-ball fans find him adamant;
turf devotees, marble; golf enthusiasts, cold as the tiles beneath his
feet.
Even in early June, when Dalton, whose suburban home is next door,
returns, tanned and clear-eyed from a week-end at _the_ lake--there is
but one lake to Dalton--and calls him mysteriously back to the rear
of the house, where, with a flourish, the cover is removed from a box
the expressman has just delivered, to disclose a shining five-pound
bass reposing upon its bed of packed ice--even then, hands in pockets,
Sandford merely surveys and expresses polite congratulation. Certainly
it is a fine fish, a noble fish, even; but for the sake of one like
it--or, yes, granted a dozen such--to leave the office, the
sanitary-tiled office, deserted for four whole days (especially when
Dr. Corliss on the floor below is watching like a hawk)--such a crazy
proceeding is not to be thought of.
Certainly he will not go along the next week end--or the next, either.
The suggestion simply is unthinkable. Such digressions may be all
right for the leisure class or for invalids; but for adults, live
ones, strong and playing the game? A shrug and a tolerant smile end
the discussion, as, hands still in his pockets, an after-dinner cigar
firm between his teeth, Sandford saunters back across the dozen feet
of sod separating his own domicile from that of his fallen and
misguided neighbor.
"Dalton's got the fever again, bad," he comments to the little woman
upon his own domain, whom he calls "Polly," or "Mrs. Sandford," as
occasion dictates. She has been watching the preceding incident with
inscrutable eyes.
"Yes?" Polly acknowledges, with the air of harkening to a familiar
harangue while casting ahead, in anticipation of what was to come
next.
"Curious about Dalton; peculiar twist to his mental machinery
somewhere." Sandford blows a cloud of smoke and eyes it meditatively.
"Leaving business that way, chopping it all to pieces in fact; and
just for a fish! Curious!"
"Harry's got something back there that'll probably interest you," he
calls out to me as I chug by in my last year's motor; "better stop and
see."
"Yes," I acknowledge simply; and though Polly's eyes and mine meet we
never smile, or twitch an eyelid, or turn a hair; for Sandford is
observing--and this is only June.
So much for Dr. Jekyll Sandford, the Sandford of fifty-one weeks in
the year.
Then, as inevitably as time rolls by, comes that final week; period
of mania, of abandon; and in the mere sorcerous passage of a pair
of whirring wings, Dr. Jekyll, the exemplary, is no more. In his
place, wearing his shoes, audaciously signing his name even to
checks, is that other being, Hyde: one absolutely the reverse of
the reputable Jekyll; repudiating with scorn that gentleman's
engagements; with brazen effrontery denying him utterly, and all the
sane conventionality for which the name has become a synonyme.
Worst of all, rank blasphemy, he not only refuses to set foot in that
modern sanitary office of enamel and tiling, at the corner of
Thirteenth and Main, below which, by day and by night, the "L" trains
go thundering, but deliberately holds it up to ridicule and derision
and insult.