Green River was getting ready for the rally in Odd Fellows' Hall. It was
six o'clock on the evening of the seventeenth of September, and "Grand
rally, Odd Fellows' Hall, September Seventeenth at eight-thirty," had
been featured for weeks in the Green River _Record_, on the list that
with a somewhat arrogant suggestion of prophetic powers possessed by the
_Record_ was headed "Coming Events." It was always a scanty list,
especially in the fall, when ten, twenty, thirty companies began to play
larger centres, and church lawn parties and circuses could no longer
appear on it. Sometimes not more than six events were to come in a gray
and workaday world. But six were enough to announce. Even a true prophet
is not expected to see all the future, only to see clearly all that he
sees, and the _Record_ did that.
This rally was important enough to be listed all by itself, and it did
not need the adjective grand. It was The Rally.
It was Green River's own--a local, almost a family, affair. No
out-of-town celebrities were to be imported this time, to be listened
to with awe and then wined and dined by the Colonel safe from the
curious eyes of the town. This time old Joe Grant was to preside, as he
had done as a matter of course on all such occasions when he was the
acknowledged head of the town in political and financial matters, in the
old days of high-sounding oratory and simpler politics that were gone
forever, but were not very long ago. Judge Saxon, an old timer, too, and
better loved than the Honourable Joe, had declined the honour of
presiding, but had the authentic offer of it, his first distinction of
the kind for years.
It was a local but very important occasion. It was Colonel Everard's
first official appearance as candidate for mayor. It was to be a very
modest appearance. No more time was allotted for his speech than for
Luther Ward's. He was putting himself on a level with Luther and the
Judge and the Honourable Joe and identifying himself at last with local
politics. The evening emphasized the great man's condescension in
accepting this humble office and honouring Green River. Even with the
scandal of Theodore Burr's suicide unexplained still and only two weeks
old, interest centred on the rally. It was a triumph for the town.
Green River was almost ready. Dugan's orchestra was engaged for the
evening, instead of a rival organization from Wells, which the Colonel
often imported upon private and public occasions. Jerry Dugan was
getting old, too, like the Judge and the Honourable Joe. He had not lost
the peculiar wail and lilt from his fiddling, but he had made few recent
additions to his repertoire. Just now the band concert in front of Odd
Fellows' Hall was winding up with his old favourite: "A Day on the
Battlefield."
It had the old swing still, contagious as ever. Loafers in front of the
hall shuffled their feet in time to it. Moon-struck young persons
hanging two by two over the railings of the bridge to gaze at the water
straightened themselves and listened. An ambitious soloist lounging
against the court-house fence across the square began to whistle it with
elaborate variations, at the inspiring moment when "morning in the
forest" had bird-called and syncopated itself into silence, and actual
fighting, and the martial music of the charge began.
High and lilting and shrill, it hung in the still night air, alive for
the hour, challenging the echoes of dead tunes that lingered about the
square, only to die away and be one with them at last; band music,
old-fashioned band music, blatant and empty and splendid, clear through
the still night air, attuned to the night and the town.
"Good old tune. Gets into your feet," Judge Saxon said, while his wife
adjusted his tie before the black walnut mirror in their bedroom, but
his unusual tribute to the tune was perfunctory to-night, and his wife
ignored it, wisely taking this moment of helpfulness to plunge him
suddenly and briskly into a series of questions which she had been
trying in vain for some time to get the correct answers to.
"Hugh," she said, "why wouldn't you take the chair to-night?"
"You were the only thing I ever tried to take away from Joe Grant and
got away with it, Millie," the Judge explained gallantly.
"Don't you think this rally is like old times? Don't you want to see the
town stand on its own feet again, instead of being run from outside?"
"I do, Millie."
Mrs. Saxon made her next point triumphantly, connecting it with the
point before by some obscure logic known only to ladies.
"Hugh, a father could not do more for Lillian Burr than the Colonel has
since poor Theodore went. The house full of flowers, calling there
himself every day and twice a day, though she won't see him; but Lillian
won't see any one. The Colonel's been ailing himself, too, but he
wouldn't put off the rally and disappoint the town. And the new library
will open this fall, and there's talk that he's giving an organ to the
church. Hugh, don't you think Theodore's death may have sobered him?
Don't you think this may be the beginning of better things? Don't you
think----"
"I think you're making a butterfly bow. I don't like them," said the
Judge, with the ingenuous smile that somehow closed a subject. She
sighed, but changed her attack.
"Turn round now. I want to brush you. Hugh, what has happened to Neil
Donovan?"
"What do you mean, happened to him?" snapped the Judge, and then added
soberly, "I don't know, Millie. I wish I did."
"An Irish boy can get just so far and no farther."
"How far, Millie?"
"Don't be flippant, Hugh. There's something strange about Neil lately.
He didn't speak three times at the table last time he came to supper
here. He looks at me as if he didn't know who I was when I speak to him
on the street sometimes. There's no life in him. He's like Charlie and
all the rest of them--giving out just when things are going his way;
that's an Irish boy every time."
"When things are going his way? When his best friend has just shot
himself?"
"I didn't refer to that, Hugh," said Mrs. Saxon with dignity.
"No?"
"I referred to Neil's family affairs, and the fact that Colonel Everard
has taken him up."
"Maggie home and behaving herself and no questions asked, Charlie
shipped to Wells, and Neil going shooting twice with the Colonel?"
"Three times, Hugh."
"And that's what you call things going his way."
"Hugh, why should those two spend any time together at all? They hate
each other, or I always thought so--that is, if a man like the Colonel
could hate a boy like Neil. What does he want of Neil now? What does
Neil want of him?"
"They don't tell me, Millie."
"But it's queer. It frightens me, Hugh. It's as queer as----"
"What?"
"Everything," Mrs. Saxon said, goaded into an exaggeration foreign to
her placid type, "everything, lately. You refusing to preside to-night.
Lillian Burr shutting herself up in this uncanny way. It is uncanny,
even if she is in trouble. Minna Randall taking to church work, and
sewing for hours at a time, and taking long drives with her husband.
They haven't been inside the Colonel's doors for weeks. Their second
girl told our Mary that they have refused five invitations there in the
last month. It's my idea that he gave that last stag dinner because he
couldn't get Minna or Edith there, or any woman. Why should his own
circle turn against him, just when he's doing real good to the town? And
it's not only his own circle that's against him. I was matching curtains
at Ward's when Sebastian came in to-day, and Luther Ward was barely
civil to him--the Colonel's own secretary. What's wrong with the town,
Hugh? Can't it be grateful to the Colonel, now when he really deserves
it?"
"Don't worry about what Everard deserves. He's not likely to get it,
Millie."
Again the Judge was closing the subject, and this time his wife had no
more to say. She gave his threadbare, scrupulously pressed coat a final
pat and jerk of adjustment, and stood off and looked at him.
"You'll do," she said, "now go along. The music's stopping. It won't
look well if you're late."
She turned off the flickering gas jet above the marble-topped bureau
abruptly, but not before the Judge had caught the gleam of tears in her
eyes.
"Why girl," he said, and came close to her and slipped an arm round her
plump, comfortable waist. "You're really troubled."
"Yes."
"And vexed with me for not helping you."
"Yes."
He had drawn her toward a front window of the big, square room. The
Judge and his wife stood by it quietly, looking down through a triangle
of white, starched curtains at the glimmering, sparsely lit length of
street below, and straightening out their difficulties in darkness and
silence, as all true lovers should, even lovers at fifty, as these two
were fortunate enough to be.
"Millie, I don't want to tease you," the Judge said. "I'll tell you
anything you want to know."
"I've been so worried," she wept comfortably against his shoulder. "I'm
so afraid."
"Why?"
"I feel as if something--anything might happen. I--oh, you'll only
laugh. I can't just tell you, Hugh."
"I'll tell you," said the Judge.
He hesitated and then went on slowly, speaking more to himself than to
her.
"Women hate change. That makes them dread it, even when it's not coming.
You're dreading it, but it's not coming now, dear. There's feeling
against Everard. You're right, but you exaggerate it. It's instinctive
and unformulated. It hasn't gone far and won't go any farther. He won't
let it. The rally and the library and this new democracy stuff, stag
dinners to Ward's crowd and all, are part of a campaign to stop it. The
campaign will succeed. Everard's own crowd won't quarrel with him. They
can't afford to. Everard has pulled through worse times than this. I've
helped him myself, and I shall help him again.
"There'll be no change, Millie. Things will go on just the way they are.
I've lived the best years of my life believing that it was best they
should, and if I'm wrong, I'm too old to change my mind. I've said
somebody had to own the town, and it might as well be Everard. I've said
the Burrs and Kents and Randalls, and old Joe Grant's young wife with
their parties and drinks and silly little love affairs, were playing too
hard, but doing no real harm, planting their cheap, fake smart set here
in Green River where it don't belong. Now poor Theodore Burr's dead.
That don't look like play. Harry Randall's so deep in debt to the bank
for what Everard's let him borrow that he has to stay on there at three
thousand a year, though he's been offered twice that in Wells. Everard
won't let him go. And the best I can say about myself in the years I've
worked for Everard is that I've kept my hands clean, if I have had to
keep my eyes shut, but I can say that to you, Millie."
"It does look like old times down there," he went on softly, after a
minute. "The street and the lights are the same. And it sounds like old
times. It was from a rally in the hall that I first went home with you,
Millie. Remember? I was just a boy then, but I wish I was half the man I
was then, to-night." He heard a murmur of protest, and laughed. "But I
do, Millie. I--wouldn't be helping Everard."
"Oh, Hugh!"
"Don't worry. Everard will pull through all right. Look at the Randalls
over there, starting for the hall. Leave your windows open, Millie, and
you'll soon hear them all cheering for Everard. The moon won't rise till
late, but it will be full to-night. Listen, the band's going into the
hall now."
The Judge rested his cheek for a moment against his wife's soft, smooth
hair, the decorous, satisfying caress of a decorous generation, then he
raised his head with a long, tired sigh.
"I wish I was young," he said. "I wish I was young to-night."
* * * * *
"I wish I was young," the Judge had said, with a thrill and hunger that
was the soul of youth itself in his voice. At the moment when he said
it, a boy who had the privilege that the Judge coveted, and was not
enjoying it just then, was leaning against the court-house railing, and
watching Green River crowd into Odd Fellows' Hall.
Another boy had pushed his way across the square to his side, and was
not heartily welcomed there, but was calmly unconscious of it.
"Some night, Donovan," he remarked.
"Some night, Willard," Neil agreed gravely.
"Going in? Good for three hours of hot air?"
"I'm not going. No."
"Good boy. Say--" Mr. Willard Nash lowered his voice as he made this
daring suggestion--"we'll go around to Halloran's, and get into a little
game."
His invitation was not accepted.
"Jerry Dugan's not dead yet," observed Willard presently.
Strains of a deservedly popular waltz tune, heard from inside the hall,
gave faint but unmistakable proof of this. Willard kept time with his
feet as he listened, paying the tune the tribute of silence, a rare one
from him. Standing so, the two were sharply contrasted figures, though
the flickering lamps in the square threw only faint light here, and
showed them darkly outlined against the railing, as they leaned there
side by side. Pose, carriage, every movement and turn of the head were
different, as different as a bulky and overgrown child is from a boy
turning into a man.
"Some night," Willard repeated, unanswered, but unchilled by it, "and
some crowd."
The hall had been filling fast. Though the waltz still swung its faint
challenge into the night, so much of Green River had responded to it
already that now it was arriving only by twos and threes. But the groups
still followed each other fast under the big globe of light at the
entrance door, gayly shaded with red for the occasion, and up the bare,
clattering stairs to the floor above, and the hall.
Willard was right, more right than he knew. There was a crowd up there,
a crowd as Willard did not understand the word; a crowd with a tone and
temper of its own and a personality of its own. It was subject to laws
of its own and could think and feel for itself, and its thoughts and
feelings were made up of the brain stuff of every person in it, but
different from them all. It was a newly created thing, a new factor in
the world, and like all crowds it was born for one evening, to live for
that evening only, and do its work and die.
Upstairs behind closed doors, such a crowd was forming; getting ready to
think its own thoughts and act and feel, and so many houses, little and
big, had emptied themselves to contribute to it, so many family
discussions like the Saxons' had gone on as a prelude to it, that you
might fairly say the crowd up there was Green River.
Willard, watching the late arrivals and commenting upon them to Neil,
still an uncommunicative audience, was vaguely stirred.
"This gets me," he conceded. "There's something about old Dugan's music
that always gets me. For two cents, I'd go in. I sat through a patent
medicine show there last week, because I didn't have the sense to stay
away. It always gets me when there is anything doing in the hall.
And--" he paused, heavily testing his powers of self-analysis, "it gets
me," he brought out at length, "more to-night than it ever did before.
It--gets me."
"Look, there's Joe Grant," Willard went on. "This is his night, all
right. Look at the bulge to that manuscript case, and the shine to his
hair. He mixes varnish with his hair dye, all right. I said, look at
him."
"I'm looking."
"Well, you don't do much else. What's eating you to-night? Say, will you
go in if I will?"
An inarticulate murmur answered him.
"What's that?"
"No."
"All right. Well, what do you know about that? Look there."
"I'm looking."
The latest comers were crowding hurriedly into the entrance hall by this
time, and with them, a slender, heavily veiled figure had slipped
quickly through the door and out of sight.
"Was that Lil?" Willard said. "Lil Burr?"
"Yes."
"She wouldn't come here; I don't believe it."
"I know it."
"How?"
"She told me."
"What was she doing, talking to you? Why, she won't talk to anybody.
She----"
"You'll be late at Hallorans'."
"Aren't you coming?"
"No."
"But you said you would. I don't want to go if you don't. I don't half
like to leave you here, you act so queer to-night. What makes you act
so? What's eating----"
"Nothing."
Willard detached himself from the railings and regarded his friend,
suddenly breathless with surprise, and deeply grieved. Nothing. The
word, harmless in itself, had been spoken so that it hit him like an
actual blow, straight from the shoulder. Neil, shifting so that the
light showed his face, was returning his look with the sudden,
unreasoning anger that we feel toward little sounds that beat their slow
way into our consciousness at night, to irritate us unendurably at last.
"Go," he urged, "go along to Halloran's. Go anywhere."
"Well, what do you know about that?" began Willard, offended, and then
forgave him. There was a look in Neil's pale face that commanded
forgiveness. It was pale and strained with a trouble that had nothing to
do with Willard, and Willard was respectful and inarticulate before it.
"That's all right," Willard muttered, "that will be all right. I'll go."
Neil took no notice of this promise. Up in the hall the waltz had
swelled to a high, light-hearted climax, heady and strained, like the
sudden excitements that sweep a crowd. It came clear through the open
windows, making one last appeal to the boy below to come up and be part
of what was there. And just then a small closed car swept down through
the empty square and stopped. Two men stepped out, and paused in the
doorway under the red-shaded light.
One was the Colonel's secretary, waiting on the step beyond range of
the light, a tall, shadowy figure, and the other, who stood with the
light on his face, was Colonel Everard.
He was still pale from his week of illness, but his keen eyes and
clear-cut profile were more effective for that. He stood listening to
the sounds from upstairs, and he smiled as he listened. He turned at
last and looked out across the square as if he could feel Neil's eyes
upon him and were returning their look, and then turned away and
disappeared up the stairs.
"Neil," Willard was announcing uneasily, "I think a lot of you. I'd do a
lot for you. If you're in wrong, any way, if----"
Willard broke off, rebuffed. Neil did not even look at him. He stood
staring at the lighted doorway where the Colonel had stood and smiled,
as if he could still see him there. He was a creature beyond Willard's
world, as he looked, but unaccountably fascinating to Willard. Willard
regarded him in awed silence.
Now Dugan's music had stopped. Some one above shut a window with a
clatter that echoed disproportionately loud. Then there was silence up
there, tense silence, and the call of the silence was harder to resist
than the music. The boy by the court-house railing could not resist it.
He pushed away Willard's detaining hand, and without a word to him or
another glance at him, was across the square and through the red-lighted
door, and running up the stairs.
"What do you know about that?" Willard demanded, in vain. "What do you
know----"
Willard, certainly, knew nothing, and gave up the attempt to understand,
with a sigh.
A little later the vantage point of the court-house fence was
unoccupied. Of the two boys who had occupied it, one was making a
belated and rather disconsolate way toward Halloran's--the one who would
be boasting to-morrow that he had spent the last fifteen minutes with
Neil Donovan. The other boy stood listening outside the closed doors of
the hall.
* * * * *
It was half an hour later and it had been an important half-hour in Odd
Fellows' Hall, that uneventful but vital time when the newly made
creature that is the crowd is passive, gathering its forces slowly,
getting ready to fling the weight of them into one side of a balance
irrevocably, if it has decisions to make; the most important half-hour
of the evening if you were interested in the psychology of crowds. The
Honourable Joe Grant was not. He would have said that the first speech
dragged and the half-hour had been dull. Dull or significant, that
half-hour was over, and Green River was waking up. In the listening
hush of the hall the big moments of the evening, whatever they were to
be, were creeping nearer and nearer. Now they were almost here.
The Honourable Joe had just introduced Luther Ward and heavily resumed
his seat. He sat portly and erect and entirely happy behind the
thin-legged, inadequate looking table that held a water pitcher, his
important looking papers, and his watch. The ornately chased gold watch
that had measured so many epoch-making hours for Green River was in
public life again, like the Honourable Joe. He fingered it
affectionately, wiped his forehead delicately from time to time with a
purple silk handkerchief, followed Mr. Ward's remarks with unwavering
brown eyes, and smiled his benevolent, public-spirited smile. This was
his night indeed.
Behind the Honourable Joe, on the stage in a semicircular row of chairs
were the speakers of the evening, and before him was Green River.
The badly proportioned little hall was not at its best to-night. It was
too brightly lit and the footlights threw an uncompromising glare upon
the tiny stage. Red, white, and blue cheesecloth in crude, sharp
colouring draped windows and stage, making gay little splashes of colour
that emphasized the dinginess of the room. Only the Grand Army flag,
borrowed and draped elaborately above the stage, showed faded and thin
against the brightness of the cheesecloth, but kept its dignity and kept
up its claim to homage still. And the ugliness of the room was a thing
to be discounted and forgotten, like some beautiful, full-blooded
woman's tawdry, and ill-chosen clothes, because this room held Green
River.
Green River, filling the little room to over-flowing, standing in the
rear of the room, crowding every available inch of space on benches,
window sills, and an emergency supply of camp chairs, impressive as that
much sheer bulk of humanity, crowded between four walls, becomes
impressive, and impressive in its own right, too; Green River
represented as it was, with all the warring, unreconciled elements that
made the town.
For they were all here, Paddy Lane, and the Everard circle, and the
intermediate stages of society, the Gaynors and other prosperous farmers
and unprosperous farmers and their wives, from the outskirts of the
town, and citizens a cut above them both, like the Wards, were all
represented here. Mrs. Kent, hatless and evening coated, was elbowed by
a lady from Paddy Lane, hatless because she had no presentable hat, and
wearing a ragged shawl. These two were side by side, and they had the
same look on their faces. There was something of it now on every face
in the room. It was a look of listening and waiting.
It was on every face, and it grew more intense every minute that Luther
Ward's speech droned on, though it was only a dry, illogical rehash of
political issues that could not have called that look into any face. It
was as if the audience listened eagerly through it because every word of
it was bringing them nearer to something that was to follow. What was
it? What did Green River want? What was it waiting for? Green River
itself did not know, but it was very near.
Perhaps it was coming now. This might well be the climax of the evening.
No more important event was scheduled. Luther Ward, looking discontented
with his performance, but relieved to complete it, had sunk into his
chair to a scattered echoing of applause, and the next speaker was
Colonel Everard.
The Honourable Joe was rising to introduce him. The little introductory
speech was a masterpiece, for, though the Colonel had edited every word
of it, it was still in the Honourable Joe's best style, flowery and
sprinkled with quotations.
"I will not say more," it concluded magnificently, "of one whose life
and work among you can best speak for itself, and who will speak for
himself now, in his own person. I present to you the Republican
candidate for mayor, Colonel Everard."
And now the Honourable Joe had bowed and smiled himself into his seat,
and the great man was on his feet, and coming forward to the centre of
the stage. The first real applause of the evening greeted him, not very
hearty or sustained, but prompt at least. He looked like a very great
man indeed, as he stood acknowledging it, his most effective self, a
strong man, though so lightly built, erect and pliant of carriage, a man
with infinite reserves of power and dignity. He was smiling, and his
smile was the same that the boy by the court-house fence had seen, a
tantalizing smile of assurance and charm and power, as if he were master
of himself and the town.
This was his moment, planned for and led up to for weeks, but Colonel
Everard was slow to take advantage of it. He stood still, with his eyes
toward the rear of the hall. As he stood so, heads here and there turned
and looked where he was looking. Presently all Green River saw what the
Colonel saw. A boy was pushing his way toward the front of the hall--a
boy who had slipped quietly inside the doors unnoticed fifteen minutes
before, and came forward now just as quietly, but held their eyes as he
came. Now he had reached the stage, and he broke through the barrier of
goldenrod that fenced the short flight of steps, crushing the flowers
under his feet, and now he was on the stage confronting Colonel Everard.
It was Neil Donovan.
"Sit down," he said to the great man. "They're not going to listen to
you. They're going to listen to me."
After that he did not wait to see if the great man took his amazing
advice. He came forward alone, and spoke to Green River. He was not an
imposing figure as he stood there, only a lean, eager boy, with dark,
flashing eyes, and a face that was very pale in the glare of the
footlights. He hardly raised his tense, low-pitched voice as he spoke,
but Green River heard.
"You're going to listen to me."
And it was true. Green River was going to listen. In the middle of the
hall, where the chief delegation from Paddy Lane was massed, a ripple of
excitement promised the boy support. It was seconded by a muttering and
shuffling of feet on the rear benches, devoted to the youth of the town.
From here and there in the hall there were murmurs of protest, too,
dying out one by one, and ceasing automatically, like the whispered
consultation that went on behind him on the stage.
But the boy did not wait for support or regard interruptions. He did not
need to. The audience was his in spite of them, and he knew it and they
knew it. Whatever he had to say, important or not, it was what they had
been waiting for; that was what the evening had been leading to, and it
was here at last. Pale and intent, the boy looked across the footlights
at Green River. The audience was his, but he had no pride in the
triumph. He began haltingly to speak.
"It will do no good to you or me, but you're going to listen. I've got a
word to say about Everard.
"He's sucked your town dry for years and you know it. He's had the pick
of your men and used their brains and their youth, and he's had the pick
of your women. If there are any of you here that he's got no hold on,
it's because you're worth nothing to him. He's got the town. Now he's
driven one of your boys to his death.
"'I can't beat him.' That's what Theodore Burr said to me the night he
died. 'They won't blame him for this. I want to die because I don't want
to live in the world with him, but I'll do no harm to him by dying, only
to Lily and me. They won't blame him. You can't beat Everard.'
"Well, you don't blame Everard. He's got you where you don't blame him,
whatever he does. You shut your eyes to it. He's got you. You know all
this and you shut your eyes. Now I'll tell you some things you don't
know. Everard's been trying for weeks to bribe me to keep my mouth shut,
like he bribed Charlie for years. He might have saved his breath and his
money. I can't hurt him, whether I keep my mouth shut or not. You won't
blame him. You'll let him get away with this, too. But you're going to
know."
The boy came closer still to the footlights and leaned across them,
pausing and deliberately choosing his words. The pause, and the look in
his dark, intent eyes as he stood there challenged Green River and dared
it to interrupt him. But it was too late to interrupt, too late to stop
him now. And behind him in the place of honour in the centre of the row
of chairs on the stage, one man at least was powerless to stop him:
Colonel Everard, who listened with a set smile on his lips, and a set
stare in his eyes.
"He's the man that broke Maggie Brady's life to pieces," Neil's low
voice went on. "Everard's the man. He got her away from town. He filled
her head with him and set her wild and she had to go. When he was tired
of her, he left her in a place he thought she'd be too proud to come
back from. She was proud, but he's broken her pride, and she crawled
back to us. The prettiest girl in the town, she was, and you all knew
that, and my sister and more to me----" he broke off abruptly, and
laughed a dry little laugh that echoed strangely in the silent room. His
voice sounded dry and hard as he went on.
"He broke Maggie's life, but what's that to you, that give him a chance
at your women, knowing well what he is, and leave them to take care of
themselves with him, your own women that are yours to take care of,
daughters and wives? It's nothing to you, but you're going to know it,
and you're going to know this. I had it straight from Theodore Burr the
night he died.
"Everard's going to sell you out at the next election, the whole of
you--his own crowd, too. He's been planning it for months. He's worked
prohibition for all it's worth to him; worked for it till the state went
dry, and then he's made money for you that are in it with him, and more
for himself, protecting places like Halloran's that sell liquor on the
quiet, and the smuggling of liquor into the state. Well, he's made money
enough that way, and it's getting risky, and now he sees a way to make
more and let nobody in on it. He's going to sell out to the liquor
interests and work against prohibition, and the big card he'll use will
be exposing Halloran's and the secret traffic in liquor, and all the
crowd that's been buying protection from him. There's a big campaign
started already, and big money being spent. There'll be big money in it
for him. There'll be arrests made here and a public scandal. He's going
to sell the town.
"Maybe that interests you some. Maybe it gets you. It won't for long.
He'll crawl out of it and lie out of it and talk you and buy you back to
him. Well, I know one thing more, and he can't lie or crawl out of it.
My father could have put him behind bars any time in twenty years. He's
a common thief.
"It was when he was seventeen, and studying law first, back in a town up
state that's not on the map or likely to get there, and he was called by
a name there that wasn't Everard. He was seventeen, but he was the same
then as now; he had the same will to get on and the power to, no matter
who he trampled on to get there, and the same charm that got men and
women both, though they didn't trust him--got them even when he was
trampling on them and they knew it. It got him into trouble there with
two girls at once. One was the girl that gave him his start, the chance
to go into her uncle's office. He was the biggest man in the town. Older
than Everard, this girl was, and teaching in the school he went to, when
she fell in love with him and brought him home to her town and gave him
his chance. He was tired of her, and she was where it was bound to come
out soon how things were with them, and so was the other girl, a girl
that he wasn't tired of, the daughter of the woman where he boarded. He
tried to get her to go away with him. She wouldn't go and she wouldn't
forgive him, but the town was getting too hot for him, and he had to go.
"He had to go quick and make a clean getaway and he wanted a real start
this time. He had to have money. That was a dead little town. There was
only one place he could get money enough, in the little hotel there. It
was the only bank they had. The keeper of it used to cash checks and
make loans. Everard was lucky, the same then as now. There was almost
five thousand dollars in the safe in the hotel office the night he broke
into it, and that was enough for him. He had a fight with the hotel
clerk, but he got away with the money, and he got away from the town.
"The clerk was his best friend in town--never trusted him, but fell for
him the same as the girls and lent him money and listened to his
troubles--and fell for him again when he ran across him again, years
later, here in Green River. Everard told him he'd sent the money back,
and he kept the secret. He never took hush money for it like Charlie. He
said Everard ought to have his chance, and was straight now. But he fell
for Everard again, that's what happened. Everard had him, the same as
the rest of you.
"The clerk was my father."
The boy's voice broke off. There was dead silence in the hall. Green
River had been listening almost in silence, and did not break it now.
Presently the boy sighed, shrugged his thin shoulders as if they were
throwing off an actual weight, and spoke again, this time in a lifeless
voice, with all the colour and drama wiped out of it, a voice that was
very tired.
"That's all," he said. "That's back of him, with his fine airs and his
far-reaching schemes and his big name in the state. You've stood for a
crook. Will you stand for a common criminal, a common thief? Now you
know and it's up to you. That's all."
* * * * *
An hour later a boy was hurrying through the dark along the road to the
Falls.
He was almost home. Green River lay far behind with its scattered,
sparsely strewn lights. The flat fields around him and the unshaded road
before him, so bleak by day, were beautiful to-night, far reaching and
mysterious. Above them, flat looking and unreal, remote in a coldly
clouded sky, hung the yellow September moon.
"I've done for myself," the boy was saying half out loud, as if the
faraway moon could hear. "I've lost everything now. I've done for
myself."
The boy was sure of this, but could have told little more about the
events of the evening. He remembered listening outside the hall doors
until he was drawn inside in spite of himself, and listening there until
something snapped in his brain, and suddenly the long days of
repression, of vainly wondering what to do with his hard-won knowledge,
were over, and he was pouring it all out in one jumbled burst of speech.
He had no plan and no hope of doing harm to his enemy by speaking. He
had to speak.
After he had spoken he remembered getting down from the stage and out of
the hall somehow. He remembered the crushed goldenrod, slippery under
his feet. Against a background of blurred, unrecognizable faces, he
remembered a tall, black-garbed figure that rose to its feet swaying and
then steadying itself. It was Lilian Burr. Less clearly he remembered a
wave of sound from the hall that followed him as he hurried away across
the square. It was not like applause. He did not know or care what it
meant. After that, he remembered only the cool dark of the September
night as he walked through it aimlessly at first, and then turned toward
home.
"I've lost everything," he had said, and it must be true. How could he
face the Judge again? How could he go on living in Green River? This
was what all his long-cherished dreams had come to; a scene that Charlie
might have made, and disgrace in the eyes of the town. He had lost
everything.
Yet strangely, as he said it, he knew that it was not true. Whatever he
had lost, he had better things left. He had those free and splendid
minutes of speaking out his heart. They could not be taken from him. The
freedom and relief of them was with him still. And he had the road firm
under his feet, and the clean air blowing the fever out of his brain,
and the strength of his own young body, clean strength, good to feel as
he walked through the night. And along the dark road before him,
familiar as it was, and worn so many times by discouraged feet, the
white track of moonlight beckoned him, clean and new. It was a way that
might lead anywhere--to fairy-land, to success, to the end of the world.
Now the boy made the turn in the road that brought him within sight of
home. Faint lights twinkling from it, intimate and warm, invited him as
never before. Was his mother waiting up for him? Home itself, lighted
and intimate and safe, was enough to find waiting. His heart gave a
strange little leap that hurt, but was keen pleasure, too. Almost
running, he covered the last bit of road, crossed the grassy front yard
and then climbed the creaking front steps, and stood for a minute that
was unendurably long, fumbling with the door.
The door was unlocked and gave suddenly, opening wide, and he stood on
the threshold of the kitchen. The lights he had seen were in the
sitting-room beyond. In this room there was only moonlight. It came
through the window that looked out on the marshy field, the fairies'
field. Surely there must be fairies there to-night, out in the empty
green spaces, flooded with moonlight. But the fairies were not all in
the field, there was one in the room. Neil could see it.
The old rocking chair stood in the moonlit window. It was holding two,
his mother, and some one else--the fairy, golden haired and white robed
and slender, and close in his mother's arms. As he stood and wondered
and looked, a board creaked under his feet. It was the faintest of
sounds, but a fairy's ears are keen, and the fairy heard, and stirred,
and turned in his mother's arms.
Now Neil could see her face. It was flushed and human and warm, and in
her eyes, opening grave and deep, was a look that was the shyest but
surest of welcomes. The welcome was all for Neil, and the fairy was
Judith.