CHAPTER I.

A Fortnight of Folly

BY

MAURICE THOMPSON

AUTHOR OF

"Alice of Old Vincennes," "A Banker of Bankersville," etc.

[Illustration]

NEW YORK AND LONDON

STREET & SMITH, PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1888

By THE ALDEN PUBLISHING COMPANY

Copyright, 1902

By STREET & SMITH

A Fortnight of Folly

CONTENTS

A FORTNIGHT OF FOLLY.

THE TALE OF A SCULPTOR, by HUGH CONWAY

CARRISTON'S GIFT.

A FORTNIGHT OF FOLLY.

I.

The Hotel Helicon stood on a great rock promontory that jutted far out

into a sea of air whose currents and eddies filled a wide, wild valley

in the midst of our southern mountain region. It was a new hotel, built

by a Cincinnati man who founded his fortune in natural gas speculations,

and who had conceived the bright thought of making the house famous at

the start by a stroke of rare liberality.

Viewing the large building from any favorable point in the valley, it

looked like a huge white bird sitting with outstretched wings on the

gray rock far up against the tender blue sky. All around it the forests

were thick and green, the ravines deep and gloomy and the rocks tumbled

into fantastic heaps. When you reached it, which was after a whole day

of hard zig-zag climbing, you found it a rather plain three-story house,

whose broad verandas were worried with a mass of jig-saw fancies and

whose windows glared at you between wide open green Venetian shutters.

Everything look new, almost raw, from the stumps of fresh-cut trees on

the lawn and the rope swings and long benches, upon which the paint

was scarcely dry, to the resonant floor of the spacious halls and the

cedar-fragrant hand-rail of the stairway.

There were springs among the rocks. Here the water trickled out with a

red gleam of iron oxide, there it sparkled with an excess of carbonic

acid, and yonder it bubbled up all the more limpid and clear on account

of the offensive sulphuretted hydrogen it was bringing forth. Masses

of fern, great cushions of cool moss and tangles of blooming shrubs

and vines fringed the sides of the little ravines down which the

spring-streams sang their way to the silver thread of a river in the

valley.

It was altogether a dizzy perch, a strange, inconvenient, out-of-the-way

spot for a summer hotel. You reached it all out of breath, confused as

to the points of the compass and disappointed, in every sense of the

word, with what at first glance struck you as a colossal pretense,

empty, raw, vulgar, loud--a great trap into which you had been inveigled

by an eloquent hand-bill! Hotel Helicon, as a name for the place, was

considered a happy one. It had come to the proprietor, as if in a dream,

one day as he sat smoking. He slapped his thigh with his hand and sprang

to his feet. The word that went so smoothly with hotel, as he fancied,

had no special meaning in his mind, for the gas man had never been

guilty of classical lore-study, but it furnished a taking alliteration.

"Hotel Helicon, Hotel Helicon," he repeated; "that's just a dandy name.

Hotel Helicon on Mount Boab, open for the season! If that doesn't get

'em I'll back down."

His plans matured themselves very rapidly in his mind. One brilliant

idea followed another in swift succession, until at last he fell upon

the scheme of making Hotel Helicon free for the initial season to a

select company of authors chosen from among the most brilliant and

famous in our country.

"Zounds!" he exclaimed, all to himself, "but won't that be a darling old

advertisement! I'll have a few sprightly newspaper people along with

'em, too, to do the interviewing and puffing. By jacks, it's just the

wrinkle to a dot!"

Mr. Gaslucky was of the opinion that, like Napoleon, he was in the hands

of irresistible destiny which would ensure the success of whatever he

might undertake; still he was also a realist and depended largely upon

tricks for his results. He had felt the great value of what he liked to

term legitimate advertising, and he was fond of saying to himself that

any scheme would succeed if properly set before the world. He regarded

it a maxim that anything which can be clearly described is a fact. His

realism was the gospel of success, he declared, and needed but to be

stated to be adopted by all the world.

From the first he saw how his hotel was to be an intellectual focus;

moreover he designed to have it radiate its own glory like a star set

upon Mt. Boab.

The difficulties inherent in this project were from the first quite

apparent to Mr. Gaslucky, but he was full of expedients and cunning.

He had come out of the lowest stratum of life, fighting his way up to

success, and his knowledge of human nature was accurate if not very

broad.

Early in the summer, about the first days of June, in fact, certain

well-known and somewhat distinguished American authors received by

due course of mail an autograph letter from Mr. Gaslucky, which was

substantially as follows:

CINCINNATI, O., May 30, 1887.

MY DEAR SIR:

The Hotel Helicon, situated on the Lencadian promontory, far up the

height of Mt. Boab and overlooking the glorious valley of the Big

Mash River, amid the grandest scenery of the Cumberland Mountains,

where at their southern extremity they break into awful peaks,

chasms and escarpments, is now thrown open to a few favored guests

for the summer. The proprietor in a spirit of liberality (and for

the purpose of making this charming hotel known to a select public)

is issuing a few special invitations to distinguished people to come

and spend the summer free of charge. You are cordially and urgently

invited. The Hotel Helicon is a place to delight the artist and the

_litterateur_. It is high, airy, cool, surrounded by wild scenes,

good shooting and fishing at hand, incomparable mineral springs,

baths, grottos, dark ravines and indeed everything engaging to the

imagination. The proprietor will exhaust effort to make his chosen

guests happy. The rooms are new, sweet, beautifully furnished and

altogether comfortable, and the table will have every delicacy of

the season served in the best style. There will be no uninvited

guests, all will be chosen from the most exalted class. Come, and

for one season taste the sweets of the dews of Helicon, without

money and without price.

If you accept this earnest and cordial invitation, notify me at

once. Hotel Helicon is at your command.

Truly yours,

ISAIAH R. GASLUCKY.

It is needless to say that this letter was the product of a professional

advertising agent employed for the occasion by the proprietor of Hotel

Helicon. The reader will observe the earmarks of the creation and

readily recognize the source. Of course, when the letter was addressed

to a woman there was a change, not only in the gender of the terms, but

in the tone, which took on a more persuasive color. The attractions

of the place were described in more poetic phrasing and a cunningly

half-hidden thread of romance, about picturesque mountaineers and

retired and reformed bandits, was woven in.

Naturally enough, each individual who received this rather uncommon

letter, read it askance, at first, suspecting a trick, but the

newspapers soon cleared the matter up by announcing that Mr. Isaiah

Gaslucky, of Cincinnati, had "conceived the happy idea of making his

new and picturesque Hotel Helicon free this season to a small and

select company of distinguished guests. The hotel will not be open to

the public until next year."

And thus it came to pass that in midsummer such a company as never

before was assembled, met on Mt. Boab and made the halls of Hotel

Helicon gay with their colors and noisy with their mirth. The woods,

the dizzy cliffs, the bubbling springs, the cool hollows, the windy

peaks and the mossy nooks were filled with song, laughter, murmuring

under-tones of sentiment, or something a little sweeter and warmer, and

there were literary conversations, and critical talks, and jolly satire

bandied about, with some scraps of adventure and some bits of rather

ludicrous mishap thrown in for variety.

Over all hung a summer sky, for the most part cloudless, and the days

were as sweet as the nights were delicious.

II.

In the afternoon of a breezy day, at the time when the shadows were

taking full possession of the valley, the coach arrived at Hotel Helicon

from the little railway station at the foot of Mt. Boab.

A man, the only passenger, alighted from his perch beside the driver and

for a moment stood as if a little dazed by what he saw.

He was very short, rather round and stout, and bore himself quietly,

almost demurely. His head was large, his feet and hands were small and

his face wore the expression of an habitual good humor amounting nearly

to jolliness, albeit two vertical wrinkles between his brows hinted of a

sturdy will seated behind a heavy Napoleonic forehead. The stubby tufts

of grizzled hair that formed his mustaches shaded a mouth and chin at

once strong and pleasing. He impressed the group of people on the hotel

veranda most favorably, and at once a little buzz of inquiry circulated.

No one knew him.

That this was an important arrival could not be doubted; it was felt at

once and profoundly. Great men carry an air of individuality about with

them; each, like a planet, has his own peculiar atmosphere by which his

light is modified. There was no mistaking the light in this instance; it

indicated a luminary of the first magnitude.

Unfortunately the guests at Hotel Helicon were not required to record

their names in a register, therefore the new comer could bide his own

time to make himself known.

Miss Alice Moyne, of Virginia, the beautiful young author of two or

three picturesque short stories lately published in a popular magazine,

was in conversation with Hartley Crane, the rising poet from Kentucky,

just at the moment when this new arrival caused a flutter on the

veranda.

"Oh, I do wonder if he can be Edgar De Vere?" she exclaimed.

"No," said Hartley Crane, "I have seen De Vere; he is as large and as

fascinating as his romances. That little pudgy individual could never

make a great romantic fiction like _Solway Moss_, by De Vere."

"But that is a superb head," whispered Miss Moyne, "the head of a

master, a genius."

"Oh, there are heads and heads, genius and genius," replied Crane. "I

guess the new-comer off as a newspaper man from Chicago or New York. It

requires first-class genius to be a good reporter."

The stranger under discussion was now giving some directions to a porter

regarding his luggage. This he did with that peculiar readiness, or

sleight, so to call it, which belongs to none but the veteran traveler.

A moment later he came up the wooden steps of the hotel, cast a

comprehensive but apparently indifferent glance over the group of guests

and passed into the hall, where they heard him say to the boy in

waiting: "My room is 24."

"That is the reserved room," remarked two or three persons at once.

Great expectations hung about room 24; much guessing had been indulged

in considering who was to be the happy and exalted person chosen to

occupy it. Now he had arrived, an utter stranger to them all. Everybody

looked inquiry.

"Who can he be?"

"It must be Mark Twain," suggested little Mrs. Philpot, of Memphis.

"Oh, no; Mark Twain is tall, and very handsome; I know Mark," said

Crane.

"How strange!" ejaculated Miss Moyne, and when everybody laughed, she

colored a little and added hastily:

"I didn't mean that it was strange that Mr. Crane should know Mr. Twain,

but----"

They drowned her voice with their laughter and hand-clapping.

They were not always in this very light mood at Hotel Helicon, but just

now they all felt in a trivial vein. It was as if the new guest had

brought a breath of frivolous humor along with him and had blown it over

them as he passed by.

Room 24 was the choice one of Hotel Helicon. Every guest wanted it, on

account of its convenience, its size and the superb view its windows

afforded; but from the first it had been reserved for this favored

individual whose arrival added greater mystery to the matter.

As the sun disappeared behind the western mountains, and the great gulf

of the valley became a sea of purplish gloom, conversation clung in half

whispers to the subject who meantime was arraying himself in evening

dress for dinner, posing before the large mirror in room 24 and smiling

humorously at himself as one who, criticising his own foibles, still

holds to them with a fortitude almost Christian.

He parted his hair in the middle, but the line of division was very

slight, and he left a pretty, half-curled short wisp hanging over the

centre of his forehead. The wide collar that hid his short neck creased

his heavy well-turned jaws, giving to his chin the appearance of being

propped up. Although he was quite stout, his head was so broad and his

feet so small that he appeared to taper from top to toe in a way that

emphasized very forcibly his expression of blended dignity and jollity,

youth and middle age, sincerity and levity. When he had finished his

toilet, he sat down by the best window in the best room of Hotel

Helicon, and gazed out over the dusky valley to where a line of

quivering silver light played fantastically along the line of peaks that

notched the delicate blue of the evening sky. The breeze came in, cool

and sweet, with a sort of champagne sparkle in its freshness and purity.

It whetted his appetite and blew the dust of travel out of his mind. He

was glad when the dinner hour arrived.

The long table was nearly full when he went down, and he was given a

seat between Miss Moyne and little Mrs. Philpot. By that secret cerebral

trick we all know, but which none of us can explain, he was aware that

the company had just been discussing him. In fact, someone had ventured

to wonder if he were Mr. Howells, whereupon Mr. Crane had promptly said

that he knew Mr. Howells quite well, and that although in a general

way the new-comer was not unlike the famous realist, he was far from

identical with him.

Laurens Peck, the bushy-bearded New England critic, whispered in

someone's ear that it appeared as if Crane knew everybody, but that

the poet's lively imagination had aided him more than his eyes, in all

probability. "Fact is," said he, "a Kentuckian soon gets so that he

_thinks_ he has been everywhere and seen everybody, whether he has or

not."

Out of this remark grew a serious affair which it will be my duty to

record at the proper place.

Little Mrs. Philpot, who wore gold eye-glasses and had elongated dimples

in her cheeks and chin, dexterously managed to have a word or two with

the stranger, who smiled upon her graciously without attempting to enter

into a conversation. Miss Moyne fared a little better, for she had the

charm of grace and beauty to aid her, attended by one of those puffs

of good luck which come to none but the young and the beautiful. Mr.

B. Hobbs Lucas, a large and awkward historian from New York, knocked

over a bottle of claret with his elbow, and the liquor shot with an

enthusiastic sparkle diagonally across the table in order to fall on

Miss Moyne's lap.

With that celerity which in very short and stout persons appears to

be spontaneous, a sort of elastic quality, the gentleman from room 24

interposed his suddenly outspread napkin. The historian flung himself

across the board after the bottle, clawing rather wildly and upsetting

things generally. It was but a momentary scene, such as children at

school and guests at a summer hotel make more or less merry over, still

it drew forth from the genial man of room 24 a remark which slipped into

Miss Moyne's ear with the familiarity of well trained humor.

"A deluge of wine in a free hotel!" he exclaimed, just above a whisper.

"Such generosity is nearly shocking."

"I am sorry you mention it," said Miss Moyne, with her brightest and

calmest smile; "I have been idealizing the place. A gush of grape-juice

on Helicon is a picturesque thing to contemplate."

"But a lap-full of claret on Mt. Boab is not so fine, eh? What a farce

poetry is! What a humbug is romance!"

The historian had sunk back in his chair and was scowling at the purple

stain which kept slowly spreading through the fiber of the cloth.

"I always do something," he sighed, and his sincerity was obvious.

"And always with _aplomb_," remarked little Mrs. Philpot.

"It would be a genius who could knock over a claret bottle with grace,"

added Peck. "Now a jug of ale----"

"I was present at table once with Mr. Emerson," began the Kentucky poet,

but nobody heard the rest. A waiter came with a heavy napkin to cover

the stain, and as he bent over the table he forced the man from room 24

to incline very close to Miss Moyne.

"To think of making an instance of Emerson!" he murmured. "Emerson who

died before he discovered that men and women have to eat, or that wine

will stain a new dress!"

"But then he discovered so many things----" she began.

"Please mention one of them," he glibly interrupted. "What did Emerson

ever discover? Did he ever pen a single truth?"

"Aloft in secret veins of air

Blows the sweet breath of song,"

she replied. "He trod the very headlands of truth. But you are not

serious----" she checked herself, recollecting that she was speaking to

a stranger.

"Not serious but emphatically in earnest," he went on, in the same

genial tone with which he had begun. "There isn't a thing but cunning

phrase-form in anything the man ever wrote. He didn't know how to

represent life."

"Oh, I see," Miss Moyne ventured, "you are a realist."

It is impossible to convey any adequate idea of the peculiar shade of

contempt she conveyed through the words. She lifted her head a little

higher and her beauty rose apace. It was as if she had stamped her

little foot and exclaimed: "Of all things I detest realism--of all men,

I hate realists."

"But I kept the wine off your dress!" he urged, as though he had

heard her thought. "There's nothing good but what is real. Romance is

lie-tissue. Reality is truth-tissue."

"Permit me to thank you for your good intentions," she said, with a

flash of irony; "you held the napkin just in the right position, but

the wine never fell from the table. Still your kindness lost nothing in

quality because the danger was imaginary."

When dinner was over, Miss Moyne sought out Hartley Crane, the Kentucky

poet who knew everybody, and suggested that perhaps the stranger was

Mr. Arthur Selby, the analytical novelist whose name was on everybody's

tongue.

"But Arthur Selby is thin and bald and has a receding chin. I met him

often at the--I forget the club in New York," said Crane. "It's more

likely that he's some reporter. He's a snob, anyway."

"Dear me, no, not a snob, Mr. Crane; he is the most American man I ever

met," replied Miss Moyne.

"But Americans are the worst of all snobs," he insisted, "especially

literary Americans. They adore everything that's foreign and pity

everything that's home-made."

As he said this he was remembering how Tennyson's and Browning's poems

were overshadowing his own, even in Kentucky. From the ring of his voice

Miss Moyne suspected something of this sort, and adroitly changed the

subject.

III.

It might be imagined that a hotel full of authors would be sure to

generate some flashes of disagreement, but, for a time at least,

everything went on charmingly at Hotel Helicon. True enough, the name of

the occupant of room 24 remained a vexatious secret which kept growing

more and more absorbing as certain very cunningly devised schemes for

its exposure were easily thwarted; but even this gave the gentleman

a most excellent excuse for nagging the ladies in regard to feminine

curiosity and lack of generalship. Under the circumstances it was not to

be expected that everybody should be strictly guarded in the phrasing

of speech, still so genial and good-humored was the nameless man and so

engaging was his way of evading or turning aside every thrust, that he

steadily won favor. Little Mrs. Philpot, whose seven year old daughter

(a bright and sweet little child) had become the pet of Hotel Helicon,

was enthusiastic in her pursuit of the stranger's name, and at last she

hit upon a plan that promised immediate success. She giggled all to

herself, like a high-school girl, instead of like a widow of thirty, as

she contemplated certain victory.

"Now do you think you can remember, dear?" she said to May, the child,

after having explained over and over again what she wished her to do.

"Yeth," said May, who lisped charmingly in the sweetest of child voices.

"Well, what must you say?"

"I muth thay: Pleathe write your--your----"

"Autograph."

"Yeth, your au--to--graph in my album."

"That's right, autograph, autograph, don't forget. Now let me hear you

say it."

"Pleathe write your autograph in my book."

Mrs. Philpot caught the child to her breast and kissed it vigorously,

and not long afterward little May went forth to try the experiment. She

was armed with her mother's autograph album. When she approached her

victim he thought he never had seen so lovely a child. The mother had

not spared pains to give most effect to the little thing's delicate and

appealing beauty by an artistic arrangement of the shining gold hair and

by the simplest but cunningest tricks of color and drapery.

With that bird-like shyness so winning in a really beautiful little

girl, May walked up to the stranger and made a funny, hesitating

courtesy. He looked at her askance, his smiling face shooting forth a

ray of tenderness along with a gleam of shrewd suspicion, as he made out

the album in her dimpled little hand.

"Good morning, little one," he said cheerily. "Have you come to make a

call?"

He held out both hands and looked so kindly and good that she smiled

until dimples just like her mother's played over her cheeks and chin.

Half sidewise she crept into his arms and held up the book.

"Pleathe write your photograph in my book," she murmured.

He took her very gently on his knee, chuckling vigorously, his heavy

jaws shaking and coloring.

"Who told you to come?" he inquired, with a guilty cunning twinkle in

his gray eyes.

"Mama told me," was the prompt answer.

Again the man chuckled, and, between the shame he felt for having

betrayed the child and delight at the success of his perfidy, he grew

quite red in the face. He took the autograph album and turned its stiff,

ragged-edged leaves, glancing at the names.

"Ah, this is your mama's book, is it?" he went on.

"Yeth it is," said May.

"And I must write my name in it?"

"No, your--your----"

"Well what?"

"I don't 'member."

He took from his pocket a stylographic pen and dashed a picturesque sign

manual across a page.

While the ink was drying he tenderly kissed the child's forehead and

then rested his chin on her bright hair. He could hear the clack of

balls and mallets and the creak of a lazy swing down below on the

so-called lawn, and a hum of voices arose from the veranda. He looked

through the open window and saw, as in a dream, blue peaks set against

a shining rim of sky with a wisp of vultures slowly wheeling about in

a filmy, sheeny space.

"Mama said I muthn't stay," apologized the child, slipping down from his

knee, which she had found uncomfortably short.

He pulled himself together from a diffused state of revery and beamed

upon her again with his cheerful smile.

She turned near the door and dropped another comical little courtesy,

bobbing her curly head till her hair twinkled like a tangle of

starbeams on a brook-ripple, then she darted away, book in hand.

Little Mrs. Philpot snatched the album from May, as she ran to her, and

greedily rustled the leaves in search of the new record, finding which

she gazed at it while her face irradiated every shade of expression

between sudden delight and utter perplexity. In fact she could not

decipher the autograph, although the handwriting surely was not bad.

Loath as she naturally was to sharing her secret with her friends,

curiosity at length prevailed and she sought help. Everybody in turn

tried to make out the two short words, all in vain till Crane, by the

poet's subtle vision, cleared up the mystery, at least to his own

satisfaction.

"Gaspard Dufour is the name," he asserted, with considerable show of

conscious superiority. "A Canadian, I think. In fact I imperfectly

recall meeting him once at a dinner given by the Governor General to

Lord Rosenthal at Quebec. He writes plays."

"Another romance out of the whole cloth by the Bourbon æsthete!"

whispered the critic. "There's no such a Canadian as Gaspard Dufour,

and besides the man's a Westerner rather over-Bostonized. I can tell

by his voice and his mixed manners."

"But Mrs. Hope would know him," suggested the person addressed. "She

meets all the Hub _literati_, you know."

"_Literati!_" snarled the critic, putting an end to further discussion.

A few minutes later Mr. Gaspard Dufour came down and passed out of the

hotel, taking his way into the nearest ravine. He wore a very short coat

and a slouch hat. In his hand he carried a bundle of fishing-rod joints.

A man of his build looks far from dignified in such dress, at best; but

nothing could have accentuated more sharply his absurd grotesqueness of

appearance than the peculiar waddling gait he assumed as he descended

the steep place and passed out of sight, a fish basket bobbing beside

him and a red kerchief shining around his throat.

Everybody looked at his neighbor and smiled inquisitively. Now that they

had discovered his name, the question arose: What had Gaspard Dufour

ever done that he should be accorded the place of honor in Hotel

Helicon. No one (save Crane, in a shadowy way) had ever heard of him

before. No doubt they all felt a little twinge of resentment; but

Dufour, disappearing down the ravine, had in some unaccountable way

deepened his significance.

IV.

Everybody knows that a mountain hotel has no local color, no sympathy

with its environment, no gift of making its guests feel that they are

anywhere in particular. It is all very delightful to be held aloft on

the shoulder of a giant almost within reach of the sky; but the charm of

the thing is not referable to any definite, visible cause, such as one

readily bases one's love of the sea-side on, or such as accounts for our

delight in the life of a great city. No matter how fine the effect of

clouds and peaks and sky and gorge, no matter how pure and exhilarating

the air, or how blue the filmy deeps of distance, or how mossy the

rocks, or how sweet the water, or how cool the wooded vales, the hotel

stands there in an indefinite way, with no _raison d'etre_ visible in

its make-up, but with an obvious impudence gleaming from its windows.

One cannot deport one's self at such a place as if born there. The

situation demands--nay, exacts behavior somewhat special and peculiar.

No lonely island in the sea is quite as isolated and out of the world

as the top of any mountain, nor can any amount of man's effort soften

in the least the savage individuality of mountain scenery so as to

render those high places familiar or homelike or genuinely habitable.

Delightful enough and fascinating enough all mountain hotels surely are;

but the sensation that living in one of them induces is the romantic

consciousness of being in a degree "out of space, out of time." No doubt

this feeling was heightened and intensified in the case of the guests at

Hotel Helicon who were enjoying the added novelty of entire freedom from

the petty economies that usually dog the footsteps and haunt the very

dreams of the average summer sojourner. At all events, they were mostly

a light-hearted set given over to a freedom of speech and action which

would have horrified them on any lower plane.

Scarcely had Gaspard Dufour passed beyond sight down the ravine in

search of a trout-brook, than he became the subject of free discussion.

Nothing strictly impolite was said about him; but everybody in some way

expressed amazement at everybody's ignorance of a man whose importance

was apparent and whose name vaguely and tauntingly suggested to each one

of them a half-recollection of having seen it in connection with some

notable literary sensation.

"Is there a member of the French institute by the name of Dufour?"

inquired R. Hobbs Lucas, the historian, thoughtfully knitting his heavy

brows.

"I am sure not," said Hartley Crane, "for I met most of the members when

I was last at Paris and I do not recall the name."

"There goes that Bourbon again," muttered Laurens Peck, the critic; "if

one should mention Xenophon, that fellow would claim a personal

acquaintance with him!"

It was plain enough that Peck did not value Crane very highly, and Crane

certainly treated Peck very coolly. Miss Moyne, however, was blissfully

unaware that she was the cause of this trouble, and for that matter the

men themselves would have denied with indignant fervor any thing of the

kind. Both of them were stalwart and rather handsome, the Kentuckian

dark and passionate looking, the New Yorker fair, cool and willful

in appearance. Miss Moyne had been pleased with them both, without a

special thought of either, whilst they were going rapidly into the worry

and rapture of love, with no care for anybody but her.

She was beautiful and good, sweet-voiced, gentle, more inclined to

listen than to talk, and so she captivated everybody from the first.

"I think it would be quite interesting," she said, "if it should turn

out that Mr. Dufour is a genuine foreign author, like Tolstoï or Daudet

or----"

"Realists, and nobody but realists," interposed Mrs. Philpot; "why don't

you say Zola, and have done with it?"

"Well, Zola, then, if it must be," Miss Moyne responded; "for, barring

my American breeding and my Southern conservatism, I am nearly in

sympathy with--no, not that exactly, but we are so timid. I should like

to feel a change in the literary air."

"Oh, you talk just as Arthur Selby writes in his critical papers. He's

all the time trying to prove that fiction is truth and that truth is

fiction. He lauds Zola's and Dostoieffsky's filthy novels to the skies;

but in his own novels he's as prudish and Puritanish as if he had been

born on Plymouth Rock instead of on an Illinois prairie."

"I wonder why he is not a guest here," some one remarked. "I should have

thought that our landlord would have had _him_ at all hazards. Just now

Selby is monopolizing the field of American fiction. In fact I think he

claims the earth."

"It is so easy to assume," said Guilford Ferris, whose romances always

commanded eulogy from the press, but invariably fell dead on the market;

"but I am told that Selby makes almost nothing from the sales of his

books."

"But the magazines pay him handsomely," said Miss Moyne.

"Yes, they do," replied Ferris, pulling his long brown mustache

reflectively, "and I can't see why. He really is not popular; there is

no enthusiasm for his fiction."

"It's a mere vogue, begotten by the critics," said Hartley Crane.

"Criticism is at a very low ebb in America. Our critics are all either

ignorant or given over to putting on English and French airs."

Ferris opened his eyes in a quiet way and glanced at Peck who, however,

did not appear to notice the remark.

"There's a set of them in Boston and New York," Crane went on, "who

watch the _Revue de Deux Mondes_ and the London _Atheneum_, ready to

take the cue from them. Even American books must stand or fall by the

turn of the foreign thumb."

"That is a very ancient grumble," said Ferris, in a tone indicative of

impartial indifference.

"Take these crude, loose, awkward, almost obscene Russian novels,"

continued Crane, "and see what a furor the critics of New York and

Boston have fermented in their behalf, all because it chanced that a

_coterie_ of Parisian literary _roués_ fancied the filthy imaginings of

Dostoieffsky and the raw vulgarity of Tolstoï. What would they say of

_you_, Ferris, if _you_ should write so low and dirty a story as _Crime

and Its Punishment_ by Dostoieffsky?"

"Oh, I don't know, and, begging your grace, I don't care a straw,"

Ferris replied; "the publishers would steal all my profits in any

event."

"Do you really believe that?" inquired Peck.

"Believe it? I know it," said Ferris. "When did you ever know of a

publisher advertising a book as in its fiftieth thousand so long as the

author had any royalty on the sales? The only book of mine that ever had

a run was one I sold outright in the manuscript to George Dunkirk & Co.,

who publish all my works. That puerile effort is now in its ninetieth

thousand, while the best of the other six has not yet shown up two

thousand! Do you catch the point?"

"But what difference can printing a statement of the books sold make,

anyway?" innocently inquired Miss Moyne.

Ferris laughed.

"All the difference in the world," he said; "the publisher would have to

account to the author for all those thousands, don't you see."

"But they have to account, anyhow," replied Miss Moyne, with a perplexed

smile.

"Account!" exclaimed Ferris, contemptuously; "account! yes, they have to

account."

"But they account to me," Miss Moyne gently insisted.

"Who are your publishers?" he demanded.

"George Dunkirk & Co.," was the answer.

"Well," said he, "I'll wager you anything I can come within twenty of

guessing the sales up to date of your book. It has sold just eleven

hundred and forty copies."

She laughed merrily and betrayed the dangerous closeness of his guess by

coloring a little.

"Oh, its invariably just eleven hundred and forty copies, no matter what

kind of a book it is, or what publisher has it," he continued; "I've

investigated and have settled the matter."

The historian was suddenly thoughtful, little Mrs. Philpot appeared to

be making some abstruse calculation, Crane was silently gazing at the

ground and Peck, with grim humor in his small eyes, remarked that eleven

hundred and forty was a pretty high average upon the whole.

Just at this point a figure appeared in the little roadway where it made

its last turn lapsing from the wood toward the hotel. A rather tall,

slender and angular young woman, bearing a red leather bag in one hand

and a blue silk umbrella in the other, strode forward with the pace of a

_tragedienne_. She wore a bright silk dress, leaf-green in color, and a

black bonnet, of nearly the Salvation Army pattern, was set far back on

her head, giving full play to a mass of short, fine, loosely tumbled

yellow hair.

She was very much out of breath from her walk up the mountain, but there

was a plucky smile on her rather sallow face and an enterprising gleam

in her light eyes.

She walked right into the hotel, as if she had always lived there, and

they heard her talking volubly to the servant as she was following him

to a room.

Everybody felt a waft of free Western air and knew that Hotel Helicon

had received another interesting guest, original if not typical, with

qualities that soon must make themselves respected in a degree.

"Walked from the station?" Mrs. Philpot ventured, in querulous, though

kindly interrogation.

"Up the mountain?" Miss Moyne added, with a deprecatory inflection.

"And carried that bag!" exclaimed all the rest.

V

Gaspard Dufour, whose accumulations of adipose tissue appeared to serve

him a good turn, as he descended the steep, rocky ravine, hummed a droll

tune which was broken at intervals by sundry missteps and down-sittings

and side-wise bumps against the jutting crags. He perspired freely,

mopping his brow meantime with a vast silk kerchief that hung loosely

about his short neck.

The wood grew denser as he descended and a damp, mouldy odor pervaded

the spaces underneath the commingling boughs of the oaks, pines, cedars,

and sassafras. Here and there a lizard scampered around a tree-hole

or darted under the fallen leaves. Overhead certain shadowy flittings

betrayed the presence of an occasional small bird, demurely going about

its business of food-getting. The main elements of the surroundings,

however, were gloom and silence. The breeze-currents astir in the valley

and rippling over the gray peaks of Mt. Boab could not enter the leafy

chambers of this wooded gorge. Heat of a peculiarly sultry sort seemed

to be stored here, for as Dufour proceeded he began at length to gasp

for breath, and it was with such relief as none but the suffocating can

fully appreciate, that he emerged into an open space surrounded, almost,

with butting limestone cliffs, but cut across by a noisy little stream

that went bubbling down into the valley through a cleft bedecked with

ferns and sprinkled with perennial dew from a succession of gentle

cascades. The ideal trout-brook was this, so far as appearances

could go. At the foot of each tiny water-fall was a swirling pool,

semi-opaque, giving forth emerald flashes and silver glints, and bearing

little cones of creamy foam round and round on its bosom. A thousand

noises, every one a water-note, rising all along the line of the brook's

broken current, clashed together with an effect like that of hearing a

far-off multitude applauding or some distant army rushing on a charge.

So much out of breath and so deluged with perspiration was Dufour that

he flung himself upon the ground beside the brook and lay there panting

and mopping his face. Overhead the bit of sky was like turquoise, below

a slender glimpse of the valley shone between the rock walls, like a

sketch subdued almost to monochrome of crepuscular purple. A fitful

breath of cool air fell into the place, fanning the man's almost purple

cheeks and forehead, while a wood-thrush, whose liquid voice might have

been regarded as part of the water-tumult, sang in a thorn tree hard by.

In a half-reclining attitude, Dufour gave himself over to the delicious

effect of all this, indulging at the same time in the impolite and

ridiculous, but quite Shakespearian, habit of soliloquizing.

"Jingo!" he remarked, "Jingo! but isn't this a daisy prospect for trout!

If those pools aren't full of the beauties, then there's nothing in

Waltonian lore and life isn't worth living. Ha! Jingo! there went one

clean above the water--a ten ouncer, at least!"

He sprang at his rod as if to break it to pieces, and the facility with

which he fitted the joints and the reel and run the line and tied the

cast was really a wonder.

"I knew they were here," he muttered, "just as soon as I laid my eyes on

the water. Who ever did see such another brook!"

At the third cast of the fly, a brown hackle, by the way, up came a

trout with a somersault and a misty gleam of royal purple and silver,

attended by a spray of water and a short bubbling sound. Dufour struck

deftly, hooking the beautiful fish very insecurely through the edge of

the lower lip. Immediately the reel began to sing and the rod to quiver,

while Dufour's eyes glared almost savagely and his lips pursed with

comical intensity.

Round and round flew the trout, now rushing to the bottom of the pool,

now whisking under a projecting ledge and anon flinging itself clean

above the water and shaking itself convulsively.

The angler was led hither and thither by his active prey, the exercise

bedewing his face again with perspiration, whilst his feet felt the cool

bath of water and the soothing embrace of tangled water-grass. The mere

switch of a bamboo rod, bent almost into a loop, shook like a rush in a

wind.

Dufour was ill prepared to formulate a polite response when, at the

height of his sport, a gentle but curiously earnest voice exclaimed:

"Snatch 'im out, snatch 'im out, dog gone yer clumsy hide! Snatch 'im

out, er I'll do it for ye!"

The trout must have heard, for as the angler turned to get a hasty

glance at the stranger, up it leaped and by a desperate shake broke the

snell.

"Confound you!" cried Dufour, his face redder than ever. "Confound your

meddlesome tongue, why didn't you keep still till I landed him?"

There was a tableau set against the gray, lichen-bossed rocks. Two men

glaring at each other. The new-comer was a tall, athletic, brown-faced

mountaineer, bearing a gun and wearing two heavy revolvers. He towered

above Dufour and gazed down upon him as if about to execute him. The

latter did not quail, but grew angrier instead.

"You ought to have better sense than to interfere with my sport in such

a way! Who are you, anyway?" he cried in a hot, fierce tone.

The mountaineer stood silent for a moment, as if collecting words enough

for what he felt like saying, then:

"See yer," he drawled, rather musically, "ef I take ye by the scruff o'

yer neck an' the heel o' yer stockin' an' jest chuck ye inter thet

puddle, ye'll begin to surmise who I air, ye saucy little duck-legged

minny-catcher, you!"

Dufour, remembering his long training years ago at the Gentlemen's

Glove-Club, squared himself with fists in position, having flung aside

his tackle. In his righteous rage he forgot that his adversary was not

only his superior in stature but also heavily armed.

"Well, thet' ther' do beat me!" said the mountaineer, with an

incredulous ring in his voice. "The very idee! W'y ye little aggervatin'

banty rooster, a puttin' up yer props at me! W'y I'll jest eternally and

everlastin'ly wring yer neck an' swob the face o' nature wi' ye!"

What followed was about as indescribable as a whirlwind in dry grass.

The two men appeared to coalesce for a single wild, whirling, resounding

instant, and then the mountaineer went over headlong into the middle

of the pool with a great plash and disappeared. Dufour, in a truly

gladiatorial attitude, gazed fiercely at the large dimple in which his

antagonist was buried for the instant, but out of which he presently

projected himself with great promptness, then, as a new thought came to

him, he seized the fallen gun of the mountaineer, cocked it and leveled

it upon its owner. There was a peculiar meaning in his words as he

stormed out:

"Lie down! down with you, or I blow a hole clean through you instantly!"

Promptly enough the mountaineer lay down until the water rippled around

his chin and floated his flaxen beard. Some moments of peculiar silence

followed, broken only by the lapsing gurgle and murmur of the brook.

Dufour, with arms as steady as iron bars, kept the heavy gun bearing on

the gasping face of the unwilling bather, whilst at the same time he was

dangerously fingering the trigger. The stout, short figure really had a

muscular and doughty air and the heavy face certainly looked warlike.

"Stranger, a seein' 'at ye've got the drap onto me, 'spose we swear off

an' make up friends?" The man in the water said this at length, in the

tone of one presenting a suggestion of doubtful propriety.

"Don't hardly think you've cooled off sufficiently, do you?" responded

Dufour.

"This here's spring warter, ye must 'member," offered the mountaineer.

The gun was beginning to tire Dufour's arms.

"Well, do you knock under?" he inquired, still carelessly fumbling the

trigger.

"Great mind ter say yes," was the shivering response.

"Oh, take your time to consider, I'm in no hurry," said Dufour.

If the man in the water could have known how the supple but of late

untrained arms of the man on shore were aching, the outcome might have

been different; but the bath was horribly cold and the gun's muzzle kept

its bearing right on the bather's eye.

"I give in, ye've got me, stranger," he at last exclaimed.

Dufour was mightily relieved as he put down the gun and watched his

dripping and shivering antagonist wade out of the cold pool. The men

looked at each other curiously.

"Ye're the dog gone'dest man 'at ever I see," remarked the mountaineer;

"who air ye, anyhow?"

"Oh, I'm a pretty good fellow, if you take me on the right tack," said

Dufour.

The other hesitated a moment, and then inquired:

"Air ye one o' them people up at the tavern on the mounting?"

"Yes."

"A boardin' there?"

"Yes."

"For all summer?"

"Possibly."

Again there was a silence, during which the water trickled off the

mountaineer's clothes and ran over the little stones at his feet.

"Goin' ter make fun o' me when ye git up thar?" the catechism was at

length resumed. Dufour laughed.

"I could tell a pretty good thing on you," he answered, taking a

sweeping observation of the stalwart fellow's appearance as he stood

there with his loose jeans trousers and blue cotton shirt clinging to

his shivering limbs.

"See yer, now," said the latter, in a wheedling tone, and wringing his

light, thin beard with one sinewy dark hand, "see yer, now, I'd like for

ye not ter do thet, strenger."

"Why?"

"Well," said the mountaineer, after some picturesque hesitation and

faltering, "'cause I hev a 'quaintance o' mine up ther' at thet tavern."

"Indeed, have you? Who is it?"

"Mebbe ye mought be erquainted with Miss Sarah Anna Crabb?"

"No."

"Well, she's up ther', she stayed all night at our house las' night an'

went on up ther' this mornin'; she's a literary woman an' purty, an'

smart, an' a mighty much of a talker."

"Ugh!"

"Jest tell her 'at ye met me down yer, an' 'at I'm tol'ble well; but

don't say nothin' 'bout this 'ere duckin' 'at ye gi' me, will ye?"

"Oh, of course, that's all right," Dufour hastened to say, feeling an

indescribable thrill of sympathy for the man.

"Yer's my hand, strenger, an' w'en Wesley Tolliver gives a feller his

hand hit means all there air ter mean," exclaimed the latter, as warmly

as his condition would permit, "an' w'en ye need er friend in these

parts jest come ter me."

He shouldered his gun, thereupon, and remarking that he might as well

be going, strode away over a spur of the mountain, his clothes still

dripping and sticking close to his muscular limbs. Dufour found his rod

broken and his reel injured, by having felt the weight of Wesley

Tolliver's foot, and so he too turned to retrace his steps.

Such an adventure could not fail to gain in spectacular grotesqueness as

it took its place in the memory and imagination of Dufour. He had been

in the habit of seeing such things on the stage and of condemning them

out of hand as the baldest melodramatic nonsense, so that now he could

not fairly realize the matter as something that had taken place in his

life.

He was very tired and hungry when he reached Hotel Helicon.

VI.

"Oh, yes, I walked all the way up the mountain from the railroad depot,"

explained the young woman whose arrival we chronicled in another

chapter, "but I stopped over night at a cabin on the way and discovered

some just delightful characters--the Tollivers--regular Craddock sort

of people, an old lady and her son."

By some method known only to herself she had put herself upon a

speaking-plane with Dufour, who, as she approached him, was standing in

an angle of the wide wooden veranda waiting for the moon to rise over

the distant peaks of the eastern mountains.

"I saw Mr. Tolliver to-day while whipping a brook down here," said he,

turning to look her squarely in the face.

"Oh, did you! Isn't he a virile, villainous, noble, and altogether

melodramatic looking man? I wish there was some one here who could

sketch him for me. But, say, Mr. Dufour, what do you mean, please, when

you speak of _whipping_ a brook?"

She took from her pocket a little red note-book and a pencil as he

promptly responded: "Whipping a brook? oh, that's angler's nonsense, it

means casting the line into the water, you know."

"That's funny," she remarked, making a note.

She was taller than Dufour, and so slender and angular that in

comparison with his excessive plumpness she looked gaunt and bony. In

speaking her lips made all sorts of wild contortions showing her uneven

teeth to great effect, and the extreme rapidity of her utterance gave an

explosive emphasis to her voice. Over her forehead, which projected, a

fluffy mass of pale yellow hair sprang almost fiercely as if to attack

her scared and receding chin.

"You are from Michigan, I believe, Miss Crabb," remarked Dufour.

"Oh, dear, no!" she answered, growing red in the face, "No, indeed. I am

from Indiana, from Ringville, associate editor of the _Star_."

"Pardon, I meant Indiana. Of course I knew you were not from Michigan."

"Thanks," with a little laugh and a shrug, "I am glad you see the

point."

"I usually do--a little late," he remarked complacently.

"You are from Boston, then, I infer," she glibly responded.

"Not precisely," he said, with an approving laugh, "but I admit that I

have some Bostonian qualities."

At this point in the conversation she was drooping over him, so to say,

and he was sturdily looking up into her bright, insistent face.

"What a group!" said Crane to Mrs. Bridges, a New York fashion editor.

"I'd give the best farm in Kentucky (so far as my title goes) for a

photograph of it! Doesn't she appear to be just about to peck out his

eyes!"

"Your lofty imagination plays you fantastic tricks," said Mrs. Bridges.

"Is she the famous Western _lady_ reporter?"

"The same, of the _Ringville Star_. I met her at the Cincinnati

convention. It was there that Bascom of the _Bugle_ called her a bag of

gimlets, because she bored him so."

"Oh!"

This exclamation was not in response to what Crane had said, but it

was an involuntary tribute to the moon-flower just flaring into bloom

between twin peaks lying dusky and heavy against the mist of silver

and gold that veiled the sweet sky beyond. A semi-circle of pale

straw-colored fire gleamed in the lowest angle of the notch and sent up

long, wavering lines of light almost to the zenith, paling the strongest

stars and intensifying the shadows in the mountain gorges and valleys.

Grim as angry gods, the pines stood along the slopes, as if gloomily

contemplating some dark scheme of vengeance.

"A real Sapphic," said Crane, dropping into a poetical tone, as an

elocutionist does when he is hungry for an opportunity to recite a

favorite sketch.

"Why a Sapphic?" inquired the matter-of-fact fashion-editor.

"Oh, don't you remember that fragment, that glorious picture Sappho's

divine genius has made for us--"

He quoted some Greek.

"About as divine as Choctaw or Kickapoo," she said. "I understand the

moon-shine better. In fact I have a sincere contempt for all this

transparent clap-trap you poets and critics indulge in when you got upon

your Greek hobby. Divine Sappho, indeed! A lot of bald bits of jargon

made famous by the comments of fogies. Let's look at the moon, please,

and be sincere."

"Sincere!"

"Yes, you know very well that if you had written the Sapphic fragments

the critics would----"

"The critics! What of them? They are a set of disappointed poetasters

themselves. Blind with rage at their own failures, they snap right and

left without rhyme or reason. Now there's Peck, a regular----"

"Well, sir, a regular _what_?" very coolly demanded the critic who had

stepped forth from a shadowy angle and now stood facing Crane.

"A regular star-gazer," said Mrs. Bridges. "Tell us why the planets

yonder all look so ghastly through the shimmering moonlight."

Peck, without reply, turned and walked away.

"Is he offended?" she asked.

"No, he gives offence, but can not take it."

Mrs. Bridges grew silent.

"We were speaking of Sappho," observed Crane, again gliding into an

elocutionary mood. "I have translated the fragment that I repeated a

while ago. Let me give it to you.

"When on the dusky violet sky

The full flower of the moon blooms high

The stars turn pale and die!"

Just then Miss Moyne, dressed all in white, floated by on Peck's arm,

uttering a silvery gust of laughter in response to a cynical observation

of the critic.

"What a lovely girl she is," said Mrs. Bridges. "Mr. Peck shows fine

critical acumen in being very fond of her."

Crane was desperately silent. "He's a handsome man, too, and I suspect

it's a genuine love affair," Mrs. Bridges went on, fanning herself

complacently. Back and forth, walking slowly and conversing in a soft

minor key, save when now and then Miss Moyne laughed melodiously, the

promenaders passed and repassed, Peck never deigning to glance toward

Crane, who had forgotten both Sappho and the moon. Miss Moyne did,

however, once or twice turn her eyes upon the silent poet.

"Oh," went on Miss Crabb, filling Dufour's ears with the hurried din of

her words, "Oh, I'm going to write a novel about this place. I never saw

a better chance for local color, real transcripts from life, original

scenes and genuine romance all tumbled together. Don't you think I might

do it?"

"It does appear tempting," said Dufour. "There's Tolliver for instance,

a genuine Chilhowee moonshiner." He appeared to laugh inwardly as he

spoke. Indeed he heard the plash of water and the dripping, shivering

mountaineer stood forth in his memory down there in the gorge.

"A moonshiner!" gasped Miss Crabb, fluttering the leaves of her

note-book and writing by moonlight with a celerity that amazed Dufour.

"Potentially, at least," he replied evasively. "He looks like one and he

don't like water."

"If he _does_ turn out to be a real moonshiner," Miss Crabb proceeded

reflectively to say, "it will be just too delicious for anything. I

don't mind telling you, confidentially, Mr. Dufour, that I am to write

some letters while here to the _Chicago Daily Lightning Express_. So I'd

take it as a great favor if you'd give me all the points you get."

"That's interesting," he said, with a keen scrutiny of her face for a

second. "I shall be glad to be of assistance to you."

He made a movement to go, but lingered to say: "Pray give me all the

points, too, will you?"

"Oh, are you a journalist too?" she inquired, breathlessly hanging over

him. "What paper--"

"I'm not much of anything," he hurriedly interposed, "but I like to know

what is going on, that's all."

He walked away without further excuse and went up to his room.

"I've got to watch him," soliloquized Miss Crabb, "or he'll get the

scoop of all the news. Give him points, indeed! Maybe so, but not till

after I've sent them to the _Lightning Express_! I'll keep even with

him, or know the reason why."

It was a grand panorama that the climbing moon lighted up all around

Mount Boab, a vast billowy sea of gloom and sheen. Here were shining

cliffs, there dusky gulches; yonder the pines glittered like steel-armed

sentinels on the hill-tops, whilst lower down they appeared to skulk

like cloaked assassins. Shadows came and went, now broad-winged and

wavering, again slender and swift as the arrows of death. The hotel was

bright within and without. Some one was at the grand piano in the hall

making rich music--a fragment from Beethoven,--and a great horned owl

down the ravine was booming an effective counterpoint.

Crane stood leaning on the railing of the veranda and scowling savagely

as Peck and Miss Moyne continued to promenade and converse. He was,

without doubt, considering sinister things. Mrs. Bridges, finding him

entirely unsympathetic, went to join Miss Crabb, who was alone where she

had been left by Dufour. Meantime, up in his room, with his chair tilted

far back and his feet thrust out over the sill of an open window,

Dufour was smoking a fragrant Cuban cigar, (fifty cents at retail) and

alternating smiles with frowns as he contemplated his surroundings.

"Authors," he thought, "are the silliest, the vainest, and the most

impractical lot of human geese that ever were plucked for their valuable

feathers. And newspaper people! Humph!" He chuckled till his chin shook

upon his immaculate collar. "Just the idea, now, of that young woman

asking me to furnish her with points!"

There was something almost jocund blent with his air of solid

self-possession, and he smoked the precious cigars one after another

with prodigal indifference and yet with the perfect grace of him to the

manner born.

"Hotel Helicon on Mt. Boab!" he repeated, and then betook himself to

bed.

VII.

Some people are born to find things out--to overhear, to reach a place

just at the moment in which an event comes to pass there--born indeed,

with the news-gatherer's instinct perfectly developed. Miss Crabb was

one of these. How she chanced to over-hear some low-spoken but deadly

sounding words that passed between Peck and Crane, it would be hard to

say; still she overheard them, and her heart jumped almost into her

mouth. It was a thrillingly dramatic passage, there under the

heavy-topped oak by the west veranda in the gloom.

"Villain!" exclaimed Crane, in the hissing voice of a young

tragedy-player at rehearsal,

"Villain! you shall not escape me. Defend yourself!"

"Nonsense," said Peck, "you talk like a fool. I don't want to fight!

What's that you've got in your hand?"

"A sword, you cowardly craven!"

"You call me a coward! If I had a good club I should soon show you what

I could do, you sneaking assassin!"

More words and just as bitter followed, till at last a fight was agreed

upon to take place immediately, at a certain point on the verge of a

cliff not far away. There were to be no seconds and the meeting was to

end in the death of one or both of the combatants.

To Miss Crabb all this had a sound and an appearance as weird as

anything in the wildest romance she ever had read. It was near

mid-night; the hotel was quite soundless and the moon on high made the

shadows short and black.

"Meet me promptly at the Eagle's Nest in ten minutes," said Crane, "I'll

fetch my other sword and give you choice."

"All right, sir," responded Peck, "but a club would do."

The peculiar hollowness of their voices affected the listener as if

the sounds had come from a tomb. She felt clammy. Doubtless there is a

considerable element of humorous, almost ludicrous bravado in such a

scene when coolly viewed; but Miss Crabb could not take a calm, critical

attitude just then. At first she was impelled almost irresistibly toward

interfering and preventing a bloody encounter; but her professional

ambition swept the feeling aside. Still, being a woman, she was

dreadfully nervous. "Ugh!" she shuddered, "it will be just awful, but I

can't afford to miss getting the full particulars for the _Lightning

Express_. A sure enough duel! It will make my fortune! Oh, if I were a

man, now, just only for a few hours, what a comfort it would be! But all

the same I must follow them--I must see the encounter, describe it as

an eye-witness and send it by wire early in the morning."

It occurred to her mind just then that the nearest telegraph station was

twelve miles down the mountain, but she did not flinch or waver. The

thought that she was required to do what a man might well have shrunk

from gave an element of heroism to her pluck. She was conscious of this

and went about her task with an elasticity and facility truly admirable.

Eagle's Nest was the name of a small area on the top of a beetling cliff

whose almost perpendicular wall was dotted with clumps of sturdy little

cedar trees growing out of the chinks. It was a dizzy place at all

times, but by night the effect of its airy height was very trying on any

but the best nerves. Crane and Peck both were men of fine physique and

were possessed of stubborn courage and great combativeness. They met on

the spot and after choosing swords, coolly and promptly proceeded to the

fight. On one hand, close to the cliff's edge, was a thick mass of small

oak bushes, on the other hand lay a broken wall of fragmentary stones.

The footing-space was fairly good, though a few angular blocks of stone

lay here and there, and some brushes of stiff wood-grass were scattered

around.

Crane led with more caution than one would have expected of an irate

Kentuckian, and Peck responded with the brilliant aplomb of an

enthusiastic duelist.

The swords were neither rapiers nor broad-swords, being the ordinary

dress-weapons worn by Confederate Infantry officers in the war

time--weapons with a history, since they had been at the thigh of father

and son, the bravest of Kentucky Cranes, through many a stormy battle.

Peck's back was toward the precipice-brink at the commencement of the

engagement, but neither had much the advantage, as the moon was almost

directly overhead. As their weapons began to flash and clink, the

slender keen echoes fell over into the yawning chasm and went rattling

down the steep, ragged face of the precipice. They were vigorous and

rather good fencers and it would have been evident to an onlooker of

experience that the fight was to be a long one, notwithstanding the

great weight of the swords they were using. They soon began to fight

fiercely and grew more vehemently aggressive each second, their blows

and thrusts and parries and counter-cuts following each other faster and

faster until the sounds ran together and the sparks leaped and shone

even in the bright moonlight. They mingled broad-sword exercise with

legitimate rapier fencing and leaped about each other like boxers, their

weapons whirling, darting, rising, falling, whilst their breathing

became loud and heavy. It was a scene to have stirred the blood of men

and women four hundred years ago, when love was worth fighting for and

when men were quite able and willing to fight for it.

The combatants strained every point of their strength and skill, and

not a drop of blood could either draw. Slash, thrust, whack, clink,

clank, clack, click, cling! Round and round they labored, the fury of

their efforts flaming out of their eyes and concentrating in the deep

lines of their mouths. As if to listen, the breeze lay still in the

trees and the great owl quit hooting in the ravine. Faster and faster

fell the blows, swifter and keener leaped the thrusts, quicker and surer

the parries were interposed. The swords were hacked and notched like

hand-saws, the blades shook and hummed like lyre-cords. Now close to

the cliff's edge, now over by the heap of broken stones and then close

beside the clump of oak bushes, the men, panting and sweating, their

muscles knotted, their sinews leaping like bow-strings, their eyes

standing out, as if starting from their sockets, pursued each other

without a second's rest or wavering.

At last, with an irresistible spurt of fury, Crane drove Peck right into

the bushes with a great crash and would not let him out. The critic

was not vanquished, however, for, despite the foliage and twigs, he

continued to parry and thrust with dangerous accuracy and force.

Just at this point a strange thing happened. Right behind Peck there was

a tearing, crashing sound and a cry, loud, keen, despairing, terrible,

followed immediately by the noise of a body descending among the cedars

growing along the face of the awful precipice.

It was a woman's voice, shrieking in deadly horror that then came up

out of the dizzy depth of space below!

The men let fall their swords and leaped to the edge of the cliff with

the common thought that it was Miss Moyne who had fallen over. They

reeled back giddy and sick, staggering as if drunken.

Far down they had seen something white fluttering and gleaming amid a

tuft of cedars and a quavering voice had cried:

"Help, help, oh, help!"

And so the duel was at an end.

VIII.

Hotel Helicon was shaken out of its sleep by the startling rumor to the

effect that Miss Moyne had fallen down the precipice at Eagle's Nest.

Of all the rudely awakened and mightily frightened inmates, perhaps Miss

Moyne herself was most excited by this waft of bad news. She had been

sleeping very soundly in dreamless security and did not at first

feel the absurdity of being told that she had just tumbled down the

escarpment, which in fact she never yet had summoned the courage to

approach, even when sustained by a strong masculine arm.

"O dear! how did it happen?" she demanded of her aunt, Mrs. Coleman

Rhodes, who had rushed upon her dainty couch with the frightful

announcement of her accident.

"Oh, Alice! you are here, you are not hurt at all! Oh!" Mrs. Rhodes went

on, "and what _can_ it all mean!"

Everybody rushed out, of course, as soon as hurried dressing would

permit, and fell into the confusion that filled the halls and main

veranda.

Crane was talking in a loud, but well modulated strain, explaining the

accident:

"Mr. Peck and I," he went on to say, "were enjoying a friendly turn at

sword-play up here at Eagle's Nest; couldn't sleep, needed exercise, and

went up there so as not to disturb any one. While we were fencing she

came rushing past through those bushes and leaped right over with a

great shriek. She--"

"Don't stop to talk," cried Mr. E. Hobbs Lucas, with a directness and

clearness quite unusual in a historian. "Don't stop to talk, let's go do

something!"

"Yes, come on," quavered poor Peck, his face whiter than the moon and

his beard quivering in sympathy with his voice.

"Oh, it's dreadful, awful!" moaned little Mrs. Philpot, "poor, dear Miss

Moyne, to think that she is gone!" and she leaned heavily on Miss

Moyne's shoulder as she spoke.

It was a strange scene, too confused for the best dramatic effect,

but spectacular in the extreme. Servants swarmed out with lights that

wavered fantastically in the moonshine, while the huddled guests swayed

to and fro in a body. Every face was pinched with intense excitement

and looked haggard under its crown of disheveled hair. Even the hotel

windows stared in stupid horror, and the kindly countenances of the

negro waiters took on a bewildered and meaningless grin set in a black

scowl of superstition and terror.

When Dufour came upon the scene, he did not appear in the least

flurried, and the first thing he did was to lay his hand on Miss Moyne's

shoulder and exclaim in a clear tenor strain:

"Why, here! it's all a mistake! What are you talking about? Here's Miss

Moyne! Here she stands!"

"Mercy! where?" enquired little Mrs. Philpot, who was still leaning on

her friend and shedding bitter tears.

Dufour, with a quiet: "Please don't take offence," put a hand on either

side of Miss Moyne and lifted her so that she stood in a chair looking

very sweetly down over the crowd of people.

Few indeed are they who can look beautiful under such circumstances, but

Miss Moyne certainly did, especially in the eyes of Crane and Peck as

they gazed up at her.

Forthwith the tragedy became a farce.

"That Kentuckian must romance, I suppose," grumbled R. Hobbs Lucas.

"Wonder what he'll tell next."

"I don't see how I could be so mistaken," said Peck, after quiet had

been somewhat restored, "I would have willingly been sworn to--"

He was interrupted by a dozen voices hurling ironical phrases at him.

"It is every word truth," exclaimed Crane testily. "Do you suppose I

would trifle with so--"

"Oh, don't you absolutely know that we suppose just that very thing?"

said Lucas.

With the return of self-consciousness the company began to scatter, the

ladies especially scampering to their rooms with rustling celerity. The

men grumbled not a little, as if being deprived of a shocking accident

touched them with a sting.

"The grotesque idea!" ejaculated Dufour. "Such a practical

joke--impractical joke, I might better say, could originate only between

a poet and a critic."

Everybody went back to bed, feeling more or less injured by Crane and

Peck, who shared in their own breasts the common impression that they

had made great fools of themselves. If these crest-fallen knights, so

lately militant and self-confident, had any cause of quarrel now it

was based upon a question as to which should feel the meaner and which

should more deeply dread to meet Miss Moyne on the morrow.

As for Miss Moyne herself she was indignant although she tried to quiet

her aunt, who was ready to shake the dust of Mt. Boab from her feet at

once.

Next morning, however, when it was discovered that Miss Crabb was

missing and that after all something tragic probably had happened,

everybody felt relieved.

IX

Mr. Wesley Tolliver might well have served the turn of romancer or

realist, as he stood in the shadow of a cedar-clump with the mysterious

stillness of midnight all around him. He was a very real and substantial

looking personage, and yet his gun, his pistols, his fantastic mountain

garb and the wild setting in which he was framed gave him the appearance

of a strong sketch meant to illustrate a story by Craddock. Above him

towered the cliff at Eagle's Nest and near by was the mountain "Pocket"

in which nestled the little distillery whose lurking-place had long been

the elusive dream of utopian revenue officers. In a space of brilliant

moonlight, Tolliver's dog, a gaunt, brindle cur, sat in statuesque

worthlessness, remembering no doubt the hares he never had caught and

the meatless bones he had vainly buried during a long ignoble life.

The hotel and its inmates had rendered the distillery and its furtive

operatives very uneasy of late, and now as Tolliver in his due turn

stood guard by night he considered the probability of having to look

for some better situation for his obscure manufactory with a species of

sadness which it would be impossible to describe. He thought with deep

bitterness of all the annoyance he had suffered at the hands of meddling

government agents and from the outside world in general and he tried

to understand how any person could pretend to see justice in such

persecution. What had he done to merit being hunted like a wild beast?

Nothing but buy his neighbor's apples at the fair price of twenty cents

a bushel and distil them into apple brandy! Could this possibly be any

injury to any government official, or to anybody else? He paid for his

still, he paid for the apples, he paid fair wages to the men who worked

for him, what more could be justly demanded of him?

It was while he was wholly absorbed in trying to solve this knotty

problem that far above a strange clink and clatter began, which sounded

to him as if it were falling from among the stars. Nothing within his

knowledge or experience suggested an explanation of such a phenomenon.

He felt a thrill of superstitious terror creep through his iron nerves

as the aerial racket increased and seemed to whisk itself from place to

place with lightning celerity. An eccentric echo due to the angles and

projections of the cliff added weird effect to the sounds.

The dog uttered a low plaintive whine and crept close to his master, and

even wedged himself with tremulous desperation between the knees of that

wondering and startled sentinel.

The clinking and clanging soon became loud and continuous, falling in

a cataract down the escarpment, accompanied now and again by small

fragments of stone and soil.

At last Tolliver got control of himself sufficiently, and looked out

from his shadowy station and up towards the dizzy crown of Eagle's

Nest.

Just at that moment there was a crash and a scream. He saw a

wide-winged, ghostly object come over the edge and swoop down. Another

scream, another and another, a tearing sound, a crushing of cedar

boughs, a shower of small stones and lumps of soil.

Tolliver, frightened as he never before had been, turned and fled,

followed by his ecstatic dog.

A voice, keen, clear, high, beseeching pursued him and reached his ears.

"Help! help! Oh, help!"

Surely this was the "Harnt that walks Mt. Boab!" This syren of the

mountains had lured many a hunter to his doom.

"Oh, me! Oh, my! Oh, mercy on me! Help! help!"

Tolliver ran all the faster, as the voice seemed to follow him, turn as

he would. He bruised his shins on angular rocks, he ran against trees,

he fell over logs, and at last found himself hopelessly entangled in a

net of wild grape-vines, with his enthusiastic dog still faithfully

wriggling between his knees.

The plaintive voice of the syren, now greatly modified by distance,

assailed his ears with piteous persistence, as he vainly struggled to

free himself. The spot was dark as Erebus, being in the bottom of a

ravine, and the more he exerted himself the worse off he became.

It was his turn to call for help, but if any of his friends heard they

did not heed his supplications, thinking them but baleful echoes of the

Harnt's deceitful voice.

It was at the gray of dawn when at last Tolliver got clear of the

vines and made his way out of the ravine. By this time he had entirely

overcome his fright, and with that stubbornness characteristic of all

mountain men, he betook himself back to the exact spot whence he had so

precipitately retreated. His dog, forlornly nonchalant, trotted behind

him to the place and resumed the seat from which the Harnt had driven

him a few hours ago. In this attitude, the animal drooped his nose and

indifferently sniffed a curious object lying near.

"What's thet ther' thing, Mose?" inquired Tolliver, addressing the dog.

"Well I'll ber dorg-goned!" he added, as he picked up a woman's bonnet.

"If this here don't beat the worl' an' all camp meetin'! Hit air--well,

I'll ber dorged--hit air--I'm er ghost if hit aint Miss Sara' Anna

Crabb's bonnet, by Ned!"

He held it up by one silk string and gazed at it with a ludicrously

puzzled stare. The dog whined and wagged his tail in humble sympathy

with his master's bewilderment.

"Hit's kinder interestin', haint it, Mose?" Tolliver went on dryly.

"We'll hev ter look inter this here thing, won't we, Mose?"

As for Mose, he was looking into it with all his eyes. Indeed he was

beginning to show extreme interest, and his tail was pounding the

ground with great rapidity.

Suddenly a thought leaped into Tolliver's brain and with a start he

glanced up the escarpment, his mouth open and his brown cheeks betraying

strong emotion. Mose followed his master's movements with kindling eyes,

and whined dolefully, his wolfish nose lifted almost vertically.

"Is that you, Mr. Tolliver?" fell a voice out of a cedar clump a little

way up the side of the cliff.

"Hit air me," he responded, as he saw Miss Crabb perched among the

thick branches. She had her little red note-book open and was writing

vigorously. Her yellow hair was disheveled so that it appeared to

surround her face with a flickering light which to Tolliver's mind gave

it a most beautiful and altogether lovely expression.

"Well, I'll ber--" he checked himself and stood in picturesque suspense.

"Now, Mr. Tolliver, won't you please help me down from here?" she

demanded, closing her note-book and placing her pencil behind her ear.

"I'm awfully cramped, sitting in this position so long."

The chivalrous mountaineer did not wait to be appealed to a second time,

but laying down his gun to which he had clung throughout the night, he

clambered up the steep face of the rock, from projection to projection,

until he reached the tree in which Miss Crabb sat. Meantime she watched

him with admiring eyes and just as he was about to take her in his arms

and descend with her she exclaimed:

"Wait a moment, I might lose the thought, I'll just jot it down."

She took her note-book and pencil again and hurriedly made the following

entry: _Sinewy, virile, lithe, hirsute, fearless, plucky, bronzed,

vigorous, lank, Greek-eyed, Roman-nosed, prompt, large-eared, typical

American. Good hero for dramatic, short, winning dialect story. The

magazines never refuse dialect stories._

"Now, if you please, Mr. Tolliver, I will go with you."

It was an Herculean labor, but Tolliver was a true hero. With one arm

wound around her, after the fashion of the serpent in the group of the

Laocoön, and with her long yellow hair streaming in crinkled jets over

his shoulder, he slowly made his way down to the ground.

Meantime Mose, the dog, with true canine sympathy and helpfulness, had

torn the bonnet into pathetic shreds, and was now lying half asleep

under a tree with a bit of ribbon in his teeth.

"Well, I'll jest ber--beg parding Miss Crabb, but thet ther dog hev et

up yer head-gear," said Tolliver as he viewed with dilating eyes the

scattered fragments.

She comprehended her calamity with one swift glance, but she had caught

a new dialect phrase at the same time.

"Head-gear, you call it, I believe?" she inquired, again producing book

and pencil.

"Beg parding all over, Miss Crabb, I meant bonnet," he hurried to say.

"Oh, it's all right, I assure you," she replied, writing rapidly, "it's

a delightfully fresh and artistic bit of special coloring."

Miss Crabb's clothes were badly torn and she looked as if she had spent

the night wretchedly, but with the exception of a few slight scratches

and bruises she was unhurt.

"Well jes' look a there, will ye!" exclaimed Tolliver as he spied Mose.

There was more of admiration than anger in his voice. "Ef thet ther

'fernal dog haint got yer chin-ribbon in his ole mouth, I'm er rooster!"

"Chin-ribbon," repeated Miss Crabb, making a note, "I'm er rooster," and

she smiled with intense satisfaction. "You don't know, Mr. Tolliver, how

much I am indebted to you."

"Not a tall, Miss Crabb, not a tall. Don't mention of it," he humbly

said, "hit taint wo'th talkin' erbout."

The morning was in full blow now and the cat-birds were singing sweetly

down the ravine. Overhead a patch of blue sky gleamed and burned with

the true empyrean glow. Far away, down in the valley by the little

river, a breakfast horn was blown with many a mellow flourish and a cool

gentle breeze with dew on its wings fanned Miss Crabb's sallow cheeks

and rustled Tolliver's tawny beard. At the sound of the horn Mose sprang

to his feet and loped away with the bit of ribbon fluttering from his

mouth.

X.

It was late in the forenoon before it was discovered at Hotel Helicon

that Miss Crabb was missing, and even then there arose so many doubts

about the tragic side of the event that before any organized search

for her had been begun, she returned, appearing upon the scene mounted

behind Wesley Tolliver on a small, thin, wiry mountain mule.

Crane and Peck each drew a deep, swift sigh of relief upon seeing her,

for the sense of guilt in their breasts had been horrible. They had by

tacit conspiracy prevented any examination of Eagle's Nest, for they

dreaded what might be disclosed. Of course they did not mean to hide the

awful fate of the poor girl, nor would they willingly have shifted the

weight of their dreadful responsibility, but it was all so much like

a vivid dream, so utterly strange and theatrical as it arose in their

memories, that they could not fully believe in it.

Miss Crabb looked quite ludicrous perched behind the tall mountaineer

on such a dwarfish mule. Especially comical was the effect of the

sun-bonnet she wore. She had accepted this article of apparel from

Tolliver's mother, and it appeared to clutch her head in its stiff folds

and to elongate her face by sheer compression.

Everybody laughed involuntarily, as much for joy at her safe return as

in response to the demand of her melodramatic appearance.

"I've brung back yer runerway," said Tolliver cheerily, as he helped the

young woman to dismount. "She clim down the mounting by one pertic'ler

trail an' I jes' fotch her up by t'other."

Miss Crabb spoke not a word, but ran into the hotel and up to her room

without glancing to the right or to the left. In her great haste the

stiff old sun-bonnet fell from her head and tumbled upon the ground.

"Wush ye'd jes' be erbligin' enough ter han' thet there head-gear up ter

me, Mister," said Tolliver addressing Crane, who was standing near. "My

mammy'd raise er rumpage ef I'd go back 'thout thet ther bonnet."

With evident reluctance and disgust Crane gingerly took up the fallen

article and gave it to Tolliver, who thanked him so politely that all

the onlooking company felt a glow of admiration for the uncouth and yet

rather handsome cavalier.

"Thet gal," he observed, glancing in the direction that Miss Crabb had

gone, "she hev the winnin'est ways of any gal I ever seed in my life. Ye

orter seen 'er up inter thet there bush a writin' in 'er book! She'd

jes' tumbled kerwhummox down the clift an' hed lodged ther' in them

cedars; but as she wer' a writin' when she started ter fall w'y she

struck a writin' an' jes' kep' on at it same's if nothin' had happened.

She's game, thet ole gal air, I tell ye! She don't propose for any

little thing like fallin' off'n a clift, ter interfere with w'at she's a

doin' at thet time, le' me say ter ye. Lord but she wer' hongry, though,

settin' up ther a writin' all night, an' it'd a done ye good to a

seen 'er eat thet chicken and them cake-biscuits my mammy cooked for

breakfast. She air a mos' alarmin' fine gal, for a fac'."

At this point Dufour came out of the hotel, and when Tolliver saw him

there was an instantaneous change in the expression of the mountaineer's

face.

"Well I'll ber dorged!" he exclaimed with a smile of delight, "ef ther'

haint the same leetle John the Baptis' what bapsonsed me down yer inter

the branch! Give us yer baby-spanker, ole feller! How air ye!"

Dufour cordially shook hands with him, laughing in a jolly way.

"Fust an' only man at ever ducked me, I'm here ter say ter ye," Tolliver

went on, in a cheery, half-bantering tone, and sitting sidewise on the

mule. "Ye mus' hev' a sight o' muscle onto them duck legs and bantam

arms o' your'n."

He had the last word still in his mouth when the little beast suddenly

put down its head and flung high its hind feet.

"Woirp!" they heard him cry, as he whirled over in the air and fell

sprawling on the ground.

Dufour leaped forward to see if the man was hurt, but Tolliver was

upright in an instant and grinning sheepishly.

"Thet's right, Bonus," he said to the mule which stood quite still in

its place, "thet's right ole fel, try ter ac' smart in comp'ny. Yer a

beauty now, ain't ye?"

He replaced his hat, which had fallen from his head, patted the mule

caressingly on the neck, then lightly vaulting to the old saddle-tree,

he waved his hand to the company and turning dashed at a gallop down the

mountain road, his spurs jingling merrily as he went.

"What a delicious character!"

"What precious dialect!"

"How typically American!"

"A veritable hero!"

Everybody at Hotel Helicon appeared to have been captivated by this

droll fellow.

"How like Tolstoi's lovely Russians he is!" observed Miss Fidelia

Arkwright, of Boston, a near-sighted maiden who did translations and who

doted on virile literature.

"When I was in Russia, I visited Tolstoi at his shoe-shop--" began

Crane, but nobody appeared to hear him, so busy were all in making notes

for a dialect story.

"Tolstoi is the greatest fraud of the nineteenth century," said Peck.

"That shoe-making pretence of his is about on a par with his genius in

genuineness and sincerity. His novels are great chunks of raw filth,

rank, garlic garnished and hideous. We touch them only because the

French critics have called them savory. If the _Revue de Deux Mondes_

should praise a Turkish novel we could not wait to read it before we

joined in. Tolstoi is remarkable for two things: his coarseness and his

vulgar disregard of decency and truth. His life and his writings are

alike crammed with absurdities and contradictory puerilities which would

be laughable but for their evil tendencies."

"But, my dear sir, how then do you account for the many editions of

Tolstoi's books?" inquired the historian, R. Hobbs Lucas.

"Just as I account for the editions of Cowper and Montgomery and

Wordsworth and even Shakespeare," responded Peck. "You put a ten per

cent. author's royalty on all those dear classics and see how soon

the publishers will quit uttering them! If Tolstoi's Russian raw meat

stories were put upon the market in a fair competition with American

novels the latter would beat them all hollow in selling."

"Oh, we ought to have international copyright," plaintively exclaimed a

dozen voices, and so the conversation ended.

Strangely enough, each one of the company in growing silent did so in

order to weigh certain suggestions arising out of Peck's assertions. It

was as if a score of semi-annual statements of copyright accounts were

fluttering in the breeze, and it was as if a score of wistful voices had

whispered:

"How in the world do publishers grow rich when the books they publish

never sell?"

Perhaps Gaspard Dufour should be mentioned as appearing to have little

sympathy with Peck's theory or with the inward mutterings it had

engendered in the case of the rest of the company.

If there was any change in Dufour's face it was expressed in a smile of

intense self-satisfaction.

XI.

It was, of course, not long that the newspapers of our wide-awake

country were kept from giving their readers very picturesque glimpses of

what was going on among the dwellers on Mt. Boab. The humorists of the

press, those charming fellows whose work is so enjoyable when performed

upon one's neighbor and so excruciating when turned against oneself,

saw the vulnerable points of the situation and let go a broadside of

ridicule that reverberated from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It became

a matter of daily amusement among the inmates of Hotel Helicon to come

together in little groups and discuss these humorous missiles fired upon

them from California, Texas, Arkansas and Wisconsin, from Brooklyn,

Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Oil-City, Detroit and--, but from everywhere,

indeed.

When it came to Miss Crabb's adventure, every humorist excelled himself

in descriptive smartness and in cunning turns of ironical phrasing. The

head-line experts did telling work in the same connection. All this was

perfectly understood and enjoyed at home, but foreigners, especially the

English, stubbornly insisted upon viewing it as the high-water mark of

American refinement and culture.

When that genial periodical, the Smartsburgh _Bulldozer_, announced with

due gravity that Miss Crabb, a Western journalist, had leaped from the

top of Mt. Boab to the valley below, and had been caught in the arms of

a stalwart moonshiner, where she safely reposed, etc., the London

_Times_ copied the paragraph and made it a text for a heavy editorial

upon the barbaric influences of Republican institutions, to which the

American Minister felt bound to advert in a characteristic after-dinner

speech at a London club. So humorous, however, were his remarks that he

was understood to be vigorously in earnest, and the result was perfect

confirmation of the old world's opinion as to the rudimentary character

of our national culture.

Meantime Hotel Helicon continued to be the scene of varied if not

startling incidents. In their search for local color and picturesque

material, the litterateurs invaded every nook and corner of the region

upon and round about Mt. Boab, sketching, making notes, recording

suggestions, studying dialect, and filling their minds with the uncouth

peculiarities of the mountain folk.

"It has come to this," grumbled Peck, "that American literature, its

fiction I mean, is founded on dialect drivel and vulgar yawp. Look at

our magazines; four-fifths of their short stories are full of negro

talk, or cracker lingo, or mountain jibberish, or New England farm

yawp, or Hoosier dialect. It is horribly humiliating. It actually makes

foreigners think that we are a nation of green-horns. Why, a day or two

ago I had occasion to consult the article on American literature in the

Encyclopædia Britannica and therein I was told in one breath how great

a writer and how truly American Mr. Lowell is, and in the next breath

I was informed that a poem beginning with the verse, 'Under the yaller

pines I house' is one of his master-pieces! Do you see? Do you catch the

drift of the Englishman's argument? To be truly great, _as an American_,

one must be surpassingly vulgar, even in poetry!"

This off-hand shower of critical observation had as little effect upon

the minds of Peck's hearers as a summer rain has on the backs of a flock

of ducks. They even grew more vehement in their pursuit of local color.

"When I was spending a month at Rockledge castle with Lord Knownaught,"

said Crane, "his lordship frequently suggested that I should make a poem

on the life of Jesse James."

"Well, why didn't you do it?" inquired Miss Crabb with a ring of

impatience in her voice, "if you had you might have made a hit. You

might have attracted some attention."

Dufour laughed heartily, as if he had caught some occult humor from the

young woman's words.

"I did write it," said Crane retrospectively, "and sent it to George

Dunkirk & Co."

"Well?" sighed Miss Crabb with intense interest.

"Well," replied Crane, "they rejected the MS. without reading it."

Again Dufour laughed, as if at a good joke.

"George Dunkirk & Co.!" cried Guilford Ferris, the romancer, "George

Dunkirk & Co.! They are thieves. They have been making false reports on

copyright to me for five years or more!"

Dufour chuckled as if his jaws would fall off, and finally with a red

face and gleaming humorous eyes got up from the chair he was filling on

the veranda, and went up to his room.

The rest of the company looked at one another inquiringly.

"Who is he, anyhow?" demanded Peck.

"That's just my query," said Ferris.

"Nobody in the house knows anything definite about him," remarked R.

Hobbs Lucas. "And yet he evidently is a distinguished person, and his

name haunts me."

"So it does me," said Miss Moyne.

"I tell you he's a newspaper reporter. His cheek proves that," remarked

Peck.

Miss Crabb made a note, her own cheek flaming. "I presume you call that

humor," she observed, "it's about like New York's best efforts. In the

West reporters are respectable people."

"I beg pardon," Peck said hastily, "I did not mean to insinuate that

anybody is not respectable. Everybody is eminently respectable if I

speak of them. I never trouble myself with the other kind."

"Well, I don't believe that Mr. Dufour is a reporter at all," replied

Miss Crabb, with emphasis, "for he's not inquisitive, he don't make

notes, and he don't appear to be writing any."

"In my opinion he's a realist--a genuine analytical, motive-dissecting,

commonplace-recording, international novelist in disguise," said Ferris.

"Oh!"

"Ah!"

"Dear me!"

"But who?"

"It may be Arthur Selby himself, incog. Who knows?"

"Humph!" growled Crane with a lofty scrowl, "I should think I ought to

know Selby. I drank wine with him at--"

His remark was cut short by the arrival of the mail and the general

scramble that followed.

Upon this occasion the number of newspapers that fell to the hand of

each guest was much greater than usual, and it was soon discovered that

Miss Crabb's latest letter had been forwarded to a "syndicate" and was

appearing simultaneously in ninety odd different journals.

No piece of composition ever was more stunningly realistic or more

impartially, nay, abjectly truthful than was that letter. It gave

a minute account of the quarrel between Peck and Crane over their

attentions to Miss Moyne, the fight, Miss Crabb's fall, the subsequent

adventures and all the hotel gossip of every sort. It was personal to

the last degree, but it was not in the slightest libelous. No person

could say that any untruth had been told, or even that any tinge of

false-coloring had been laid upon the facts as recorded; and yet how

merciless!

Of course Miss Crabb's name did not appear with the article, save as

one of its subjects, and she saw at once that she had better guard her

secret.

That was a breeze which rustled through Hotel Helicon. Everybody was

supremely indignant; but there was no clue to the traitor who had

thus betrayed everybody's secrets. It would be absurd to suppose that

Miss Crabb was not suspected at once, on account of her constant and

superfluous show of note-making, still there were others who might be

guilty. Crane and Peck were indignant, the former especially ready to

resent to the death any allusion to the details of the duel. Miss Moyne

with the quick insight of a clever and gifted young woman, comprehended

the situation in its general terms and was vexed as much as amused. The

whole thing had to her mind the appearance of a melodramatic, broadly

sensational sketch, in which she had played the part of the innocent,

unconscious, but all-powerful heroine. Indeed the newspaper account

placed her in this unpleasant attitude before a million readers.

"A lucky affair for you, Miss Moyne," said Dufour to her, a few days

later, "you cannot over-reckon the boom it will give to your latest

book. You may expect a pretty round sum with your next copyright

statement."

He spoke with the voice and air of one who knew how to read the signs of

the day.

"But the ridiculous idea of having all this stuff about me going the

rounds of the newspapers!" she responded, her beautiful patrician face

showing just a hint of color.

"Don't care for it a moment," said Dufour, "it will not hurt you."

"The thought of having that hideous picture in all the patent inside

pages of the cheap press, with my name under it, _en toutes lettres_,

and--why it is horrible!" she went on, with trembling lips.

Dufour smiled upon her, as if indulgently, a curious, tender gleam in

his eyes.

"Wait," he said, "and don't allow it to trouble you. The world

discriminates pretty well, after all. It will not hurt you. It's a

mighty boom for you."

She looked at him with a sudden flash in her cheeks and eyes, and

exclaimed almost vehemently: "I will not permit it! They shall not

do it. I cannot bear to be treated as if--as if I were a theatrical

person--a variety actress!"

"My dear Miss Moyne," he hurriedly said, his own face showing a tinge of

embarrassment, "you are taking a wrong point of view, indeed you are.

Wait till you see the out-come." His tone was humble and apologetic as

he continued--"My opinion is that this very thing will quadruple the

sales of your book."

"I don't want them quadrupled," she cried, "just look at that front hair

and that nose!" She held up a newspaper for him to inspect a picture of

herself, a miserable, distorted thing. "It is absolutely disgraceful.

My dresses never fit like that, and who ever saw me with a man's collar

on!"

Tears were in her beautiful eyes.

Dufour consoled her as best he could, though he could not resist the

temptation to suggest that even a caricature of her face was sure to

have in it the fascination of genuine loveliness, a suggestion which was

phrased with consummate art and received with an appearance of innocence

that was beyond all art.

XII.

Summer on Mt. Boab was much like summer on any other mountain, and life

at Hotel Helicon was very like life at any other mountain hotel, save

that a certain specialization due to the influence of literature and art

was apparent in the present instance, giving to the house, the landscape

and the intercourse of the guests a peculiar tinge, so to say, of

self-consciousness and artificiality. Not that these authors, thus drawn

together by the grace of a man grown suddenly rich, were very different

from men and women of other lines in life, the real peculiarity sprang

out of the obligation by which every one felt bound to make the most, in

a professional way, of the situation and the environment. Perhaps there

was not a soul under the broad roof of Hotel Helicon, servants excepted,

that did not secrete in its substance the material for a novel, a poem,

or an essay which was to brim with the local life and flash with the

local color of the region of Mt. Boab. Yes, there appeared to be one

exception. Dufour constantly expressed a contempt for the mountaineers

and their country.

"To be sure," he conceded, "to be sure there is a demand for dialect

stories, and I suppose that they must be written; but for my part I

cannot see why we Americans must stultify ourselves in the eyes of all

the world by flooding our magazines, newspapers and books with yawp

instead of with a truly characteristic American literature of a high

order. There is some excuse for a quasi-negro literature, and even the

Creoles might have a niche set apart for them, but dialect, on the

whole, is growing to be a literary bore."

"But don't you think," said Miss Crabb, drawing her chin under, and

projecting her upper teeth to such a degree that anything like realistic

description would appear brutal, "don't you think, Mr. Dufour, that Mr.

Tolliver would make a great character in a mountain romance?"

"No. There is nothing great in a clown, as such," he promptly answered.

"If Tolliver is great he would be great without his jargon."

"Yes," she admitted, "but the picturesqueness, the color, the contrast,

you know, would be gone. Now Craddock--"

"Craddock is excellent, so long as there is but one Craddock, but when

there are some dozens of him it is different," said Dufour, "and it is

the process of multiplication that I object to. There's Cable, who is

no longer a genius of one species. The writers of Creole stories are

swarming by the score, and, poor old Uncle Remus! everybody writes negro

dialect now. Literary claim-jumpers are utterly conscienceless. The book

market will soon be utterly ruined."

Miss Crabb puffed out her lean sallow cheeks and sighed heavily.

"I had hoped," she said, "to get my novel on the market before this, but

I have not yet found a publisher to suit me."

She winced inwardly at this way of expressing the fact that every

publisher, high and low, far and near, had declined her MS. out of hand;

but she could not say the awful truth in its simpliest terms, while

speaking to one so prosperous as Dufour. She felt that she must at all

hazards preserve a reasonable show of literary independence. Crane came

to her aid.

"One publisher is just as good as another," he said almost savagely.

"They are all thieves. They report every book a failure, save those they

own outright, and yet they all get rich. I shall publish for myself my

next volume."

Dufour smiled grimly and turned away. It was rather monotonous, this

iteration and reiteration of so grave a charge against the moral

character of publishers, and this threat of Crane's to become his own

publisher was a bit of unconscious and therefore irresistible humor.

"It's too pathetic to be laughed at," Dufour thought, as he strolled

along to where Miss Moyne sat under a tree, "but that Kentuckian

actually thinks himself a poet!"

With all his good nature and kind heartedness, Dufour could be

prejudiced, and he drew the line at what he called the "prevailing

tendency toward boastful prevarication among Kentucky gentlemen."

As he walked away he heard Crane saying:

"George Dunkirk & Co. have stolen at least twenty thousand dollars in

royalties from me during the past three years."

It was the voice of Ferris that made interrogative response:

"Is Dunkirk your publisher?"

"Yes, or rather my robber."

"Glad of it, misery loves company."

Dufour half turned about and cast a quick glance at the speakers. He did

not say anything, however, but resumed his progress toward Miss Moyne,

who had just been joined by Mrs. Nancy Jones Black, a stoutish and

oldish woman very famous on account of having assumed much and done

little. Mrs. Nancy Jones Black was from Boston. She was president of the

Woman's Antiquarian Club, of the Ladies' Greek Association, of The

Sappho Patriotic Club, of the Newport Fashionable Near-sighted Club for

the study of Esoteric Transcendentalism, and it may not be catalogued

how many more societies and clubs. She was a great poet who had never

written any great poem, a great essayist whom publishers and editors

avoided, whom critics regarded as below mediocrity, but of whom

everybody stood in breathless awe, and she was an authority in many

literary and philosophical fields of which she really knew absolutely

nothing. She was a reformer and a person of influence who had made a

large number of her kinsfolk famous as poets and novelists without any

apparent relevancy between the fame and the literary work done. If your

name were Jones and you could trace out your relationship to Mrs. Nancy

Jones Black and could get Mrs. Nancy Jones Black interested in your

behalf, you could write four novels a year with great profit ever

afterward.

As Dufour approached he heard Miss Moyne say:

"I publish my poor little works with George Dunkirk & Co. and the firm

has been very kind to me. I feel great encouragement, but I don't see

how I can bear this horrible newspaper familiarity and vulgarity."

"My dear child," said Mrs. Nancy Jones Black, placing her plump,

motherly hand on the young woman's arm, "you must not appear to notice

it. Do as did my daughter Lois when they assailed her first little novel

with sugar-plum praise. Why, when it began to leak out that Lois was

the author of _A Sea-Side Symphony_ the poor girl was almost smothered

with praise. Of course I had to take the matter in hand and under my

advice Lois went abroad for six months. When she returned she found

herself famous."

"Talking shop?" inquired Dufour, accepting the offer of a place on the

bench beside Mrs. Black.

"Yes," said she, with a comprehensive wave of her hand, "I am taking

Miss Moyne under my wing, so to say, and am offering her the comfort of

my experience. She is a genius whom it doesn't spoil to praise. She's

going to be the next sensation in the East."

"I suggested as much to her," said Dufour. "She is already on a strong

wave, but she must try and avoid being refractory, you know." He said

this in a straightforward, business way, but his voice was touched with

a certain sort of admirable tenderness.

Miss Moyne was looking out over the deep, hazy valley, her cheeks still

warm with the thought of that newspaper portrait with its shabby clothes

and towsled bangs. What was fame, bought at such a price! She bridled a

little, but did not turn her head as she said.

"I am not refractory, I am indignant, and I have a right to be. They

cannot justify the liberty they have taken, besides I will not accept

notoriety--I--"

"There, now, dear, that is what Lois said, and Milton John Jones,

my nephew, was at first bound that he wouldn't let Tom, my brother,

advertise him; but he soon saw his way clear, I assure you, and now he

publishes four serials at once. Be prudent, dear, be prudent."

"But the idea of picturing me with great barbaric rings in my ears and

with a corkscrew curl on each side and--"

Dufour interrupted her with a laugh almost hearty enough to be called a

guffaw, and Mrs. Black smiled indulgently as if at a clever child which

must be led, not driven.

"Being conscious that you really are stylish and beautiful, you needn't

care for the picture," said Dufour, in a tone of sturdy sincerity.

"There is nothing so effective as a foil," added Mrs. Black.

Miss Moyne arose and with her pretty chin slightly elevated walked away.

"How beautiful she is!" exclaimed Dufour, gazing after her, "and I am

delighted to know that you are taking an interest in her."

Mrs. Black smiled complacently, and with a bland sidewise glance at him,

remarked:

"She grows upon one."

"Yes," said he, with self-satisfied obtuseness, "yes, she is magnetic,

she is a genuine genius."

"Precisely, she stirs one's heart strangely," replied Mrs. Black.

"Yes, I have noted that; it's very remarkable."

"You should speak of it to her at the first opportunity."

Dufour started a little, flushed and finally laughed as one does who

discovers a bit of clever and harmless treachery.

"If I only dared," he presently said, with something very like fervor in

his tone. "If I only dared."

Mrs. Black looked at him a moment, as if measuring in her mind his

degree of worthiness, then with a wave of her hand she said:

"Never do you dare to dare. Mr. Crane stands right in your path."

Dufour leaped to his feet with the nimbleness and dangerous celerity of

a tiger.

"Crane!" he exclaimed with a world of contempt in his voice, "If he--"

but he stopped short and laughed at himself.

Mrs. Black looked at him with a patronizing expression in her eyes.

"Leave it to me," she said, in her most insinuating tone.

XIII.

Crane tried not to show the bitterness he felt as he saw his hope of

winning the favor of Miss Moyne fading rapidly out, but now and again a

cloud of irresistible melancholy fell upon him.

At such times it was his habit to lean upon the new fence that

circumscribed Hotel Helicon and dreamily smoke a cigar. He felt a blind

desire to assassinate somebody, if he could only know who. Of course not

Peck, for Peck, too, was disconsolate, but somebody, anybody who would

claim the place of a successful rival.

One morning while he stood thus regaling himself with his tobacco and

his misery, Tolliver rode up, on a handsome horse this time, and,

lifting his broad hat, bowed picturesquely and said:

"Good mornin,' Kyernel, how're ye this mornin'?"

"Good morning," growled Crane.

Tolliver looked off over the valley and up at the sky which was flecked

with tags of fleece-cloud.

"Hit look like hit mought rain in er day er two," he remarked.

"Yes, I don't know, quite likely," said Crane, gazing evasively in

another direction.

"Ever'body's well, I s'pose, up ther' at the tavern?" inquired Tolliver.

"I believe so," was the cold answer.

Tolliver leaned over the pommel of his saddle-tree and combed his

horse's mane with his sinewy fingers. Meantime the expression in his

face was one of exceeding embarrassment blent with cunning.

"Kyernel, c'u'd ye do a feller a leetle yerrent what's of importance?"

he asked with peculiar faltering.

"Do what?" inquired Crane lifting his eye-brows and turning the cigar in

his mouth.

"Jest a leetle frien'ly job o' kindness," said Tolliver, "jest ter

please ask thet young leddy--thet Miss Crabb 'at I fotch up yer on er

mule tother day, ye know; well, jest ax her for me ef I moughtn't come

in an' see 'er on pertic'lar an' pressin' business, ef ye please, sir."

By this time the mountaineer's embarrassment had become painfully

apparent. Any good judge of human nature could have seen at once that he

was almost overcome with the burden and worry of the matter in hand. His

cheeks were pale and his eyes appeared to be fading into utter vacancy

of expression. Crane told him that there was no need to be particularly

formal, that if he would go in and ask for Miss Crabb she would see him

in the parlor.

"But, Kyernel, hit's er private, sort er confidential confab 'at I must

hev wi' 'er, an'----"

"Oh, well, that's all right, you'll not be interrupted in the parlor."

"Air ye pine blank shore of it, Kyernel?"

"Certainly."

"Dead shore?"

"Quite, I assure you."

Crane had become interested in Tolliver's affair, whatever it might be.

He could not keep from sharing the man's evident intensity of mood, and

all the time he was wondering what the matter could be. Certainly no

common-place subject could so affect a man of iron like Tolliver. The

poet's lively imagination was all aglow over the mystery, but it could

not formulate any reasonable theory of explanation.

Miss Crabb appeared in the parlor promptly and met Tolliver with a

cordiality that, instead of reassuring him, threw him into another fit

of embarrassment from which he at first made no effort to recover. His

wide-brimmed hat, as he twirled it on his knees, quivered convulsively

in accord with the ague of excitement with which his whole frame was

shaking. He made certain soundless movements with his lips, as if

muttering to himself.

Miss Crabb at first did not notice his confusion, and went on talking

rapidly, reiterating thanks for the kindness he had shown her in her

recent mishap, and managing to put into her voice some tones that to him

sounded very tender and sweet.

"You don't know--you can't imagine, Mr. Tolliver, what I suffered during

that awful night," she said, turning her head to one side and drawing

her chin under until it almost disappeared in the lace at her throat.

"It was horrible."

Tolliver looked at her helplessly, his mouth open, his eyes dull and

sunken.

"How did you happen to discover me up there, anyway, Mr. Tolliver?" she

demanded, leaning toward him and laughing a little.

"The dog he treed ye, an' then I seed ye settin' up ther' er writin'

away," he managed to say, a wave of relief passing over his face at the

sound of his own voice.

"It was perfectly ridiculous, perfectly preposterous," she exclaimed,

"but I'm mighty thankful that I was not hurt."

"Yes, well ye mought be, Miss Crabb," he stammered out. "Wonder ye

wasn't scrunched inter pieces an' scattered all eround ther'."

She slipped out her book, took a pencil from over her ear and made a

note.

Tolliver eyed her dolefully. "How do you spell scrunched, Mr. Tolliver,

in your dialect?" she paused to inquire.

His jaw fell a little lower for a moment, then he made an effort:

"S--q--r--u--" he paused and shook his head, "S--q--k--no thet's not

hit--s--k--q--r--dorg ef I ken spell thet word--begging yer parding, hit

air 'tirely too hard for me." He settled so low in his chair that his

knees appeared almost as high as his head.

"All right," she cheerily exclaimed, "I can get it phonetically. It's

a new word. I don't think either Craddock or Johnson uses it, it's

valuable."

There was a silence during which Miss Crabb thoughtfully drummed on her

projecting front teeth with the end of her pencil.

Tolliver nerved himself and said:

"Miss Crabb I--I, well, ye know, I--that is, begging yer parding, but I

hev something' I want er say ter ye, ef ye please." He glanced furtively

around, as if suspecting that some person lay secreted among the

curtains of a bay window hard by. And indeed, Dufour was there, lightly

indulging in a morning nap, while the mountain breeze flowed over him.

He was in a deep bamboo chair behind those very curtains.

"Oh, certainly, certainly, Mr. Tolliver, go on, I shall be delighted,

charmed indeed, to hear what you have to say," Miss Crabb responded,

turning a fresh leaf of her note-book and putting on a hopeful look.

"I hope ye'll stick ter thet after I've done said it ter ye," he

proceeded to say, "but dorg on me ef I know how ter begin sayin' it."

"Oh, just go right on, it's all right; I assure you, Mr. Tolliver, I am

very anxious to hear."

"Mebbe ye air, I don't dispute yer word, but I feel mighty onery all the

same."

"Onery is a Western word," mused Miss Crabb, making a note.

"Proceed, Mr. Tolliver," she continued after a pause, "proceed, I am

listening with great interest."

"What I'm ergwine ter state ter ye mought mek ye mad, but hit can't be

holp, I jest hev ter say it--I air jest erbleeged ter say it."

His voice was husky and he was assuming a tragic air. Miss Crabb felt a

strange thrill creep throughout her frame as a sudden suspicion seemed

to leap back and forth between her heart and her brain.

"No, I assure you that I could not be angry with you, Mr. Tolliver,

under any circumstances," she murmured, "you have been so very kind to

me."

"Hit air awful confusin' an' hit mek a feller feel smaller 'n a mouse

ter speak it right out, but then hit air no foolishness, hit air pine

blank business."

"Of course," said Miss Crabb pensively, "of course you feel some

embarrassment."

He hitched himself up in his chair and crossed his legs.

"Ef ye don't like w'at I say, w'y I won't blame ye a bit. I feel jest as

if I wer a doin' somethin' 'at I hadn't orter do, but my mammy she say I

must, an' that do everlastin'ly settle it."

"Yes, your mother's advice is always safe."

"Safe, I shed say so! Hit's mighty onsafe fer me not ter foller it, I

kin tell ye. She'd thump my old gourd fer me in ermazin' style ef I

didn't."

"Thump my old gourd," repeated Miss Crabb, making a note. "Go on, Mr.

Tolliver, please."

"S'pose I mought as well, seein' 'at it has ter be said." He paused,

faltered, and then proceeded: "Well, beggin' yer parding, Miss Crabb,

but ever sence ye wer' down ther' ter we all's cabin, hit's been a

worryin' my mammy and me, an' we hev' talked it all over an' over."

"Yes," sighed Miss Crabb.

"Hit's not the cost of them beads, Miss Crabb, they air not wo'th much,

but they was guv ter mammy by her aunt Mandy Ann Bobus, an' she feel

like she jest can't give 'em up."

Miss Crabb looked puzzled.

"Ef ye'll jest erblige me an' hand them beads over ter me, I'll never

say er wo'd ter nobody ner nothin."

"Mr. Tolliver, what in the world do you mean?" cried Miss Crabb, rising

and standing before him with a face that flamed with sudden anger.

"Ye mought er tuck 'em kinder accidentally, ye know," he suggested in a

conciliatory tone, rising also.

"Mr. Tolliver!" she almost screamed.

"Ther' now, be still, er ye'll let ever'body know all erbout it," he

half whispered. "Hit'd be disgraceful."

"Mr. Tolliver!"

"Sh-h-h! They'll hear ye!"

"Get right out of this room, you--"

Just then Dufour, who had been slowly aroused from his nap and who while

yet half asleep had overheard much of what had been said, stepped forth

from behind the curtains and stood looking from one to the other of the

excited actors in the little drama.

"What's up?" he, demanded bluntly.

"He's accusing me of stealing beads!" cried Miss Crabb. "He's insulting

me!"

"What!" exclaimed Dufour, glaring at Tolliver.

"I feel mighty onery a doin' it," said Tolliver, "but hit air pine blank

mighty suspicious, Kyernel, hit air for a fac'."

Dufour looked as if he hardly knew which he should do, laugh

boisterously, or fling Tolliver out of the window, but he quickly pulled

himself together and said calmly:

"You are wrong, sir, and you must apologize."

"Certingly, certingly," said Tolliver, "thet air jest what I air a

doin'. I beg parding er thousan' times fer sayin' what I hev, but,

Kyernel, hit air a Lor' a mighty's truth, all the same, le' me tell ye.

Them beads was ther' w'en she come, an' they was gone w'en she was gone,

an'--"

"Stop that! Take back those words or I'll throw you--"

Dufour took a step towards Tolliver, but stopped suddenly when the

latter drew a huge revolver with one hand and a long crooked bowie-knife

with the other and said:

"No yer don't, Kyernel, not by er good deal. Jest ye open yer bread-trap

ergain an' I'll jest clean up this ole shanty in erbout two minutes."

It may not be inferred how this bit of dramatic experience would have

ended had not a lean, wizzen-faced mountain lad rushed in just then with

a three-cornered piece of paper in his hand upon which was scrawled the

following message:

"I hev fown them beeds. They wus in mi terbacker bag."

Tolliver read this and wilted.

The boy was panting and almost exhausted. He had run all the way up the

mountain from the Tolliver cabin.

"Yer mammy say kum home," he gasped.

"Hit air jest as I 'spected," said Tolliver. "Mammy hev made a pine

blank eejit of me again." He handed the message to Dufour as he spoke.

His pistol and knife had disappeared.

A full explanation followed, and at the end of a half-hour Tolliver went

away crest-fallen but happy.

As for Miss Crabb she had made a number of valuable dialect notes.

Dufour promised not to let the rest of the guests know what had just

happened in the parlor.

XIV.

"Literature-making has not yet taken the rank of a profession, but of

late the world has modified its opinion as to the ability of literary

people to drive a close bargain, or to manage financial affairs with

success. Many women and some men have shown that it is possible for a

vivid imagination and a brilliant style in writing to go close along

with a practical judgment and a fair share of selfish shrewdness in

matters of bargain and sale. Still, after all, it remains true that a

strong majority of literary people are of the Micawber genus, with great

faith in what is to turn up, always nicely balancing themselves on the

extreme verge of expectancy and gazing over into the promise-land of

fame and fortune with pathetically hopeful, yet awfully hollow eyes.

Indeed there is no species of gambling more uncertain in its results or

more irresistibly fascinating to its victims than literary gambling.

Day after day, month after month, year after year, the deluded,

enthusiastic, ever defeated but never discouraged writer plies his pen,

besieges the publishers and editors, receives their rebuffs, rough or

smooth, takes back his declined manuscripts, tries it over and over,

sweats, fumes, execrates, coaxes, bullies, raves, re-writes, takes a new

_nom de plume_ and new courage, goes on and on to the end. Here or there

rumor goes that some fortunate literator has turned the right card and

has drawn a great prize; this rumor, never quite authentic, is enough to

re-invigorate all the fainting scribblers and to entice new victims

into the gilded casino of the Cadmean vice. The man who manipulates the

literary machine is the publisher, that invisible person who usually

grows rich upon the profits of unsuccessful books. He it is who

inveigles the infatuated young novelist, essayist, or poet, into the

beautiful bunco-den of the book business and there fastens him and holds

him as long as he will not squeal; but at the first note of remonstrance

he kicks him out and fills his place with a fresh victim. The literary

Micawber, however, does not despair. He may be a little silly from the

effect of the summersault to which the publisher's boot has treated him,

but after a distraught look about him he gets up, brushes the dust off

his seedy clothes and goes directly back into the den again with another

manuscript under his arm and with a feverish faith burning in his

deep-set eyes. What serene and beautiful courage, by the way, have the

literary women! Of course the monster who presides at the publisher's

desk cannot be as brutal to her as he is to men, but he manipulates her

copyright statements all the same, so that her book never passes the

line of fifteen hundred copies sold. How can we ever account for a woman

who has written forty-three novels under such circumstances and has

died, finally, a devout Christian and a staunch friend of her publisher?

Poor thing! up to the hour of her demise, white-haired, wrinkled,

over-worked, nervous and semi-paralytic, she nursed the rosy hope that

to-morrow, or at the very latest, the day after to-morrow, the reward

of all her self-devotion would come to her in the form of a liberal

copyright statement from her long-suffering and charitable publisher.

"Out in the West they have a disease called milk-sickness, an awful

malady, of which everybody stands in deadly terror, but which nobody

has ever seen. If you set out to find a case of milk-sickness it is

like following a _will-o'-the-wisp_, it is always just a little way

farther on, over in the next settlement; you never find it. The really

successful author in America is, like the milk-sickness, never visible,

except on the remote horizon. You hear much of him, but you never have

the pleasure of shaking his cunning right hand. The fact is, he is a

myth. On the other hand, however, the American cities are full of

successful publishers who have become millionaires upon the profits of

books which have starved their authors. Of course this appears to be a

paradox, but I suppose that it can be explained by the rule of profit

and loss. The author's loss is the publisher's profit."

The foregoing is, in substance, the opening part of an address delivered

by Ferris before the assembled guests of Hotel Helicon.

Mrs. Nancy Jones Black presided at the meeting; indeed she always

presided at meetings. On this occasion, which was informal and

impromptu, Ferris was in excellent mood for speaking, as he just had

been notified by a letter from Dunkirk & Co. that he was expected to pay

in advance for the plates of his new romance, _A Mysterious Missive_,

and that a personal check would not be accepted--a draft on New York

must be sent forthwith. Although Ferris was a thoroughly good fellow,

who cared nothing for money as money, this demand for a sum the half

of which he could not command if his life were at stake, hit him like

a bullet-stroke. A chance to talk off the soreness of the wound was

accepted with avidity. He felt guilty of a meanness, it is true, in thus

stirring up old troubles and opening afresh ancient hurts in the breasts

of his listening friends; but the relief to him was so great that he

could not forego it. "The American publisher," he went on, "proclaims

himself a fraud by demanding of the author a contract which places the

author's business wholly in the control of the publisher. I take it that

publishers are just as honest and just as dishonest, as any other class

of respectable men. You know and I know, that, as a rule, the man

who trusts his business entirely to others will, in the long run, be

robbed. Administrators of estates rob the heirs, in two-thirds of the

instances, as every probate lawyer well knows. Every merchant has to

treat his clerks and salesmen as if they were thieves, or if he do not

they will become thieves. The government has to appoint bank examiners

to watch the bankers, and yet they steal. The Indian agents steal from

the government. Senators steal, aldermen steal, Wall street men steal

from one another and from everybody else. Canada is overflowing with men

who have betrayed and robbed those who trusted their business with them.

Even clergymen (that poorly paid and much abused class) now and again

fall before the temptation offered by the demon of manipulated returns

of trust funds. The fact is, one may feel perfectly safe in saying that

in regard to all the professions, trades, and occupations, there is

absolutely no safety in trusting one's affairs wholly in the hands of

another. (Great applause). Even your milkman waters the milk and the

dairyman sells you butter that never was in a churn. If you neglect to

keep a pass-book your grocer runs up the bill to--(a great rustle, and

some excited whispering) up to something enormous. Of course it is not

everybody that is dishonest, but experience shows that if a man has

the temptation to defraud his customers constantly before him, with

absolutely no need to fear detection, he will soon reason himself into

believing it his right to have the lion's share of all that goes into

his hands.

"Now isn't it strange, in view of the premises, that nobody ever heard

of such a thing as a publisher being convicted of making false returns?

Is it possible that the business of book-publishing is so pure and good

of itself that it attracts to it none but perfect men? (Great applause).

Publishers do fail financially once in a while, but their books of

accounts invariably show that just eleven hundred and forty copies of

each copyrighted book on their lists have been sold to date, no more, no

less. (Suppressed applause). Nobody ever saw cleaner or better balanced

books of accounts than those kept by the publishers. They foot up

correctly to a cent. Indeed it would be a very strange thing if a

man couldn't make books balance under such circumstances! (Prolonged

hand-clapping). I am rather poor at double entry, but I fancy I could

make a credit of eleven hundred and forty copies sold, so as to have it

show up all right. (Cheers). I must not lose my head in speaking on this

subject, for I cannot permit you to misunderstand my motive. So long as

authors submit to the per centum method of publication, so long they

will be the prey of the publishers. The only method by which justice

can be assured to both author and publisher is the cash-sale method. If

every author in America would refuse to let his manuscript go out of

hand before he had received the cash value for it, the trade would soon

adjust itself properly. In that case the author's reputation would be

his own property. So soon as he had made an audience his manuscripts

would command a certain price. If one publisher would not pay enough

for it another would. As the method now is, it makes little difference

whether the author have a reputation or not. Indeed most publishers

prefer to publish the novels, for example, of clever tyros, because

these fledglings are so proud of seeing themselves in print that

they never think of questioning copyright statements. Eleven hundred

and forty copies usually will delight them almost beyond endurance.

(Laughter and applause). Go look at the book lists of the publishers and

you will feel the truth of what I have said.

"Now let me ask you if you can give, or if any publisher can give

one solitary honest reason why the publishing business should not be

put upon a cash basis--a manuscript for so much money? The publisher

controls his own business, he knows every nook and corner, every

leaf and every line of it, and he should be able to say, just as the

corn-merchant does, I will give you so much, to which the author would

say: I will take it, or I will not take it. But what is the good of

standing here and arguing? You believe every word I speak, but you don't

expect to profit by it. You will go on gambling at the publisher's faro

table just as long as he will smile and deal the cards. Some of these

days you will win, you think. Poor deluded wretches, go on and die in

the faith!"

No sooner had Ferris ended than Lucas the historian arose and expressed

grave doubts as to the propriety of the address. He was decidedly of the

opinion that authors could not afford to express themselves so freely

and, if he must say it, recklessly. How could Mr. Ferris substantiate by

proof any of the damaging allegations he had made against publishers of

high standing? What Mr. Ferris had said might be strictly true, but the

facts were certainly, very hard to come at, he thought. He hoped that

Mr. Ferris's address would not be reported to the press (here he glanced

appealingly at Miss Crabb), at least not as the sense of the meeting.

Such a thing would, in his opinion, be liable to work a great harm to

all present. He felt sure that the publishers would resent the whole

thing as malicious and libellous.

Throughout the audience there was a nervous stirring, a looking at one

another askance. It was as if a cold wave had flowed over them. Nobody

had anything further to say, and it was a great relief when Dufour moved

an adjournment _sine die_, which was carried by a vote that suggested a

reserve of power. Every face in the audience, with the exception of

Dufour's, wore a half-guilty look, and everybody crept silently out of

the room.

XV.

It caused quite a commotion on Mt. Boab when Bartley Hubbard and Miss

Henrietta Stackpole, newspaper people from Boston, arrived at Hotel

Helicon. Miss Stackpole had just returned from Europe, and Bartley

Hubbard had run down from Boston for a week to get some points for his

paper. She had met Mr. Henry James on the continent and Hubbard had

dined with Mr. Howells just before leaving Boston.

No two persons in all the world would have been less welcome among the

guests at the hotel, just then, than were these professional reporters.

Of course everybody tried to give them a cordial greeting, but they were

classed along with Miss Crabb as dangerous characters whom it would be

folly to snub. Miss Moyne was in downright terror of them, associating

the thought of them with those ineffable pictures of herself which were

still appearing at second and third hand in the "patent insides" of the

country journals, but she was very good to them, and Miss Stackpole

at once attached herself to her unshakably. Hubbard did likewise with

little Mrs. Philpot, who amused him mightily with her strictures upon

analytical realism in fiction.

"I do think that Mr. Howells treated you most shamefully," she said to

him. "He had no right to represent you as a disagreeable person who was

cruel to his wife and who had no moral stamina."

Hubbard laughed as one who hears an absurd joke. "Oh, Howells and I have

an understanding. We are really great friends," he said. "I sat to him

for my portrait and I really think he flattered me. I managed to keep

him from seeing some of my ugliest lines."

"Now you are not quite sincere," said Mrs. Philpot, glancing over him

from head to foot. "You are not so bad as he made you out to be. It's

one of Mr. Howells's hobbies to represent men as rather flabby

nonentities and women as invalids or dolls."

"He's got the men down fine," replied Hubbard, "but I guess he is rather

light on women. You will admit, however, that he dissects feminine

meanness and inconsequence with a deft turn."

"He makes fun of women," said Mrs. Philpot, a little testily, "he

caricatures them, wreaks his humor on them; but you know very well that

he misrepresents them even in his most serious and _quasi_ truthful

moods."

Hubbard laughed, and there was something essentially vulgar in the notes

of the laugh. Mrs. Philpot admitted this mentally, and she found herself

shrinking from his steadfast but almost conscienceless eyes.

"I imagine I shouldn't be as bad a husband as he did me into, but--"

Mrs. Philpot interrupted him with a start and a little cry.

"Dear me! and aren't you married?" she asked in exclamatory deprecation

of what his words had implied.

He laughed again very coarsely and looked at her with eyes that almost

lured. "Married!" he exclaimed, "do I look like a marrying man? A

newspaper man can't afford to marry."

"How strange," reflected Mrs. Philpot, "how funny, and Mr. Howells calls

himself a realist!"

"Realist!" laughed Hubbard, "why he does not know enough about the

actual world to be competent to purchase a family horse. He's a capital

fellow, good and true and kind-hearted, but what does he know about

affairs? He doesn't even know how to flatter women!"

"How absurd!" exclaimed little Mrs. Philpot, but Hubbard could not

be sure for the life of him just what she meant the expression to

characterize.

"And you like Mr. Howells?" she inquired.

"Like him! everybody likes him," he cordially said.

"Well, you are quite different from Miss Crabb. _She_ hates Maurice

Thompson for putting _her_ into a story."

"Oh, well," said Hubbard, indifferently, "women are not like men. They

take life more seriously. If Thompson had had more experience he would

not have tampered with a newspaper woman. He's got the whole crew down

on him. Miss Stackpole hates him almost as fiercely as she hates Henry

James."

"I don't blame her," exclaimed Mrs. Philpot, "it's mean and contemptible

for men to caricature women."

"Oh, I don't know," yawned Hubbard, "it all goes in a lifetime."

At this opportune moment Miss Crabb and Miss Stackpole joined them,

coming arm in arm. Miss Crabb looking all the more sallow and slender in

comparison with the plump, well-fed appearance of her companion.

"May I introduce you to Miss Crabb of the Ringville _Star_, Mr.

Hubbard," Miss Stackpole asked, in a high but by no means rich voice,

as she fastened her steady, button-like eyes on Mrs. Philpot.

Hubbard arose lazily and went through the process of introduction

perfunctorily, giving Miss Crabb a sweeping but indifferent glance.

"There's an impromptu pedestrian excursion on hand," said Miss

Stackpole, "and I feel bound to go. One of the gentlemen has discovered

a hermit's cabin down a ravine near here, and he offers to personally

conduct a party to it. You will go, Mr. Hubbard?"

"Go! I should remark that I will. You don't get a scoop of that item, I

assure you."

Miss Stackpole was a plump and rather pretty young woman, fairly well

dressed in drab drapery. She stood firmly on her feet and had an air

of self-reliance and self-control in strong contrast with the fussy,

nervous manner of Miss Crabb.

Mrs. Philpot surveyed the two young women with that comprehensive,

critical glance which takes in everything that is visible, and quickly

enough she made up her comparison and estimate of them.

She decided that Miss Crabb had no style, no _savoir faire_, no repose;

but then Miss Stackpole was forward, almost impudent in appearance, and

her greater ease of manner was really the ease that comes of a long

training in intrusiveness, and of rubbing against an older civilization.

She felt quite distinctly the decided dash of vulgarity in the three

newspaper representatives before her, and she could not help suspecting

that it would not be safe to judge the press reporters by these

examples.

The question arose in her mind whether after all Howells and Henry James

and Maurice Thompson had acted fairly in taking these as representative

newspaper people.

She had met a great many newspaper people and had learned to like them

as a class; she had many good and helpful friends among them.

Unconsciously she was showing to all present that she was dissecting the

three reporters. Her unfavorable opinion of them slowly took expression

in her tell-tale face. Not that she wholly disliked or distrusted them;

she really pitied them. How could they be content to live such a life,

dependent upon what they could make by meddling, so to speak?

Then too, she felt a vague shame, a chagrin, a regret that real people

must be put into works of fiction with all the seamy side of their

natures turned out to the world's eye.

"We're in for it," exclaimed Hubbard, "Mrs. Philpot is making a study of

us as a group. See the dreaming look in her eyes!"

"Oh, no! she never studies anybody or anything," said Miss Crabb. "Poor

little woman, real life is a constant puzzle to her, and she makes not

the slightest effort to understand it."

Hubbard and Miss Stackpole glanced curiously at each other and then at

Miss Crabb. Evidently their thought was a common one.

XVI.

The pedestrian excursion spoken of by Miss Stackpole promised to be an

enjoyable affair to those of the Helicon guests who could venture upon

it. A writer of oddly entertaining and preposterously impossible short

stories, John B. Cattleton, had been mousing among the ravines of Mt.

Boab, and had stumbled upon what he described as a "very obscure little

cabin, jammed under a cliff in an angle of the cañon and right over a

bright stream of cold, pure spring-water. It's a miserably picturesque

and forlornly prepossessing place," he went on in his droll way, "where

all sorts of engaging ghosts and entertaining ogres might be supposed

to congregate at midnight. I didn't go quite down to it, but I was near

enough to it to make out its main features, and I saw the queerest being

imaginable poking around the premises. A veritable hermit, I should

call him, as old as the rocks themselves. His dress was absurdly

old-fashioned, a caricature of the uniform of our soldier sires of

revolutionary renown. A long spike-tailed blue coat with notable brass

buttons, a triangular hat somewhat bell-crowned and tow or cotton

trousers. Shirt? Vest? Yes, if I remember well they were of copperas

homespun. His hair and beard were white, fine and thin, hanging in

tags and wisps as fluffy as lint. I sat upon a rock in the shadow of a

cedar tree and watched his queer manoeuvres for a good while. All his

movements were furtive and peculiar, like those of a shy, wild beast."

"It's the Prophet of the Smoky Mountain," said Miss Crabb in an earnest

stage whisper. "He's Craddock's material, we can't touch him."

"Touch him! I'll interview him on dialect in politics," said Hubbard,

"and get his views on sex in genius."

"I should like a sketch of his life. There must be a human interest to

serve as straw for my brick," remarked Miss Stackpole. "The motive that

induced him to become a hermit, and all that."

Miss Crabb dared not confess that she desired a sketch of the old man

for the newspaper syndicate, so she merely drummed on her front teeth

with her pencil.

Dufour joined the pedestrian party with great enthusiasm, having dressed

himself for the occasion in a pair of tennis trousers, a blue flannel

shirt, a loose jacket and a shooting cap.

His shoes were genuine alpine foot-gear with short spikes in their heels

and soles.

"Lead on Cattleton," he cried jovially, "and let our motto be, 'On to

the hut of Friar Tuck'!"

"Good," answered Cattleton in like spirit, "and you shall be my

lieutenant, come, walk beside me."

"Thank you, from the bottom of my heart," replied Dufour, "but I cannot

accept. I have contracted to be Miss Moyne's servant instead."

That was a gay procession filing away from Hotel Helicon through the

thin forest that fringed one shoulder of stately Mt. Boab. Cattleton

led the column, flinging back from time to time his odd sayings and

preposterous conceits.

The day was delightfully cool with a steady wind running over the

mountain and eddying in the sheltered coves where the ferns were thick

and tall. In the sky were a few pale clouds slowly vanishing, whilst

some broad-pinioned buzzards wheeled round and round above the

blue-green abyss of the valley. There were sounds of a vague, dreamy

sort abroad in the woods, like the whisperings and laughter of legions

of invisible beings. Everybody felt exhilarated and buoyant, tramping

gaily away to the hut of the hermit.

At a certain point Cattleton commanded a halt, and pointing out the

entrance to the ravine, said:

"Now, good friends, we must have perfect silence during the descent,

or our visit will be all in vain. Furthermore, the attraction of

gravitation demands that, in going down, we must preserve our

uprightness, else our progress may be facilitated to an alarming degree,

and our advent at the hut be far from becomingly dignified."

Like a snake, flecked with touches of gay color, the procession crawled

down the ravine, the way becoming steeper and more tortuous at every

step. Thicker and thicker and thicker grew the trees, saving where the

rock broke forth from the soil, and closer drew the zig-zags of the

barely possible route. Cattleton silenced every voice and rebuked every

person who showed signs of weakening.

"It's just a few steps farther," he whispered back from his advanced

position, "don't make the least sound."

But the ravine proved, upon this second descent much more difficult and

dangerous than it had appeared to Cattleton at first, and it was with

the most heroic exertions that he finally led the party down to the

point whence he had viewed the cabin. By this time the column was

pressing upon him and he could not stop. Down he went, faster and

faster, barely able to keep his feet, now sliding, now clutching a tree

or rock, with the breathless and excited line of followers gathering

dangerous momentum behind him.

It was too late now to command silence or to control the company in any

way. An avalanche of little stones, loosened by scrambling feet, swept

past him and went leaping on down below. He heard Miss Moyne utter a

little scream of terror that mingled with many exclamations from both

men and women, and then he lost his feet and began to slide. Down he

sped and down sped the party after him, till in a cataract of mightily

frightened, but unharmed men and women, they all went over a little

precipice and landed in a scattered heap on a great bed of oak leaves

that the winds had drifted against the rock.

A few moments of strange silence followed, then everybody sprang up,

disheveled and red-faced, to look around and see what was the matter.

They found themselves close to the long, low cabin, from under which

flowed a stream of water. A little column of smoke was wandering out

of a curious clay chimney. Beside the low door-way stood a long, deep

trough filled with water in which a metal pipe was coiled fantastically.

Two earthen jugs with cob stoppers sat hard by. A sourish smell

assaulted their sense and a faint spirituous flavor burdened the air.

Cattleton, who was first upon his feet, shook himself together and

drolly remarked:

"We have arrived in good order, let's interview the----"

Just then rushed forth from the door the old man of the place, who

halted outside and snatched from its rack on the wall a long tin horn,

which he proceeded to blow vigorously, the echoes prowling through the

woods and over the foot-hills and scampering far away up and down the

valley.

Not a soul present ever could forget that sketch, the old man with his

shrunken legs bent and wide apart, his arms akimbo as he leaned far

back and held up that wailing, howling, bellowing horn, and his long

coat-tail almost touching the ground, whilst his fantastic hat quivered

in unison with the strain he was blowing. How his shriveled cheeks

puffed out, and how his eyes appeared to be starting from their bony

sockets!

"That is what I call a fitting reception," said Cattleton, gazing at the

trumpeter.

"See here," exclaimed Crane with evident excitement, "I smell whisky!

This----"

"Hyer! what d'ye mean hyer, you all a comin' down hyer?" broke forth a

wrathful voice, and Wesley Tolliver rushed with melodramatic fierceness

upon the scene.

"Oh! I--I--wa--want to g--go home!" cried little Mrs. Philpot, clutching

Bartley Hubbard's arm.

"So do I," said he with phlegmatic cleverness. "I should like to see my

mother. I'm feeling a little lonely and----"

"What upon yearth do this yer mean, anyhow?" thundered Tolliver. "Who

invited you all down yer, tell me thet, will ye?"

"Oh, Mr. Tolliver, Mr. Tolliver!" exclaimed Miss Crabb, rushing upon

him excitedly, "I'm _so_ glad you are here!"

"Well, I'll ber dorged!" he ejaculated, "you down hyer again! Well, I

never seed the like afore in all my born days."

He gazed at first one and then another of the party, and a sudden light

flashed into his face.

"Well I'll ber dorged ef ther whole kepoodle of 'em hain't done jest

gone and tumbled off'n the mounting an' jest rolled down hyer!"

"You're a very accurate reasoner, my friend," said Cattleton, trying to

get his hat into shape. "I think we touched at two or three points as we

came down, however."

About this time four or five more mountaineers appeared bearing guns and

looking savage.

"Bandits," said Miss Stackpole with a shudder.

"Moonshiners," muttered Crane.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Mr. Hubbard, do t--t--take m--me home!" wailed

Mrs. Philpot.

"I should be delighted," said Hubbard, his voice concealing the

uneasiness he felt. "Indeed I should."

More men appeared and at the same time a roll of thunder tumbled across

the darkening sky. A sudden mountain storm had arisen.

The pedestrians found themselves surrounded by a line of grim and silent

men who appeared to be waiting for orders from Tolliver.

A few large drops of rain come slanting down from the advancing fringe

of the sable-cloud, and again the thunder bounded across the heavens.

"I guess you'd better invite us in," suggested Cattleton, turning to the

old man, who stood leaning on his tin horn. "The ladies will get wet."

"I say, Cattleton," called out Bartley Hubbard, "if a fellow only had

a little supply of Stockton's negative gravity he could ameliorate his

condition, don't you think?"

"Yes, I'd like to fall up hill just now. The excitement would be

refreshing."

There came a spiteful dash of rain and a flurry of wind.

"You'ns had better go inter the still-house," said Tolliver. "Hit air

goin' ter rain yearlin' calves. Go right erlong in, ye sha'n't be hurt."

Another gush of rain enforced the invitation, and they all scrambled

into the cabin pell-mell, glad of the relief from a strain that had

become almost unbearable to some of them, but they stared at each other

when they found the door closed and securely locked on the outside.

"Prisoners!" cried some one whose voice was drowned by a deafening crash

of thunder and a mighty flood of rain that threatened to crush in the

rickety roof of the house.

"The treacherous villain!" exclaimed Dufour, speaking of Tolliver and

holding Miss Moyne's hand. The poor girl was so frightened that it was a

comfort to her to have her hand held.

"How grand, how noble it is in Mr. Tolliver and his friends," said Miss

Crabb, "to stand out there in the rain and let us have the shelter! I

never saw a more virile and thoroughly unselfish man than he is. He is

one of Nature's unshorn heroes, a man of the ancient god-like race."

Mrs. Nancy Jones Black gave the young woman a look of profound contempt.

Then a crash of thunder, wind, and rain scattered everybody's thoughts.

XVII.

The storm was wild enough, but of short duration, and it came to its end

as suddenly as it had begun. As the black cloud departed from the sky,

the darkness, which had been almost a solid inside the still-house, was

pierced by certain lines of mild light coming through various chinks in

the walls and roof. Our friends examined one another curiously, as if to

be sure that it was not all a dream.

Cattleton found himself face to face with a demure-looking young man,

whom he at once recognized as Harry Punner, a writer of delicious verses

and editor of a rollicking humorous journal at New York.

"Hello, Hal! you here?" he cried. "Well how does it strike your funny

bone? It insists upon appearing serious to me."

"I'm smothering for a whiff of fresh air," said Punner, in a very

matter-of-fact tone. "Can't we raise a window or something?"

"The only window visible to the naked eye," said Cattleton, "is already

raised higher than I can reach," and he pointed to a square hole in the

wall about seven and a-half feet above the ground and very near the

roof.

Crane went about in the room remarking that the aroma floating in the

air was the bouquet of the very purest and richest copper-distilled corn

whisky and that if he could find it he was quite sure that a sip of it

would prove very refreshing under the peculiar circumstances of the

case, an observation which called forth from Mrs. Nancy Jones Black a

withering temperance reprimand.

"As the presiding officer of the _Woman's Prohibition Promulgation

Society_ I cannot let such a remark pass without condemning it. If

this really is a liquor establishment I desire to be let out of it

forthwith."

"So do I!" exclaimed little Mrs. Philpot with great vehemence. "Open the

door Mr. Hubbard, please."

Hubbard went to the door and finding that it was constructed to open

outwardly, gave it a shove with all his might. There was a short tussle

and he staggered back.

"Why don't you push it open?" fretfully exclaimed Mrs. Nancy Jones

Black.

"The gentlemen outside object, for reasons not stated," was the rather

stolidly spoken answer.

Cattleton had taken off his hat and was going about through the company

soliciting handkerchiefs.

"Drop them in, drop them in," he urged, "I need all of them that I can

get."

He offered his hat as a contribution box as he spoke, and nearly

every-one gave a handkerchief, without in the least suspecting his

purpose.

When he had collected a round dozen, Cattleton crammed them all down in

the crown of his hat which he then put on his head.

"Now Hal," he said, addressing Punner, "give me a boost and I'll make an

observation through that window."

The rain was now entirely ended and the wind had fallen still.

With Punner's help Cattleton got up to the window and poked out his

head.

"Git back ther'!" growled a vicious voice, and at the same time the dull

sound of a heavy blow was followed by the retreat of Cattleton from the

window to the floor in a great hurry.

Upon top of his hat was a deep trench made by a club.

"The handkerchiefs did their duty nobly," he remarked. "Let everybody

come forward and identify his property."

"What did you see?" asked Punner.

"A giant with an oak tree in his hand and murder in his eye," said

Cattleton, busily selecting and returning the handkerchiefs. "This

eleemosynary padding was all that saved me. The blow was aimed at my

divine intellect."

"See here," cried Peck, in great earnest, "this is no joking matter.

We're in the power of a set of mountain moonshiners, and may be

murdered in cold blood. We'd better do something."

Crane had prowled around until he had found a small jug of fragrant

mountain dew whisky, which he was proceeding to taste in true Kentucky

style, when a gaunt form rose in a corner of the room, and tottering

forward seized the jug and took it out of his hand.

"No ye don't, sonny, no ye don't! This yer mounting jew air not

ever'body's licker 'at wants it. Not by er half er mile at the littlest

calc'lation!"

Miss Crabb made a note. Crane gazed pathetically at the fantastic old

man before him, and brushed his handkerchief across his lips, as if from

habit, as he managed to say:

"I meant no undue liberty, I assure you. That whisky is----"

"Overpowerin'," interrupted the old man, taking a sip from the vessel.

"Yes, I don't blame ye fur a wantin' of it, but this yer licker air

mine."

"Up in Kentucky," said Crane, "we are proud to offer----"

"Kaintucky! did ye say ole Kaintuck? Air ye from ther', boy?"

The octogenarian leaned forward as he spoke and gazed at Crane with

steadfast, rheumy eyes.

Miss Henrietta Stackpole came forward to hear what was to follow, her

instinct telling her that a point of human interest was about to be

reached.

"Yes," said Crane, "I was born and reared on Lulbegrud creek."

"Lulbegrud!"

"Yes."

"How fur f'om Wright's mill?"

"Close by, at Kiddville," said Crane.

"Ye 'member Easton's Springs close by an' Pilot Knob away off in the

distance?"

"Very well, indeed, and Guoff's pond."

"Boy, what mought yer name be?"

"Crane."

"Crane!"

"Yes."

"Well, I'll ber dorg!"

The old man stood gazing and grinning at Crane for some moments, and

then added:

"What's yer pap's name?"

"Eliphas Crane."

"'Liphas Crane yore pap!"

"Yes."

"Child, I air yer pap's uncle."

"What!"

"I air Peter Job Crane."

"You!"

"Sartin es anything."

"Are you my father's uncle Peter?"

"I air yer pap's uncle Pete."

"How strange!"

Miss Stackpole did not permit a word, a look, or a shade of this

interview to escape her. She now turned to Bartley Hubbard and said:

"We Americans are the victims of heterogeneous consanguinity. Such an

incident as this could not happen in England. It will be a long time

before we can get rid of our ancestors."

"Yes," assented Hubbard, nonchalantly, "Yer pap's uncle certainly is a

large factor in American life."

"How many men did you see when you looked out?" Peck inquired,

addressing Cattleton.

"I saw only one, but he was a monster," was the ready reply. "It's no

use brooding over trying to escape by force. We're utterly helpless, and

that jolt on my head has rendered me unfit for diplomatic efforts."

"What do you suppose they will do with us?"

"They won't dare let us go."

"Why?"

"They'd be afraid that we would report their illicit distillery."

"Ah, I see."

The affair began to take on a very serious and gloomy aspect, and the

room was growing oppressively hot, owing to the presence of a a small

but energetic furnace that glowed under a sighing boiler. Outside, with

the clearing sky and refreshed air, there arose a clamor of bird-song in

the dripping trees. Under the floor the spring-stream gurgled sweetly.

"Ye 'member Abbott's still house on ole Lulbegrud?" said the old man,

pursuing his reminisences, after he had permitted his grand-nephew to

taste the "mounting jew," "an' Dan Rankin's ole bob-tail hoss?"

"Very well, indeed," responded Crane, "and Billy Pace's blackberry

fields where I picked berries in summer and chased rabbits in winter."

"Take er nother drop o' the jyful juice, boy, fur the mem'ry o' ole

Kaintuck!"

"Oh dear! but isn't it incomparably awful?" exclaimed Mrs. Nancy Jones

Black, gazing in horrified fascination upon the two Kentuckians, as they

bowed to each other and drank alternately from the little jug.

"Characteristic Southern scene not used by Craddock," murmured Miss

Crabb, making a whole page of a single note.

"Don't this yere liquor taste o' one thing an' smell o' another an' jes'

kinder git ter the lowest p'int o' yer appetite?" continued Crane's

great uncle Peter.

"Delicious beyond compare," responded the young man, drinking again, "it

is nectar of the gods."

Mrs. Nancy Jones Black groaned, but could not withdraw her eyes from the

scene.

"Good deal like ole times down to Abbott's still-house on Lulbegrud,

boy," the old man suggested, "ye don't forgit erbout Dan Rankin's mule

a-kickin' ole man Hornback's hat off?"

The poet laughed retrospectively and mopped his glowing face with

his handkerchief. The heat from the furnace and the stimulus of the

excellent beverage were causing him to feel the need of fresh air.

Indeed, everybody was beginning to pant. Miss Moyne was so overcome with

excitement and with the heat of the place, that she was ready to faint,

when the door was flung open and Tolliver appeared. A rush of sweet cool

air, flooding the room, revived her, just as she was sinking into

Dufour's arms.

XVIII.

Authors who have added the vice of elocution to the weakness of dialect

verse-making, are often at a loss for a sympathetic audience. Whilst

it is true that literary people are apt to bear with a good deal of

patience the mutually offered inflictions incident to meeting one

another, they draw the line at dialect recitations; and, as a rule,

stubbornly refuse to be bored with a fantastic rendition of "When

Johnny got spanked by a mule," or "Livery-stable Bob," or "Samantha's

Courtin'," or "Over the Ridge to the Pest-house," no matter how dear a

friend may offer the scourge. Circumstances alter cases, however, and

although neither Carleton, nor Riley, nor yet Burdette, nor Bill Nye

(those really irresistible and wholly delightful humorists), had come to

Hotel Helicon, there was a certain relief for those of the guests who

had not joined the luckless pedestrians, in hearing Miss Amelia Lotus

Nebeker recite a long poem written in New Jersey patois.

Miss Nebeker was very hard of hearing, almost stone deaf, indeed, which

affliction lent a pathetic effect even to her humor. She was rather

stout, decidedly short, and had a way of making wry faces with a view to

adding comicality to certain turns of her New Jersey phraseology, and

yet she was somewhat of a bore at times. Possibly she wished to read too

often and sometimes upon very unsuitable occasions. It was Mrs. Bridges

who once said that, if the minister at a funeral should ask some one to

say a few appropriate words, Miss Nebeker, if present, would immediately

clear her throat and begin reciting "A Jerseyman's Jewsharp." "And if

she once got started you'd never be able to stop her, for she's as deaf

as an adder."

It was during the rainstorm, while those of the guests who had not gone

to the hermit's hut with Cattleton, were in the cool and spacious parlor

of the hotel, that something was said about Charles Dickens reading from

his own works. Strangely enough, although the remark was uttered in

a low key and at some distance from Miss Nebeker, she responded at

once with an offer to give them a new rendering of _The Jerseyman's

Jewsharp_. Lucas, the historian, objected vigorously, but she insisted

upon interpreting his words and gestures as emphatic applause of her

proposition. She arose while he was saying:

"Oh now, that's too much, we're tired of the jangling of that old harp;

give us a rest!"

This unexpected and surprising slang from so grave and dignified

a man set everybody to laughing. Miss Nebeker bowed in smiling

acknowledgement of what appeared to her to be a flattering anticipation

of her humor, and taking her manuscript from some hiding-place in her

drapery, made a grimace and began to read. Mrs. Philpot's cat, in the

absence of its mistress, had taken up with the elocutionist and now came

to rub and purr around her feet while she recited. This was a small

matter, but in school or church or lecture-hall, small matters attract

attention. The fact that the cat now and again mewed plaintively set

some of the audience to smiling and even to laughing.

Such apparent approval of her new rendition thrilled Miss Nebeker to her

heart's core. Her voice deepened, her intonations caught the spirit of

her mood, and she read wildly well.

Every one who has even a smattering of the _patois_ current in New

Jersey, will understand how effective it might be made in the larynx

of a cunning elocutionist; and then whoever has had the delicious

experience of hearing a genuine Jerseyman play on the jewsharp will

naturally jump to a correct conclusion concerning the pathos of the

subject which Miss Nebeker had in hand. She felt its influence and threw

all her power into it. Heavy as she was, she arose on her tip-toes at

the turning point of the story and gesticulated vehemently.

The cat, taken by surprise, leaped aside a pace or two and glared in a

half-frightened way, with each separate hair on its tail set stiffly.

Of course there was more laughter which the reader took as applause.

"A brace of cats!" exclaimed the historian. "A brace of cats!"

Nobody knew what he meant, but the laughing increased, simply for the

reason that there was nothing to laugh at.

Discovering pretty soon that Miss Nebeker really meant no harm by her

manoeuvres, the cat went back to rub and purr at her feet. Then Miss

Nebeker let down her heel on the cat's tail, at the same time beginning

with the pathetic part of _The Jerseyman's Jewsharp_.

The unearthly squall that poor puss gave forth was wholly lost on the

excited elocutionist, but it quite upset the audience, who, not wishing

to appear rude, used their handkerchiefs freely.

Miss Nebeker paused to give full effect to a touching line.

The cat writhed and rolled and clawed the air and wailed like a lost

spirit in its vain endeavor to free its tail; but Miss Nebeker, all

unconscious of the situation, and seeing her hearers convulsed and

wiping tears from their faces, redoubled her elocutionary artifices and

poured incomparable feeling into her voice.

Suddenly the tortured and writhing animal uttered a scream of

blood-curdling agony and lunged at Miss Nebeker's ankles with tooth and

claw.

She was in the midst of the passage where the dying Jerseyman lifts

himself on his elbow and calls for his trusty Jewsharp:

"Gi' me my juice-harp, Sarah Ann----" she was saying, when of a sudden

she screamed louder than the cat and bounded into the air, sending her

manuscript in fluttering leaves all over the room.

The cat, with level tail and fiery eyes, sailed through the door-way

into the hall, and went as if possessed of a devil, bounding up the

stairway to Mrs. Philpot's room.

Congratulations were in order, and Lucas insisted upon bellowing in Miss

Nebeker's ear his appreciation of the powerful effect produced by the

last scene in the little drama.

"If our friends who are out in this rain are finding anything half as

entertaining," he thundered, "they needn't mind the drenching."

"But I'm bitten, I'm scratched, I'm hurt," she exclaimed.

Lucas suddenly realized the brutality of his attitude, and hastened to

rectify it by collecting the leaves of her manuscript and handing them

to her.

"I beg pardon," he said sincerely, "I hope you are not hurt much."

"Just like a cat," she cried, "always under somebody's feet! I do

despise them!"

With a burning face and trembling hands she swiftly rearranged the

manuscript and assuming the proper attitude asked the audience to be

seated again.

"I am bitten and scratched quite severely," she said, "and am suffering

great pain, but if you will resume your places I will begin over

again."

"Call that cat back, then, quick!" exclaimed Lucas, "it's the star

performer in the play."

She proceeded forthwith, setting out on a new journey through the

tortuous ways of the poem, and held up very well to the end. What she

called New Jersey patois was a trifle flat when put into verse and she

lacked the polished buffoonery of a successful dialect reader, wherefore

she failed to get along very successfully with her audience in the

absence of the cat; still the reading served to kill a good deal of

time, by a mangling process.

The storm was over long ago when she had finished, and the sun was

flooding the valley with golden splendor. Along the far away mountain

ridges some slanting wisps of whitish mist sailed slowly, like aerial

yachts riding dark blue billows. The foliage of the trees, lately dusky

and drooping, twinkled vividly with a green that was almost dazzling,

and the air was deliciously fresh and fragrant.

Everybody went out on the veranda for a turn and a deep breath.

The mail had arrived and by a mistake a bundle of letters bearing the

card of George Dunkirk & Co., and addressed to "George Dunkirk, Esq.,

Hotel Helicon, room 24," was handed to Lucas.

The historian gazed at the superscription, adjusted his glasses and

gazed again, and slowly the truth crept into his mind. There were ten or

fifteen of the letters. Evidently some of them, as Lucas's experience

suggested, had alien letters inclosed within their envelopes, and thus

forwarded by the mailing clerk of the firm had at last come to the

senior partner at room 24.

"Gaspard Dufour, indeed!" Lucas exclaimed inwardly. "George Dunkirk,

rather. This is a pretty kettle of fish!"

He sent the letters up to room 24, to await the return of their proper

recipient, and fell to reflecting upon the many, very many and very

insulting things that he and nearly all the rest of the hotel guests as

well had said in Dufour's hearing about publishers in general and about

George Dunkirk & Co., in particular. His face burned with the heat

of the retrospect, as he recalled such phrases as "sleek thief,"

"manipulator of copy-right statements," "Cadmean wolf" "ghoul of

literary grave-yards," and a hundred others, applied with utter

unrestraint and bandied around, while George Dunkirk was sitting by

listening to it all!

He called Ferris to him and imparted his discovery in a stage whisper.

"The dickens!" was all that gentleman could say, as the full text of his

address of the other evening rushed upon him.

"It is awkward, devilish awkward," remarked Lucas, wiping his glasses

and nervously readjusting them.

A few minutes later two men rode up to the hotel. One of them was a very

quiet-looking fellow who dryly stated that he was the high sheriff of

Mt. Boab county.

XIX.

Meantime down the ravine in the obscure little still-house our

pedestrians were held in durance vile by Tolliver and his obedient

moon-shiners.

It was a puzzling situation to all concerned. Far from wishing or

intending to harm his prisoners, Tolliver still could not see his way

clear to setting them at liberty. On the other hand he was clever

enough to perceive that to hold them very long would be sure to lead to

disaster, for their friends would institute a search and at the same

time telegraph an account of their disappearance all over the country.

"'Pears ter me like I've ketched bigger game 'an my trap'll hold," he

thought, as he stood in the door-way surveying his victims.

"What ye all a doin' a monkeyin' round' these yer premerses, anyhow?" he

demanded. "W'y c'udn't ye jest wait 'll I sent for ye ter kem yer?"

"It's a sort of surprise party, my dear sir," said Cattleton. "Don't you

see?"

"S'prise set o' meddlin' Yankees a foolin' roun' wher' they air not got

no business at," responded Tolliver, "that's w'at I calls it."

"Where's your pantry?" inquired Punner, "I'm as hungry as a wolf."

"Hongry, air ye? What'd ye 'spect ter git ter eat at er still-house,

anyhow? Hain't ye got no sense er tall? Air ye er plum blasted eejit?"

Tolliver made these inquiries in a voice and manner suggestive of

suppressed but utter wrath.

"Oh he's _always_ hungry, he would starve in a feed-store," exclaimed

Cattleton. "Don't pay the least attention to him, Mr. Tolliver. He's

incurably hungry."

"W'y ef the man's really hongry----" Tolliver began to say in a

sympathetic tone.

"Here," interrupted Hubbard gruffly, "let us out of this immediately,

can't you? The ladies can't bear this foul air much longer, it's

beastly."

"Mebbe hit air you 'at air a running this yer chebang," said Tolliver

with a scowl. "I'll jes' let ye out w'en I git ready an' not a minute

sooner, nother. So ye've hearn my tin horn."

Miss Stackpole and Miss Crabb made notes in amazing haste.

Hubbard shrugged his heavy shoulders and bit his lip. He was baffled.

"Do you think they'll kill us?" murmured Miss Moyne in Dufour's ear.

Dufour could not answer.

Crane and his "pap's uncle Pete" were still hobnobbing over the jug.

"Yer's a lookin' at ye, boy, an' a hopin' agin hope 'at ye may turn out

ter be es likely a man es yer pap," the old man was saying, preliminary

to another draught.

Crane was bowing with extreme politeness in acknowledgement of the

sentiment, and was saying:

"I am told that I look like my father----"

"Yes, ye do look a leetle like im," interrupted the old man with a leer

over the jug, "but l'me say at it air dern leetle, boy, dern leetle!"

Punner overhearing this reply, laughed uproariously. Crane appeared

oblivious to the whole force of the joke, however. He was simply waiting

for his turn at the jug.

"As I wer' a sayin'," resumed the old man, "yer's er hopin' agin' hope,

an' a lookin' at ye----"

"How utterly brutal and disgusting!" cried Mrs. Nancy Jones Black. "I

must leave here, I cannot bear it longer! This is nothing but a low,

vile dram-shop! Let me pass!"

She attempted to go through the doorway, but Tolliver interfered.

"Stay wher' ye air," he said, in a respectful but very stern tone. "Ye

can't git out o' yer jist yit."

"Dear me! Dear me!" wailed Mrs. Black, "what an outrage, what an insult!

Are you men?" she cried, turning upon the gentlemen near her, "and will

you brook this?"

"Give me your handkerchiefs again," said Cattleton, "and I will once

more poke out my head; 'tis all that I can do!"

"Shoot the fust head 'at comes out'n thet ther winder, Dave!" ordered

Tolliver, speaking to some one outside.

"I don't care for any handkerchiefs, thank you," said Cattleton, "I've

changed my mind."

Miss Moyne was holding Dufour's arm with a nervous clutch, her eyes were

full of tears, and she was trembling violently. He strove to quiet her

by telling her that there was no danger, that he would shield her, die

for her and all that; but Tolliver looked so grim and the situation was

so strange and threatening that she could not control herself.

"Goodness! but isn't this rich material," Miss Crabb soliloquized,

writing in her little red book with might and main. "Bret Harte never

discovered anything better."

Miss Henrietta Stackpole was too busy absorbing the human interest of

the interview between the two Cranes, to be more than indirectly aware

of anything else that was going on around her.

"Ye needn't be erfeard as ter bein' hurt, boy," said the old man, "not

es long es yer pap's uncle Pete air eroun' yer. Hit ain't often 'at I

meets up wi' kinfolks downyer, an' w'en I does meet up wi' 'em I treats

'em es er Southern gen'l'man orter treat his kinfolks."

"Precisely so," said Crane, taking another sip, "hospitality is a

crowning Southern virtue. When I go up to Louisville Henry Watterson and

I always have a good time."

"Spect ye do, boy, spect ye do. Louisville use ter be a roarin' good

place ter be at."

Tolliver, whose wits had been hard at work, now proposed what he called

"terms o' pay-roll, like what they hed in the war."

"Ef ye'll all take a oath an' swa' at ye'll never tell nothin' erbout

nothin," said he, "w'y I'll jest let ye off this yer time."

"That is fair enough," said Dufour, "we are not in the detective

service."

"Then," observed Tolliver, "ef I ken git the 'tention of this yer

meetin', I move 'at it air yerby considered swore 'at nothin' air ter be

said erbout nothin' at no time an' never. Do ye all swa'?"

"Yes!" rang out a chorus of voices.

"Hit air cyarried," said Tolliver, "an' the meetin' air dismissed, sigh

er die. Ye kin all go on erbout yer business."

The pedestrians filed out into the open air feeling greatly relieved.

Crane lingered to have a few more passages with his sociable and

hospitable grand-uncle. Indeed he remained until the rest of the party

had passed out of sight up the ravine and he did not reach the hotel

until far in the night, when he sang some songs under Miss Moyne's

window.

Taken altogether, the pedestrians felt that they had been quite

successful in their excursion.

Dufour was happiness itself. On the way back he had chosen for himself

and Miss Moyne a path which separated them from the others, giving him

an opportunity to say a great deal to her.

Now it is a part of our common stock of understanding that when a man

has an excellent and uninterrupted opportunity to say a great deal to

a beautiful young woman, he usually does not find himself able to say

much; still he rarely fails to make himself understood.

They both looked so self-consciously happy (when they arrived a little

later than the rest at Hotel Helicon) that suspicion would have been

aroused but for two startling and all-absorbing disclosures which drove

away every other thought.

One was the disclosure of the fact that Dufour was not Dufour, but

George Dunkirk, and the other was the disclosure of the fact that the

high sheriff of Mt. Boab County was in Hotel Helicon on important

official business.

Little Mrs. Philpot was the first to discover that the great publisher

really had not practiced any deception as to his name. Indeed her album

showed that the signature therein was, after all, George Dunkirk and not

Gaspard Dufour. The autograph was not very plain, it is true, but it was

decipherable and the mistake was due to her own bad reading.

If the sheriff had been out of the question the humiliation felt by

the authors, for whom Dunkirk was publisher and who had talked so

outrageously about him, would have crushed them into the dust; but the

sheriff was there in his most terrible form, and he forced himself

upon their consideration with his quiet but effective methods of legal

procedure.

XX.

"Gaslucky has been caught in a wheat corner at Chicago," Lucas

explained, "and has been squeezed to death."

"Dead!" cried Punner, "it's a great loss. We'll have to hold a meeting

and pass res----"

"We'll have to get out of this place in short order," said Lucas, "the

sheriff has levied an attachment on the hotel and all it contains."

"What!"

"How's that?"

"Do you mean that the house is to be shut up and we turned out?"

"Just that," said Lucas. "The sheriff has invoiced every thing, even the

provisions on hand. He says that we can't eat another bite here."

"And I'm starving even now!" exclaimed Punner. "I could eat most

anything. Let's walk round to Delmonico's, Cattleton."

"But really, what can we do?" demanded Ferris, dolefully enough.

"Go home, of course," said Cattleton.

Ferris looked blank and stood with his hands thrust in his pockets.

"I can't go home," he presently remarked.

"Why?"

"I haven't money enough to pay my way."

"By George! neither have I!" exclaimed Cattleton with a start.

"That is precisely my fix," said Lucas gravely.

"You echo my predicament," said Peck.

"My salary is suspended during my absence," said Punner, with his eyes

bent on the floor.

Little Mrs. Philpot was speechless for a time as the force of the

situation broke upon her.

"Squeezed in a wheat corner?" inquired Miss Stackpole, "what do you mean

by that?"

"I mean that Gaslucky got sheared in the big deal the other day at

Chicago," Lucas explained.

"Got sheared?"

"Yes, the bulls sat down on him."

"Oh, you mean a speculation--a--"

"Yes, Gaslucky was in for all he was worth, and they run it down on

him and flattened him. A gas-man's no business in wheat, especially in

Chicago; they spread him out, just as the sheriffs proceedings have

flattened all our hopes for the present."

"It's just outrageous!" cried little Mrs. Philpot, finding her voice.

"He should have notified us, so that--"

"They didn't notify him, I guess," said Cattleton.

"No, he found it out afterwards," remarked Lucas, glancing gloomily

toward where Dunkirk and Miss Moyne stood, apparently in light and

pleasant conversation.

Viewed in any light the predicament was a peculiar and distressing

one to the guests of Hotel Helicon. The sheriff, a rather ignorant,

but very stubborn and determined man, held executions and writs of

attachment sued out by Gaslucky creditors, which he had proceeded to

levy on the hotel and on all the personalty visible in it belonging to

the proprietor.

"'Course," said he, "hit'll be poorty hard on you'ns, but I can't help

it, I've got ter do my juty, let it hurt whoever it will. Not er thing

kin ye tech at's in this yer tavern, 'ceptin' what's your'n, that air's

jest how it air. So now mind w'at yer a doin'."

The servants were idle, the dining-room closed, the kitchen and pantries

locked up. Never was there a more doleful set of people. Mrs. Nancy

Jones Black thought of playing a piece of sacred music, but she found

the grand piano locked, with its key deep in the sheriff's pocket.

The situation was made doubly disagreeable when at last the officer

informed the guests that they would have to vacate their rooms

forthwith, as he should proceed at once to close up the building.

"Heavens, man, are you going to turn us out into the woods?" demanded

Peck.

"Woods er no woods," he replied, "ye'll hev ter git out'n yer, right

off."

"But the ladies, Mr. Sheriff," suggested Punner, "no Southern gentleman

can turn a lady out of doors."

The officer actually colored with the force of the insinuation. He stood

silent for some time with his eyes fixed on the floor. Presently he

looked up and said:

"The weeming kin stay till mornin'."

"Well they must have something to eat," said Punner. "They can't

starve."

"Thet's so," the sheriff admitted, "they kin hev a bite er so."

"And we----"

"You men folks cayn't hev a dorg gone mouthful, so shet up!"

"Well," observed Cattleton, dryly, "it appears the odds is the

difference between falling into the hands of moonshiners and coming

under the influence of a lawful sheriff."

"I know a little law," interposed Bartley Hubbard with a sullen

emphasis, "and I know that this sheriff has no right to tumble us out of

doors, and for my part----"

"Fur yer part," said the sheriff coolly, "fur yer part, Mister, ef ye

fool erlong o' me I'll crack yer gourd fur ye."

"You'll do what?"

"I'll stave in yer piggin."

"I don't understand."

"W'y, blame yer ignorant hide, wha' wer' ye borned and fotch up? I'll

jest knock the everlastin' head off'n ye, _thet's_ 'zac'ly w'at I says.

Mebbe ye don't understan' _thet_?"

"Yes," said Hubbard, visibly shrinking into himself, "I begin to suspect

your meaning."

Miss Crabb was taking notes with enthusiastic rapidity.

Dunkirk called the sheriff to him and a long conference was held between

them, the result of which was presently announced.

"I heve thort it over," said the quiet officer of the law, "an' es hit

appear thet w'at grub air on han' an' done cooked might spile afore it

c'u'd be sold, therefore I proclamate an' say at you'ns kin stay yer

tell termorrer an' eat w'at's cooked, but tech nothin' else."

Cattleton and Punner applauded loudly. To everybody the announcement was

a reprieve of no small moment, and a sigh of relief rustled through the

groups of troubled guests. Those who had been down the ravine were very

tired and hungry; the thought of a cold luncheon to them was the vision

of a feast.

Dunkirk had a basket of wine brought down from his room and he made the

sheriff sit beside him at the table.

"We may as well make the most of our last evening together," he said,

glancing jovially around.

"We shall have to walk down the mountain in the morning, I suppose,"

remarked Bartley Hubbard.

"That's jest w'at's the matter," observed the sheriff.

"But the ladies, my dear sir, the ladies----" began Punner.

"The weeming, they'll hev kinveyances, young man, so ye kin jest shet up

ef ye please," the officer interrupted, with a good-natured wink and a

knowing wag of his head.

A disinterested observer would have noted readily enough that the feast

was far from a banquet. There was Ferris, for instance, munching a

biscuit and sipping his wine and pretending to enjoy Punner's sallies

and Cattleton's drolleries, while down in his heart lay the leaden

thought, the hideous knowledge of an empty pocket. Indeed the reflection

was a common one, weighting down almost every breast at the board.

One little incident did make even Ferris forget himself for a moment or

two, it was when deaf Miss Nebeker misinterpreted some remark made by

Hubbard and arose with a view to reciting _The Jerseyman's Jewsharp_,

with a new variation, "Oh, Jerseyman Joe had a Jewsharp of gold," she

began, in her most melodious drawl. She could not hear the protesting

voices of her friends and she misinterpreted the stare of the sheriff.

"For the good heaven's sake, Hubbard," cried Lucas, "do use your

influence; quick, please, or I shall collapse."

Bartley Hubbard took hold of her dress and gently pulled her down into

her chair.

"The sheriff objects!" he yelled in her ear.

"After dinner?" she resignedly inquired, "well, then after dinner, in

the parlor."

When the feast had come to the crumbs, Dunkirk arose and said:

"We all have had a good time at the Hotel Helicon, but our sojourn upon

the heights of Mt. Boab has been cut short by a certain chain of mishaps

over which we have had no control, and to-morrow we go away, doubtless

forever. I feel like saying that I harbor no unpleasant recollections

of the days we have spent together."

Cattleton sprung to his feet to move a vote of thanks "to the

public-spirited and benevolent man who built this magnificent hotel and

threw open its doors to us."

It was carried.

"Now then," said Lucas, adjusting his glasses and speaking in his

gravest chest-tones, "I move that it be taken as the sense of this

assembly, that it is our duty to draw upon our publisher for money

enough to take us home."

The response was overwhelming.

Dunkirk felt the true state of affairs. He arose, his broad face

wreathed with genial smiles, and said:

"To the certain knowledge of your unhappy publisher your accounts are

already overdrawn, but in view of the rich material you have been

gathering of late, your publisher will honor you draughts to the limit

of your expenses home."

Never did happier people go to bed. The last sleep in Hotel Helicon

proved to be the sweetest.

Far in the night, it is true, some one sang loudly but plaintively under

Miss Moyne's window until the sheriff awoke and sallied forth to end

the serenade with some remarks about "cracking that eejit's gourd;" but

there was no disturbance, the sounds blending sweetly with the dreams of

the slumberers. They all knew that it was Crane, poor fellow, who had

finally torn himself away from his father's fascinating uncle.

XXI.

The retreat from Hotel Helicon was picturesque in the extreme. There had

been much difficulty in finding vehicles to take the retiring guests

down the mountain to the railway station, but Tolliver had come to the

rescue with a mule, a horse, a cart, and an ox. These, when added to

the rather incongruous collection of wagons and carts from every other

available source, barely sufficed. Tolliver led the mule with Ferris on

its back, while Miss Crabb and Miss Stackpole occupied the ox-cart, the

former acting as driver.

"Good-bye and good luck to ye!" the sheriff called after them. "Mighty

sorry ter discommode ye, but juty air juty, an' a officer air no

respecter of persons."

Mrs. Nancy Jones Black sat beside Crane in a rickety wagon, and between

jolts gave him many a word of wisdom on the subject of strong drink,

which the handsome Bourbon poet stowed away for future consideration.

Dunkirk and Miss Moyne rode upon the "hounds" of a naked wood-wain,

as happy as two blue-birds in April, while Bartley Hubbard, with

little Mrs. Philpot and her child and some other ladies, was in an old

weather-beaten barouche, a sad relic of the _ante-bellum_ times. For the

rest there were vehicles of every sort save the comfortable sort, and

all went slowly winding and zig-zagging down Mt. Boab toward the valley

and the river. Why pursue them? Once they all looked up from far down

the slope and saw Hotel Helicon shining like a castle of gold in the

flood of summer sunlight. Its verandas were empty, its windows closed,

but the flag on its wooden tower still floated bravely in the breeze,

its folds appearing to touch the soft gray-blue sky.

* * * * *

A year later Crane and Peck met at Saratoga and talked over old times.

At length coming down to the present, Crane said:

"Of all of us who were guests on Mt. Boab, Miss Moyne is the only one

who has found success. Her story, _On The Heights_, is in its seventieth

edition."

"Oh, well," said Peck, "that goes without the saying. Anybody could

succeed with her chance."

"_Her_ chance, why do you say that?"

"Haven't you heard? Ah, I see that the news has not yet penetrated the

wilds of Kentucky. The open secret of Miss Moyne's success lies in the

fact that she has married her publisher."

A silence of some minutes followed, during which Crane burned his cigar

very rapidly.

"What fools we were," Peck presently ventured, "to be fighting a duel

about her!"

"No, sir," said Crane, with a far-away look in his eyes, "no, sir, I

would die for her right now."

So the subject was dropped between them forever.

Some of Gaslucky's creditors bought Hotel Helicon at the sheriff's sale,

but it proved a barren investment.

The house stands there now, weather-beaten and lonely on the peak of Mt.

Boab, all tenantless and forlorn.

As to Tolliver's still-house I cannot say, but at stated intervals Crane

receives a small cask marked: "J'yful juice, hannel with keer," which

comes from his "Pap's uncle Pete."

THE END.

THE TALE OF A SCULPTOR

BY HUGH CONWAY

THE TALE OF A SCULPTOR.

CHAPTER I.

After you pass the "Blue Anchor"--the sign of which swings from the

branch of an elm tree older even than the house itself--a few steps

along the road bring you in sight of the pinnacled, square tower of

Coombe-Acton Church. You cannot see the church itself, as, with schools

and rectory close by it, it lies at the back of the village, about two

hundred yards up a lane. Like the village to whose spiritual needs it

ministers, the church, to an ordinary observer, is nothing out of the

common, although certain small peculiarities of architecture, not

noticed by an uncultured eye, make it an object of some interest to

archæologists. Visit it or not, according to your inclination, but

afterwards keep on straight through the long, straggling village, until

the houses begin to grow even more straggling, the gardens larger and

less cared for as ornaments, displaying more cabbages and scarlet

runners than roses--keep on until the houses cease altogether and

hawthorn hedges take the place of palings and crumbling walls, and at

last you will come to Watercress Farm, a long, low white house, one side

of which abuts on the highway, whilst the other looks over the three

hundred acres of land attached to it.

Not a very large acreage, it is true, but then it is all good land, for

the most part such as auctioneers describe as rich, warm, deep, old

pasture land; such land that, at the time this tale opens, any farmer,

by thrift, knowledge of his business, and hard work, could make even

more than a bare living out of, and could meet his landlord on rent day

with a cheerful face, knowing that after rent and other outgoings were

provided for something would yet be left for himself.

Who occupies the Watercress Farm now, and whether in these days of

depression his rent is forthcoming or not, matters little. At the time

I write of it, it was rented by farmer Leigh, even as his forefathers,

according to village tradition, had rented it for some two hundred

years. In quiet, conservative places like Coombe-Acton, a farm of this

kind often goes from father to son with more regularity than an entailed

estate, landlord and tenant well knowing that their interests are

identical.

It was a fine afternoon towards the end of June. Abraham Leigh was

standing by the gate of the field known as the home meadow looking at

the long, ripe grass rippling as the summer breeze swept across it.

He was a thoroughly good specimen of the Somersetshire farmer. A big,

sturdy man, whose movements were slow and deliberate. His face, if heavy

and stolid, not by any means the face of a fool. No doubt, a man of

circumscribed views--the world, for him, extending eastwards to Bristol

market and westwards to the Bristol Channel. Nevertheless, respected in

his little world as a wonderful judge of a beast, a great authority on

tillages, and, above all, a man who always had a balance in his favor

at the Somersetshire Bank; a type of that extinct race, the prosperous

farmer, who looked on all townsmen with contempt, thinking, as all

farmers should think, that the owners of broad acres, and those engaged

in agriculture were alone worthy of respect.

Yet, to-day, in spite of his advantages and acquirements, Farmer Leigh

looked on the fifteen-acre meadow with a puzzled and discontented

expression on his honest face; and, moreover, murmurs of dissatisfaction

were proceeding from his lips. Farmers--Somersetshire farmers

especially--are proverbial grumblers, but it is seldom they grumble

without an audience. It is outsiders who get the benefit of their

complaints. Besides, one would think that the tenant of Watercress Farm

had little at present to complain of. The drop of rain so badly wanted

had been long in coming, but it had come just in the nick of time to

save the grass, and if the crop outwardly looked a little thin, Mr.

Leigh's experienced eye told him that the undergrowth was thick, and

that the quality of the hay would be first-class. Moreover, what corn

and roots he had looked promising, so it seems strange that the farmer

should be grumbling when he had no one to listen to him, and should lean

so disconsolately upon the gate of the field when no one observed him.

"I can't make him out," he said. "Good boy he be, too; yet, instead o'

helping me with the land, always going about dreaming or messing with

mud. Can't think where he got his notions from. Suppose it must 'a been

from the mother, poor thing! Always fond o' gimcracks and such like,

she were. Gave the lad such an outlandish name I'm ashamed to hear

it. Father's and grandfather's name ought to be good enough for a

Leigh--good boy though he be, too!"

A soft look settled on Abraham Leigh's face as he repeated the last

words; then he went deeper into his slough of despond, where, no doubt,

he battled as manfully as a Christian until he reached the other shore

and fancied he had found the solution of his difficulties.

His face brightened. "Tell 'ee what," he said, addressing the waving

grass in front of him, "I'll ask Mr. Herbert. Squire's a man who have

seen the world. I'll take his advice about the boy. Seems hard like

on me, too. Ne'er a Leigh till this one but what were a farmer to the

backbone!"

His mind made up, the farmer strode off to make arrangement with mowers.

Had he been troubled with twenty unnatural and incompetent sons, the hay

must be made while the sun shines.

Although he had settled what to do, it was some time before the weighty

resolve was carried into execution. Folks about Coombe-Acton do not

move with the celerity of cotton brokers or other men of business. Sure

they are, but slow. So it was not until the September rent day that

the farmer consulted his landlord about his domestic difficulty--the

possession of a son, an only child, of about fifteen, who, instead of

making himself useful on the land, did little else save wander about in

a dreamy way, looking at all objects in nature, animate or inanimate, or

employed himself in the mysterious pursuit which his father described as

"messing with mud." Such conduct was a departure from the respectable

bucolic traditions of the Leigh family, so great, that at times the

father thought it an infliction laid upon him for some cause or other

by an inscrutable Providence.

There are certain Spanish noblemen who, on account of the antiquity of

their families and services rendered, are permitted to enter the royal

presence with covered heads. It was, perhaps, for somewhat similar

reasons, a custom handed down from father to son and established by

time, that the tenant of Watercress Farm paid his rent to the landlord

in person, not through the medium of an agent. Mr. Herbert being

an important man in the West country, the Leigh family valued this

privilege as highly as ever hidalgo valued the one above mentioned.

Mr. Herbert, a refined, intellectual-looking man of about fifty,

received the farmer kindly, and after the rent, without a word as

to abatement or reduction, had been paid in notes of the county

bank--dark and greasy, but valued in this particular district far

above Bank of England promises--landlord and tenant settled down to

a few minutes' conversation on crops and kindred subjects. Then the

farmer unburdened his mind.

"I've come to ask a favor of your advice, sir, about my boy, Jerry."

"Yes," said Mr. Herbert, "I know him--a nice, good-looking boy. I see

him at church with you, and about your place when I pass. What of him?"

"Well, you zee, zur," said the farmer, speaking with more Somerset

dialect than usual, "he've a been at Bristol Grammar School till just

now. Masters all send good accounts of him. I don't hold wi' too much

learning, so thought 'twere time he come home and helped me like. But

not a bit o' good he be on the varm; not a bit, zur! Spends near all his

time messing about wi' dirt."

"Doing what?" asked Mr. Herbert, astonished.

"A-muddling and a-messing with bits o' clay. Making little figgers,

like, and tries to bake 'em in the oven."

"Oh, I see what you mean. What sort of figures?"

"All sorts, sir. Little clay figgers of horses, dogs, pigs--why, you'd

scarce believe it, sir--last week I found him making the figger of a

naked 'ooman! A naked 'ooman! Why, the lad could never a' seen such a

thing."

Abraham Leigh waited with open eyes to hear Mr. Herbert's opinion of

such an extraordinary, if not positively unusual, proceeding.

Mr. Herbert smiled. "Perhaps your son is a youthful genius."

"Genius or not, I want to know, sir, what to do wi' him. How's the boy

to make a living? A farmer he'll never be."

"You follow me and I will show you something."

Mr. Herbert led his guest to his drawing-room--a room furnished with

the taste of a travelled man. As the farmer gaped at its splendor, he

directed his attention to four beautiful statues standing in the corners

of the room.

"I gave the man who made those seven hundred pounds for them, and could

sell them to-morrow for a thousand if I chose. That's almost as good as

farming, isn't it?"

His tenant's eyes were wide with amazement. "A thousand pounds, sir!" he

gasped. "Why, you might have bought that fourteen-acre field with that."

"These give me more pleasure than land," replied Mr. Herbert. "But about

your boy; when I am riding by I will look in and see what he can do,

then give you my advice."

The farmer thanked him and returned home. As he jogged along the road to

Watercress Farm, he muttered at intervals: "A thousand pounds in those

white figures! Well, well, well, I never did!"

Mr. Herbert was a man who kept a promise, whether made to high or low.

Five days after his interview with Abraham Leigh he rode up to the

door of the farm. He was not alone. By his side rode a gay, laughing,

light-haired child of thirteen, who ruled an indulgent father with a rod

of iron. Mr. Herbert had been a widower for some years; the girl, and

a boy who was just leaving Harrow for the university, being his only

surviving children. The boy was, perhaps, all that Mr. Herbert might

have wished, but he could see no fault in the precocious, imperious,

spoilt little maid, who was the sunshine of his life.

She tripped lightly after her father into the farm-house, laughing at

the way in which he was obliged to bend his head to avoid damage from

the low doorway; she seated herself with becoming dignity on the chair

which the widowed sister, who kept house for Abraham Leigh, tendered

her with many courtesies. A pretty child, indeed, and one who gave rare

promise of growing into a lovely woman.

The farmer was away somewhere on the farm, but could be fetched in a

minute if Mr. Herbert would wait. Mr. Herbert waited, and very soon his

tenant made his appearance and thanked his visitor for the trouble he

was taking on his behalf.

"Now let me see the boy," said Mr. Herbert, after disclaiming all sense

of trouble.

Leigh went to the door of the room and shouted out, "Jerry, Jerry, come

down. You're wanted, my man."

In a moment the door opened, and the cause of Mr. Leigh's discontent

came upon the scene in the form of a dark-eyed, dark-haired, pale-faced

boy, tall but slightly built; not, so far as physique went, much credit

to the country-side. Yet in some respects a striking-looking if not

handsome lad. The dark, eloquent eyes and strongly-marked brow would

arrest attention; but the face was too thin, too thoughtful for the

age, and could scarcely be associated with what commonly constitutes a

good-looking lad. Yet regularity of feature was there, and no one would

dare to be sure that beauty would not come with manhood.

He was not seen at that moment under advantageous circumstances. Knowing

nothing about the distinguished visitors, he had obeyed his father's

summons in hot haste; consequently he entered the room in his shirt

sleeves, which were certainly not very clean, and with hands covered

with red clay. Mr. Herbert looked amused, while the little princess

turned up her nose in great disdain.

Poor Abraham Leigh was much mortified at the unpresentable state in

which his son showed himself. To make matters worse, the boy was not

soiled by honest, legitimate toil.

"Tut! tut!" he said, crossly. "All of a muck, as usual."

The boy, who felt that his father had a right to complain, hung his head

and showed signs of retreating. Mr. Herbert came to the rescue.

"Never mind," he said, patting young Leigh on the shoulder, "he has

been working in his own fashion. I have come on purpose to see those

modellings of yours, my boy."

The boy started as one surprised. His cheek flushed, and he looked at

the speaker with incredulity yet hope in his eyes.

"Yes," said his father, sharply. "Go and put your hands under the pump,

Jerry; then bring some of 'em down. Maybe, anyway, they'll amuse the

little lady."

"No, no," said Mr. Herbert. "I'll come with you and see them for myself.

Lead the way."

Young Leigh did not speak, but his eyes thanked Mr. Herbert. That

gentleman followed him from the room, leaving the farmer to amuse

the little maid. He did this so far as he was able by producing a

well-thumbed copy of the "Pilgrim's Progress," the leaves of which Miss

Herbert condescended to turn daintily over until she was quite terrified

by the picture of the combat with Apollyon.

Meanwhile "Jerry," with a beating heart, led Mr. Herbert up-stairs to

a room destitute of furniture save an old table and chair. A bucket

half-full of common red clay stood in one corner, and on the table were

several of the little clay figures which had excited the farmer's ire

and consternation.

Crude, defective, full of faults as they were, there was enough power in

them to make Mr. Herbert look at the lad in wonderment, almost envy. He

was a man who worshipped art; who had dabbled as an amateur in painting

and sculpturing for years; who considered a gifted artist the most

fortunate of mankind. So the word envy is not ill-chosen. What he would

have given half his wealth to possess came to this boy unsought for--to

the son of a clod of a farmer the precious gift was vouchsafed!

As he would have expected, the most ambitious efforts were the

worst--the "naked 'ooman" was particularly atrocious--but, still wet,

and not ruined by an abortive attempt at baking, was a group modelled

from life; a vulgar subject, representing, as it did, Abraham Leigh's

prize sow, surrounded by her ten greedy offspring. There was such power

and talent in this production that, had he seen nothing else, Mr.

Herbert would have been certain that the lad as a modeller and copyist

must take the first rank. If, in addition to his manual dexterity, he

had poetry, feeling, and imagination, it might well be that one of the

greatest sculptors of the nineteenth century stood in embryo before him.

As Mr. Herbert glanced from the rough clay sketches to the pale boy

who stood breathless, as one expecting a verdict of life or death, he

wondered what could have been the cause of such a divergence from the

traits habitual to the Leighs. Then he remembered that some twenty

years ago Abraham Leigh had chosen for a wife, not one of his own

kind, but a dweller in cities--a governess, who exchanged, no doubt, a

life of penury and servitude for the rough but comfortable home the

Somersetshire farmer was willing to give her. Mr. Herbert remembered

her; remembered how utterly out of place the delicate, refined woman

seemed to be as Leigh's wife; remembered how, a few years after the

birth of the boy, she sickened and died. It was from the mother's side

the artistic taste came.

Mr. Herbert, although a kind man, was cautious. He had no intention of

raising hopes which might be futile. Yet he felt a word of encouragement

was due to the lad.

"Some of these figures show decided talent," he said. "After seeing

them, I need scarcely ask you if you wish to be a sculptor?"

Young Leigh clasped his hands together. "Oh, sir!" he gasped. "If it

could only be!"

"You do not care to be a farmer, like your father?"

"I could never be a farmer, sir. I am not fit for it."

"Yet, if you follow in your father's track, you will lead a comfortable,

useful life. If you follow art, you may go through years of poverty and

suffering before success is attained."

The boy raised his head and looked full at the speaker; there was almost

passionate entreaty in his eyes.

"Oh, sir," he said, "if you would only persuade my father to let me

try--even for a few years. If I did not succeed I would come back to him

and work as a laborer for the rest of my life without a murmur."

Mr. Herbert was impressed by the boy's earnestness. "I will speak to

your father," he said. Then the two went back to the sitting-room, where

they found Abraham Leigh much exercised by some difficult questions

propounded by Miss Herbert respecting the nature of Apollyon.

"Take my little girl for a walk round the garden," said Mr. Herbert to

young Leigh. "I want to speak to your father."

In spite of the great gulf between her and the clay-bespattered boy

in his shirt sleeves, the little princess was too glad of a change of

scene to wish to disobey her father. She followed her conductor to the

back of the house, and the boy and girl stepped out into the autumnal

sunshine.

The little maid looked so trim and dainty in her neat riding-habit,

coquettish hat and tiny gloves that his own draggled appearance struck

the boy forcibly.

"If you will excuse me a minute," he said, "I will run and wash my

hands."

"Yes; I think it will be better," said Miss Herbert, with dignity.

In a minute or two young Leigh returned. He had found time not only to

wash the rich red clay from his long, well-shaped fingers, but to slip

on his coat and generally beautify himself. His improved appearance had

a great effect upon the child, who, like most of her age, was influenced

by exteriors.

So Miss Herbert, this little great lady, unbent and allowed "Jerry" to

lead her round the old-fashioned garden, to the out-houses and pigsties,

where the obese pigs lay oblivious of what fate had in store for them;

to the stables; to the dairy, where she condescended to drink a glass of

new milk, and by the time they had returned to the garden the two were

as good friends as their different stations in life would permit. Young

Leigh, who saw in this dainty little maid the incarnation of fairies,

nymphs, goddesses, and other ideals which, in a dim way, were forming

themselves in his brain, endeavored, after his first shyness had passed

away, to show her what beautiful shapes and forms could be found in

flower, leaf, and tree, and other things in nature. His talk, indeed,

soared far above her pretty little head, and when they returned to the

garden he was trying to make her see that those masses of white clouds

low down in the distance were two bodies of warriors just about to meet

in deadly fray.

"You are a very, very funny boy," said Miss Herbert, with such an air of

conviction that he was startled into silence.

"Your name is Jerry, isn't it?" she continued. "Jerry's an ugly name."

"My name is Gerald--Gerald Leigh."

"Oh; Gerald!" Even this child could see the impropriety of a tenant

farmer having a son named Gerald. No wonder Abraham Leigh addressed his

boy as Jerry!

"Do you like being a farmer?" she asked.

"I am not going to be a farmer; I don't like it."

"What a pity! Farmers are such a worthy, respectable class of men," said

the girl, using a stock phrase she had caught up somewhere.

The boy laughed merrily. Mr. Herbert's approbation sat newly upon him,

and he was only talking to a child; so he said:

"I hope to be worthy and respectable, but a much greater man than a

farmer."

"Oh! How great? as great as papa?"

"Yes; I hope so."

"That's absurd, you know," said Miss Herbert, with all the outraged

family pride that thirteen years can feel; and, turning away, she

switched at the flowers with her riding-whip.

However, a few words from Gerald made them friends once more, and she

expressed her pleasure that he should pick her one of the few roses

which remained in the garden.

"Roses are common," said the boy. "Every one gives roses. I will give

you something prettier."

He went to the sunny side of the house, and soon returned with half a

dozen pale lavender stars in his hands. They were blossoms of a new sort

of late clematis, which some one's gardener had given Abraham Leigh.

Gerald's deft fingers arranged them into a most artistic bouquet, the

appearance of which was entirely spoilt by Miss Herbert's insistence

that two or three roses should be added. The bouquet was just finished

and presented when Mr. Herbert, followed by the farmer, appeared.

Although he said nothing more to young Leigh on the subject which was

uppermost in the boy's mind, the kindly encouraging look he gave him

raised the widest hopes in his heart. Mr. Herbert bade the father and

son a pleasant good-day, and rode off with his little daughter.

Miss Herbert carried the bunch of clematis for about two miles when,

finding it rather encumbered her, tossed it over a hedge.

Gerald Leigh went back to his attic and commenced about half a dozen

clay sketches of the prettiest object which as yet had crossed his path.

For several days he was on thorns to hear what fate had in store for

him; but fate, personified by his father, made no sign, but went about

his work stolid and sphinx-like. Mr. Herbert, Gerald learned, had gone

to London for a few days.

However, before a fortnight had gone by, Abraham Leigh received a letter

from his landlord, and the same evening, whilst smoking his pipe in the

farm kitchen, informed his son and his sister that to-morrow he was

going into Gloucestershire to see if his brother Joseph could spare him

one of his many boys to take Jerry's place. Jerry was to go to London

the next day and meet Mr. Herbert. Most likely he'd stay there. 'Twas

clear as noontide the boy would never make a farmer, and if there were

fools enough in the world to buy white figures at hundreds of pounds

apiece, Jerry might as well try to make his living that way as any

other.

The truth is, Mr. Herbert told Abraham Leigh that if he would not

consent to pay for his son's art education, he, Mr. Herbert, would

bear the expense himself. But the monetary part of it troubled the

substantial farmer little. He could pay for his child's keep if he could

bring his mind to consent to his going. And now the consent was given.

Gerald heard his father's communication with glowing eyes. For shame's

sake he hid his joy, for he knew that, with all his stolid demeanor, his

father almost broke down as he contemplated the diverging paths his son

and he must henceforward thread. The boy thanked him from his heart, and

the rough farmer, laying his hand on his child's head, blessed him and

bade him go and prosper.

In this way Gerald Leigh left Coombe-Acton. At long intervals he

reappeared for a few days. The worthy villagers eyed him askance; the

only conception they could form of his profession being connected with

dark-skinned itinerants who bore double-tiered platforms on their heads,

and earned a precarious livehood by traversing the country selling

conventional representations of angels and busts of eminent men.