GREETINGS, SIR GALLAHAD!
It was late that night when Steve climbed into the rig which was
waiting with Pat Joe at the reins and they turned north into the hills.
For he had remained with Caleb and Miss Sarah long after the logs in
the fireplace had crumbled away to a flaky ash, discussing that
ink-smeared record which Caleb himself had ridden to find, ten years
before, in the shack up-river. And the latter was surprised at
learning how much of it was no longer news.
"Yes, I know," Steve told them, after Caleb had finished relating, with
quite ponderous pride, many things which he ascertained concerning the
Stephen O'Mara who had gone before. "I know! Four or five years ago,
when I found out that it was--customary for one to be certain as to
such things, I started to look it up myself. And when I found out from
the records that a boy by that name had disappeared--perhaps been
stolen by an old servant--I remembered instantly, of course, the box
over which Old Tom used to hang, hour after hour. I came back into the
woods looking for it that summer and found it gone and nothing left of
the Jenkins' cabin but a pile of charred logs. On my way out I stopped
here--somehow I thought that maybe you might have it--but the house was
closed. And no one seemed to know where you had gone or when you would
return."
Caleb nodded, and his eyes turned to Sarah.
"We were sleuthing, Steve," he explained as soberly as he was able.
"We were ranging from border to border and coast to coast, looking for
you." He stopped to scan the browned face closely for an instant.
"But couldn't you have written--or--or tried again? We've been
waiting--boy!"
Steve's face colored a little.
"I did try, twice after that," he stated, hesitatingly, "but I didn't
have much surplus cash for travel in those days, or--or clothes,
either. I'm afraid I wasn't too prepossessing an object, on any of
those visits, after I had tramped in overland. The house was closed
both times I came. And then I did write once--that was from San
Domingo--the third year after I left college. I was so lonesome down
there that I had to write, I think. But there--wasn't any reply, so I
sort of thought perhaps----"
He halted lamely, but his meaning was plain enough. Caleb faced about
abruptly, his face sternly accusing.
"Do you mean to hint that you ever dared believe we didn't want----"
and there Sarah stopped him with an capable nod of her head. "We
didn't get that letter, Steve," he finished. "If we only had we--we
would have been less lonely waiting, too."
Steve sat and stared down at his heavy boots.
"I should have known that," he faltered. "I should have known that
there were too many presidents on that island, both coming and going,
for the mails to be infallible. But I wasn't just sure----"
Miss Sarah cut in then and took the conversation serenely in hand.
"We have something else of yours, Stephen," she said in her soft,
almost lisping voice, "something which Caleb brought back with him
which he has neglected to mention."
She left them for a moment, and when she came back downstairs with the
picture of the girl with the steady mouth and eyes her brother breathed
with less difficulty than he had during her absence. For a second or
so he had almost believed that she might have run across that bunch of
loose tax receipts and the folded, legal-looking document which he had
tucked away in his own iron box. Stephen O'Mara sat and looked long
and long at his mother's picture. When he finally raised his head
again Miss Sarah's eyes were misty, too.
"This is one of the things for which I can never thank you enough," he
murmured. "I can only tell you that I didn't know--I didn't
understand----"
Miss Sarah took the gilt-framed picture from his hand. She did not
need his disconnectedly self-conscious explanation to understand.
"Voluble, verbal gratitude is not an uncommon thing," she answered. "I
am going to ask far more than that of you. I've kept her picture
always on my table, Stephen, ever since we found it; and I should miss
it greatly if I were not to see it often. Do you mind leaving it here,
in your room upstairs? I am going to ask that of you, and if you don't
mind doing so, then I--I would suggest, too, that you might kiss
the--the first 'dressed up lady you ever did git to know,' who must bid
you good-night now."
The boyish hesitation with which he saluted Miss Sarah's faded pink
cheek was far more delicately flattering than all the effusion in the
world could ever have been. After she had left them alone Steve turned
and gazed at Caleb, wonder in his face.
"I've never forgotten the way she shook hands with me, that day," he
said slowly. "I wondered then if there could be other women with
voices just as kind. And I--I'm wondering now."
Caleb smiled.
"I've often speculated on that myself, Steve," he remarked. "And I
don't know. I don't know! Sarah is pretty human--even for a Baptist,
eh?"
They both laughed over that rainy day which the words recalled; they
sat and talked and smoked, but no matter what trend the conversation
took, Caleb failed to mention the document or the tax receipts which he
had found ten years before in Old Tom's tin box. Even if he had not
been entirely certain of it that first day when he had neglected to
show them to Sarah, he knew now just what reason underlay his secrecy.
Like Old Tom, he felt that his action was in a way more or less
extenuated by circumstance. And still mindful of Dexter Allison's odd
moment or two of guarded antagonism that very morning, he gradually led
the conversation around to more recent things.
"I suppose you have had your conference with Mr. Allison, Steve?" he
suggested in a matter-of-fact way.
Instantly at that question all the boyishness left the other's face.
He looked away and looked back again, very deliberately.
"No more than a word," he answered. "He asked me to come down again,
toward the end of the week, if I could get away. He said no doubt I
would want to spend all the time I could to-day with you and Miss
Sarah."
"Of course," Caleb exclaimed, "of course! I see. Is it--is it
unethical if I ask, privately, your opinion of this job which the East
Coast Company has on its hands? Do you believe they can swing it in
time to fulfill all their obligations?"
Again there followed a moment's pause while Steve's eyes roved
thoughtfully around the room.
"Mr. Elliott wouldn't have risked every cent he has," he finally
replied, "unless I had assured him that it wasn't so very much more
than a man-sized gamble. Nor Mr. Ainnesley, either, I think. So that
puts it up to me pretty squarely, doesn't it? We'll have to win
through--because we have to, now!"
"Quite so!" murmured Caleb again.
He studied a long time over his next words, and it was a very vivid
vision of a rigid little figure in a wrecked black velvet suit--a
vision of a bleak-faced boy with bruised lips who had insisted upon
going back downtown for Miss Sarah's eggs--which eventually overbore
his distaste for anything that might savor of disloyalty to a friend.
"Of course there could arise unforeseen circumstances," he ventured.
"Unforeseen interference which, unless one guarded against it, might
defeat every effort."
The room seemed very, very quiet.
"Of course," came the calm answer at last; and Caleb could not see
Steve's face behind the cupped hands at his pipe bowl, "of
course--unless one more or less guarded against it."
And there, just as calmly, they dropped it. The topic was not
discussed again that night, unless a bit of news which Fat Joe Morgan
himself delivered might be construed as somehow relative. Fat Joe had
been driving for an hour, silent some of the time, but for the most
part devoted to a whole-hearted rendition of "Home, Sweet Home," in his
thin and bell-like tenor, when he broke off in the middle of a stanza
to chuckle.
"Say, Chief," he exclaimed, "I've got news for you that'll just fill
you plumb full of happiness and good cheer. I hired another hand
to-day who'll be a distinct addition to our gang up-river. Just to
while away the dark hours I'll let you guess for a while who he is.
I'll let you guess from here to Last Oak, above the cypress bend at the
rapids. One, two, three--and the contest is on!"
The man beside Fat Joe stirred and opened his eyes. Fat Joe couldn't
see it, for it was too dark, but Steve frowned somewhat at the levity
which had interrupted him. He had just been thinking about the tight
grip of a slender hand which had fallen upon his arm that afternoon
when a red-headed riverman lurched drunkenly from a doorway ahead.
Joe's words were exactly coincident with that thought and the answer
came mechanically.
"Harrigan," grunted Steve.
And in the darkness Fat Joe sighed mournfully.
"Bull's-eye," he whimpered, "and there goes the whole evenin's
entertainment! Why didn't you cast around, sort of fruitless for a
while, and prolong the excitement? But you're right. Harrigan, that's
him! He'd just met up with that fat party who owns the plaster palace
on the hill--just met up with him, down the road a piece, and Allison
had fired him for keeps, he said. He asked me if we didn't have room
for a nice steady hand, so I hired him. And I'll leave it to you if it
ain't Harrigan's feet that's mostly unsteady, at that. He seemed awful
cheerful for a man who'd just been allowed to resign, but who was I to
entertain dark doubts? I hired him; I thought you might like the touch
of color his hair'll lend to the landscape. It'll be comfortin', too,
havin' him around where we can have a look at him any time we take the
notion. Don't you think so?"
Steve's grunted reply was hardly intelligible, but it seemed to satisfy
Fat Joe. The latter had long before learned to read the signs; he knew
when his best efforts were only wasted words, and once more he gave his
attention to the jogging horses and his neglected melody.
Caleb Hunter, wondering after Steve had gone just how much he might
have seemed to insinuate, regretted that he had spoken at all.
Recollection of Allison's bluff cordiality with O'Mara only made him
the more ashamed of his suspicion, and yet the next morning at table he
attempted, covertly, to sound Sarah for an opinion, too. She
invariably solved his perplexities or relegated them to the limbo of
gentle ridicule.
"Just why should he want this East Coast job to fail?" he puzzled
aloud. "He's in it, along with Elliott and Ainnesley, even if he isn't
in so deep. That is, of course, assuming that he does want it to fail."
The preoccupied gleam in Miss Sarah's eyes promised a reply that might
be worth considering, but when it came Caleb found trouble in
assimilating it.
"They did look so well together," she murmured absently. "He's so much
broader--and a whole head taller, too!"
It didn't seem to be exactly a relevant answer, but Caleb nodded
patiently.
"Taller, yes," he admitted judiciously. "But he isn't half so big
around."
Sarah sat, fork poised, and gazed at him.
"Not half so big as who?" she neglected her sentence structure.
"Why--Dexter!" said Caleb. "Isn't that what we were talking about?"
"Maybe you were," Miss Sarah sniffed. "But I was not discussing
Dexter's height or girth either. I was referring to his daughter
and--and our boy, Stephen. I was going to ask you if you thought she
could be entirely disinterested in him. I don't believe any woman
forgets a man who has ever thought enough of her to fight for her."
"I suppose not," agreed Caleb humbly.
"And I was wondering, if that argument ever came up again--I'm
wondering if Archibald Wickersham wouldn't come out second best, just
as he did before?"
Then her brother understood. He threw back his head and laughed until
Sarah's face registered a trace of vexation.
"Sarah," he saluted her, "I'm a mere babe in arms when it comes to
finesse, in comparison with you. But since you have introduced the
subject I might remark that there are two individuals to be considered.
Maybe she might be--interested--as you so delicately phrase it. But
the boy--well, he's had one mighty pointed lesson, you know."
But there was no mirth in Sarah's eyes. She was most serious.
"That's the very thing which perplexes me," she confessed. "I was
going to ask you about that. For it was hurt pride that sent him away
and he hasn't forgotten the hurt, even yet. He was going to tell us,
last night when I stopped him, that he hadn't written again because he
wasn't certain that we wanted to hear; and he was painfully conscious
of how childish it would sound in words, too. Some men quit when they
are whipped once, but don't some of them refuse to recognize that
they've ever been whipped at all, Cal? And then, she told me that she
had asked him to her party, Friday night. If he comes I think I'll be
better able to tell just what----"
"He won't!" cut in Caleb flatly, and when she taxed him for it he
proceeded to elaborate at considerable length the reason for his
certainty. His argument was rather tight and so, just because of that,
woman-fashion she believed the contrary.
All day Friday she watched the hills' road. Not until the orchestra in
the lodge beyond the hedge had begun tunelessly to strum their
instruments, to insure their later tunefulness, did she reluctantly
abandon her position at the window. But then, from his chair at the
fire, Caleb noticed how wistfully disappointed her face was.
It turned much colder with nightfall; a wind sharp with the tang of
autumn was blowing in off the river when Barbara, muffled from throat
to ankle in a sapphire fur-edged wrap, slipped in at the door, having
stolen away ostensibly to display to them her costume. It was after
the hour of ten, but the girl lingered a little after she had executed
that mission; she stopped again in the door, indecisively worrying her
lip with small teeth, when she finally turned to depart.
"We are very sorry that Mr. O'Mara could not come," she hesitated. "I
had promised both Garry and Archie Wickersham that he would be down."
The older woman nodded and accepted the statement for what it was--a
question which the girl's eyes failed to conceal.
"We haven't heard from him since he went back into camp," she answered.
"He, no doubt, has been unable to get away."
Barbara turned without replying and passed out, less airily than she
had entered. But Miss Sarah's eyes were no longer disappointed as she
again took her place at a window. And a second later, when she had
drawn back suddenly into the room with a muffled exclamation, her
brother was astonished at her beaming face. A moment earlier he would
have sworn that it was only wistful, but before she went upstairs,
exclaiming still further at the lateness of the hour, it began to look
more than a little like veritable triumph to him.
Barbara Allison recrossed the lawn very slowly that night; she retraced
her steps with head bent, the fall of her slippered feet muffled by the
carpet of thick, unfrosted grass. Vaguely troubled, vaguely disturbed
at herself for her inability to analyze that strange mood which, twice
in the last few nights, had sent her with aching throat and wet cheeks
into Miriam's room, she was within arm's length of the dark figure in
the hedge gap through which she had just come, before she was aware of
its presence. Stephen O'Mara, weatherbeaten hat in hand, was standing
there in her path, peering steadily at the stucco and timber lodge
alight from end to end like a huge and sprawling glow-worm.
Even in that first moment when she stopped and caught her breath,
audibly, from sheer surprise, the girl sensed the indecision in the
attitude of the man before her. But she could not know that it was not
a thing of the moment--that irresolution; could not know that
throughout the week Steve had periodically abused himself for his
inability to settle the question once and for all, and leave his brain
free for more important things. Just as often as he told himself that
he would not go, he had found himself reopening the mental discussion,
and yet--and strangely enough--it was not the recollection of Barbara's
repeated invitations, or even her distress over Garry Devereau, who had
been ceaselessly in his thoughts ever since she had spoken of him,
which finally achieved the decision. An insistent desire again to meet
the Honorable Archibald Wickersham in the end led him to request Fat
Joe to hook up the team, that day at noon, for the long drive down
river. With Steve himself handling the reins, they had rolled the
thirty miles at a speed which might have mildly surprised Fat Joe had
he not been accustomed to putting two and two together to make six or
eight or more. And Fat Joe's thin tenor was just drifting faintly off
down the hill--a mournful rendition of "Home, Sweet Home"--when the
girl stepped noiselessly forward and put a hand, feather-light, upon
the man's arm.
Again she felt the swift tensing of the flesh beneath; she fell back a
step before the startling abruptness with which Steve whirled. She
even threw up one small hand, as if to shield her face. And then, the
cloak falling open at her throat, a slender, swaying figure in blue and
shimmering white, she stood and flung a little laugh at him--a laugh a
little unsteady, a bit tinged with mockery, and as untroubled as the
spirit of youth itself.
"Is that the way you always prepare to greet your friends?" she asked.
The man just stood and stared at her--stared much as if he mistrusted
his own ears and eyes.
"Not all my friends," his slow voice drawled at last, but even the
words were tinged with doubt. "Not all my friends," he said.
And again he was conscious first of her slimness, her smallness. He
was aware of the insistent, impish suggestion of boyishness in tilted
head and poised body, before the rays that wavered over his shoulder
from the windows behind him disclosed the misty gladness of welcome in
her eyes, splashed now with points of light not so very unlike the
blurred star-points in the infinitely deep, purplish pool of the sky
above them. Silently the man reached out and found the hand which had
lain for a moment upon his arm.
"So you are--you," he murmured, when his fingers touched hers. "I
wasn't--just sure."
The girl bobbed her head--her quaint and childishly impetuous
affirmative. She looked down at the hand holding her own,
contemplating her small white fingers curled up now into a warm, round
fist, and wondering at the completeness with which it was swallowed by
his big palm.
Suddenly unable to think quite clearly, she wondered at the new pulse
in her throat, which beat and beat until it seemed not easy even to
speak.
"Then it--must be you, too," she faltered. "I wasn't sure, either,
even when I knew it must be. I'd begun to believe that you hadn't
forgotten--that you didn't care to. . . . Will you please say that you
forgive me--please--for something over which I have been sorrier than
you can know?"
It was not more than a wisp of sound--that request. The words were
stumbling, and very earnest, and not very hard to understand. Silence
came again, broken only by the treble strains of violins beyond. Once,
in that quiet, his eyes strayed to the small and round, and yellow
object which she carried in the crook of one arm--a tiny papier-mâché
pumpkin strapped to two fuzzy mice in patent leather harness--but the
pumpkin coach and tiny animals were not necessary to translate her
costume to him.
His eyes came back and clung to the velvety face of that slim
Cinderella in bits of transparent slippers and shimmering, star-edged
white, until even in spite of the gloom the girl recognized the change
which had come creeping over his face. She saw it surge up in his
eyes--the old undisguised wonder of the boy of ten years before, for
which, until that instant, she had looked in vain--but it was a man's
wonder of woman now, utter and absolute and all-enveloping. She caught
her breath then; she touched her lips with a dainty tongue as though
they had gone dry of a sudden. Involuntarily she stepped toward him,
that single pace which she had fallen away. And above the tumult of
her own senses she heard herself trying to laugh and realized how
unsteady the effort was.
"Then you do forgive me?" she breathed. "Do I--pass inspection? Do
you like me--in my masquerade?"
Steve answered her last question first and, lips parted, she listened,
conscious of nothing save the words he was speaking.
"There was never need of a fairy-godmother for you," he told her, his
voice grave. "There was never need of a transforming miracle; you have
been that, always, yourself. And you are not permitted to ask
forgiveness from me, nor pardon. Men do not admit that there can be
need of that, where they have worshiped, as long as I have worshiped
you. You knew I was coming. . . . I've been coming ten years now.
But you can never know, either, how long ten years can be."
The words were blurred as a far-off echo in her ears. She started to
speak, but all that she would have said caught in her throat and hurt
her, and only her unsteady breath came from parted lips. Her head
drooped forward again, while the small fist twisted and searched and
found and clasped tight one finger of the hand that held it. She
realized that his free arm was lifted toward her. As she started
forward, her ankles became entangled in the soft pile of satin at her
feet, and she stopped to free them--and started forward again. But
when, at her inarticulate effort at speech, he bent his head to her
swiftly upflung face, her whole slender body tightened at the rough
contact of blue flannel against her cheek. Almost before they held her
she struggled madly from the circle of his arms. White of face, white
of lip, she broke away from him and darted through the gap in the
hedge, only to shrink back against him in panic the next instant before
the black shape upon a blacker horse, between her and the lights.
He was gazing in their direction--the man upon the horse. He was
laughing softly. And when he thrust back the black cowl that hid his
face and began to speak, Stephen O'Mara recognized that terribly pale,
terribly drawn face. Garry Devereau rocked a little in the saddle and
waved a gracefully unsteady hand.
"Blessings, my children!" he called to the two in the shadow, and his
tongue was not thick, but only wavering. "My felicitations! And e'en
though I know not your identity, still I may sense your fond confusion.
And yet--why blush, dear unknowns? 'Tis in the air to-night. Even I
myself have yielded to spirit of frivolity. Two hours ago I appeared
masked in these dingy vestments as Love's Young Dream; but with me the
mood has passed. Fellow romancers, you have witnessed a metamorphosis;
you are now gazing upon the Wrath of God, about to thunder forth upon a
coal black charger. I merely paused to bid you haste inside, lest you
miss the crux of the evening. When I withdrew the Honorable Archie was
already searching, with bravely concealed distraction, for the fair
daughter of the house. The hour has struck--it's masks off--masks off,
from eyes and hearts!"
[Illustration: "Blessings, my children!" he called to the two in the
shadow. "My felicitations! And e'en though I know not your identity,
still I may sense your fond confusion."]
He laughed again, a low and ugly chuckle. Sparks flew from Ragtime's
hoofs when he touched the sleek flanks with his heels and the splendid
animal quivered and bunched hard thigh muscles and spurned the gravel.
White face whiter still against the background of his somber vestments,
debonaire and drunkenly insecure in the saddle, Garret Devereau tore
out into the main road and thundered off into the night.
Barbara Allison stood a long time motionless, her back to the
motionless man so near her. She stood and stared, pale as had been
that black-robed horseman, straight ahead of her. Then a tremor shook
her. Mechanically she started forward, but at the first step Steve's
hand reached out and found her arm and drew her back to him. She faced
about, and waited.
"Is that--true?" he asked her, quietly.
She made no move to answer.
"Is that true?" his low and gentle voice commanded this time. "You
still mean to--marry--him?"
She recovered her voice then. All her confusion and stunned
realization was swallowed up by that tide of fiercely unreasoning,
deadly resentment which his very gentleness evoked. There was nothing
girlish in his reply--nothing boyish in that high-held chin and
stiffened body. A hard note marred her utterance, a perfection of
insolence edged with scorn, which Steve's world did not know. She
wanted but one thing in that moment; she knew but one impulse--a mad
desire to cut and tear and rend savagely his gravely possessed
kindliness.
"What I have done to-night I can never hope to explain," she told him.
"I can only hope that some day I may cease to despise myself as utterly
as you have taught me to, at this minute. And since you choose to
regard it now as your right to ask that question, I'll answer it for
you. I do not _mean_ to marry him. I shall be proud to be his wife!"
The light that streamed over her shoulder fell full upon his face. She
saw the blood pour up, staining throat and cheek and brow, and then ebb
away. She gave him time to answer, but he did not speak; and suddenly
she knew what scene of another day he was remembering. Her eyes
dropped to her imprisoned hand.
"You are--detaining me," she said.
He released her immediately, and yet she did not move. And while she
waited he turned and stooped and turned to her again. She stood like
stone while he wrapped her fur-edged sapphire cloak about her and
fastened it close beneath her uptilted chin. He waited, bare of head,
in the hedge gap until she had crossed the lawn to the house that lay a
sprawling glow-worm in the darkness. A tumult of voices leaped out to
him when she opened the door--a lilting crash of syncopated melody.
And then it was quiet again.
After a glimpse of his chief's eyes that night, Fat Joe essayed not so
much as one facetious protest against turning the fagged team homeward
with scarcely any rest at all. And hour after hour he drove in
silence, checking himself apologetically once or twice when he forgot
himself long enough to burst into the opening strains of his inevitable
ballad. He remained as quiet as that too quiet man beside him, until
Steve himself opened his lips.
"It's a--lonesome night," mused the latter at length.
Fat Joe could not have endured it much longer. His pent-up spirit
leaped fervidly forth in reply.
"Lonesome!" he ejaculated. "Man, it's lonesomer'n hell! Hear that
damn wind sighin' in the branches, as your poets say. Hear her moan!
And look at them clouds edgin' in on the moon like they was thugs
a-packin' blackjacks and waitin' for an openin' to whale in. Lonesome?
Say, it gives me chills, a night like this. It don't seem to have no
heart, somehow, nor mercy nor nuthin', does it? It's all wrong! It
ain't dark enough, and it ain't light enough; it's too quiet, and the
wind makes too much noise. It keeps whisperin' over your shoulder,
tauntin' yuh with somethin' you can't understand. No, sir, this kind
of a night ain't popular with me, at, all, at all! . . . Say, Steve,
how do you pronounce C-e-c-i-l-e?"
Steve pronounced it for him, dully inattentive, but the flood-gates of
speech were opened for Joe.
"That's the way I would of handled it myself," he averred, "but I
wanted to be certain sure. It ain't exactly genteel to call a lady out
of her name, any way you look at it. And not that I've reached that
state of exceedin' intimacy, as you might say, either. I just aim to
be prepared, that's all."
He fell to whistling after that, and almost immediately his thin tenor
was rolling ahead of them, through the black alley between the pines,
to continue in soulful reiteration until the construction camp clearing
loomed up ahead. And there, twice within a hundred yards, with the
long bunk houses already visible, the weird hoot of an owl fluted
through the darkness. At its third repetition Fat Joe's song hushed;
he cocked his head on one side to listen, and shot a glance at Steve,
but he knew that the latter had not heard. And when that night-bird's
call rose again, clear and measured and louder than before, Fat Joe
tightened the reins above the fagged team; he shot forward suddenly and
laid the whip across their tired flanks as they cleared the last
breastwork of trees.
Steve's head was jerked backward by the abruptness of their first
plunge; and then he saw what Fat Joe had seen a second before. High up
on the hillside there was a light glowing from the windows of the shack
which served the chief engineer of the East Coast job as office and
domicile, too. While Fat Joe laid on the whip a man came hurtling past
the outflung door, sprang to his feet and, running low to the ground,
disappeared into the blackness of the brush. Joe swung the horses up
in a galloping curve and with one catlike leap, incredibly light for a
man of his chunky build, was down from the seat and crashing through
the bushes on the trail of that fugitive whose noisy flight had already
become a faint crackle in the distance.
Flame poured from Fat Joe's revolver. Two whiplike reports shattered
the night quiet before Stephen O'Mara moved. Then he lifted himself
heavily from the seat. Something nuzzled his shoulder while he stood
listening to the diminishing tumult of the pursuit; and even before he
turned he knew what it was. He paused a moment to stroke the soft nose
of the black horse standing there with reins a-trail. It was Ragtime,
wet with lather and caked with dust. But even then he was not prepared
for the sight which met him when he entered the shack. Seconds must
have passed while he stood staring from the threshold, for Fat Joe came
puffing back from his fruitless chase in time to see him bend and lift
a black-robed, lifelessly limp body from the floor and stagger with it
toward a bunk. Fat Joe's steady flow of profanity, oddly, double
vicious in his thin, complaining voice, was checked short. He, too,
stood and stared from the doorway--stood and lifted his nose and
sniffed.
"Seems to be our night for callers," he remarked with bad mildness;
"and, say, this one's got a peach of a load, ain't he?"
Then Garry Devereau's head rolled over, ghastly loose and slack, and
the plump one caught sight of a ragged gash in the senseless man's
temple.
"So-o, that's it?" he droned, and his complaining voice was deadly
again. "So that's it! But he wasn't so far gone that he couldn't put
up a tidy little battle, was he? Funny about that, too, but I could
always do my best little jobs of man-handling when I was about
half-over myself."
His pale eyes swept the floor; he pounced forward and recovered a sheaf
of blue-prints from a corner.
"This, I take it," he muttered, "was what they was arguing about when
we busted in. Steve, them's our bridge estimates--and there wa'n't no
copies of 'em, either. It wouldn't take us more than two weeks to
replace 'em neither--not more'n two precious, priceless weeks. I'm
only hopin' now that when our other caller, who seems to want them more
than we do, calls again, I'll be here myself to entertain him, with tea
or somethin'. I'd plumb hate to seem so inhospitable as not to be
home, twice hand-runnin', to visitors."
Fat Joe's round face was congested with murderous rage before he had
finished, but Steve seemed hardly to have heard him at all. He had
finally straightened out that sickeningly slack figure upon his own
bunk. He was listening now to his heart, and at a jerk of his head Fat
Joe joined him at the bedside. The latter's thick fingers were as
delicate, as competent, as a skilled physician's might have been. He,
too, listened and peeled back the unconscious man's eyelids. He shook
his head, dubiously.
"Maybe that was a tidy little battle, while it lasted," he stated, "but
it ain't deuce high alongside this fight we've got on our hands right
now. For he's just as near over as I'd care to see a man, unless it
was someone I'd a little prefer dead! It ain't that scratch on the
head that's got him slippin', either." Joe paused and turned to
address Garry Devereau's still white face itself. "You sat in an'
backed my game like a gentleman born," he said, "and now I'm a-goin' to
play yourn, blue chips and white and yello'. But this is goin' to be
your last celebration, friend of mine, even if we do win through, or
you'll be holdin' your next one where the company ain't so select and
the climate nuthin' to compare with ourn!"
And while he talked he worked, for it was Fat Joe who gave the orders
that night. He called for ammonia, for brandy, for a half-dozen drugs
from the camp hospital chest; and each of them Steve brought in an
automatic fashion that finally penetrated even Fat Joe's professional
pleasure in the struggle.
"Friend of yourn?" he asked in an interval while they rested.
"A friend," Steve repeated with a tightening of his jaws, and Joe knew
what that tone meant.
After that they fought on in silence, side by side--sometimes waiting,
sometimes fighting, both of them, to hold that horribly racked man upon
the bed. He fought them with every pound of strength in his emaciated
body. He moaned up at them, screamed at them, cursed them frothingly,
and Fat Joe hung on and cursed him back--cursed him and promised him
profanely that he would not let him die. Steve's face was gray, sweat
was pouring from Fat Joe's scarlet face when the life-tide ebbed lowest
and there came a sudden cessation in that stream of babbled madness,
Garry Devereau lay so quiet that an oath jerked huskily from Fat Joe's
lips; but when he had listened at the motionless chest he lifted his
head and smiled, seraphically.
"There, by God," he stated in his high, complaining tenor, "there, by
God! And if I ain't created a vacancy in the angel chorus aloft, then
I'm a liar!"
And his explosive diagnosis proved to be as correct as it was utterly
unprofane in spirit. Before day broke there came an hour when Garry
Devereau lifted himself upon one elbow and opened his eyes to stare
half wildly, but very sanely, about the room. His gaze flitted
wonderingly from wall to wall before it rested, fearfully fixed, upon
Steve's brown face. Instantly he looked away, flinchingly, and met Fat
Joe's voluminous grin--and looked back again, cunningly cautious.
Finally he reached out a timid, blue-veined, pitifully unsteady hand
and plucked at Steve's blue flannel sleeve. And his words were an echo
of those which Stephen O'Mara had heard before that night from other
lips.
"Then you--are you," he framed the words laboriously. "I wasn't
sure--even when I knew it must be."
And Garry Devereau tried to smile--his slow smile of sophistry.
"Greetings, Sir Galahad!" he faltered. "And how are you, Steve--and
who might your--fat friend be?"