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Title: The Price

Author: Francis Lynde

Release Date: October 4, 2006 [EBook #19462]

Language: English

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THE PRICE

BY

FRANCIS LYNDE

AUTHOR OF
THE TAMING OF RED BUTTE WESTERN, ETC.

[Illustration]

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Published by Arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons


COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published May, 1911

[Illustration]


To

MR. LATHROP BROCKWAY BULLENE

SOLE FRIEND OF MY BOYHOOD, WHO WILL RECALL BETTER
THAN ANY THE YOUTHFUL MORAL AND SOCIAL SEED-TIME
WHICH HAS LED TO THIS LATER HARVESTING OF CONCLUSION,
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                PAGE

      I. AT CHAUDIERE'S                   1

     II. SPINDRIFT                        9

    III. THE RIGHT OF MIGHT              16

     IV. _IO TRIUMPHE!_                  26

      V. THE _BELLE JULIE_               34

     VI. THE DECK-HAND                   44

    VII. GOLD OF TOLOSA                  53

   VIII. THE CHAIN-GANG                  59

     IX. THE MIDDLE WATCH                68

      X. QUICKSANDS                      75

     XI. THE ANARCHIST                   84

    XII. MOSES ICHTHYOPHAGUS             94

   XIII. GRISWOLD EMERGENT              110

    XIV. PHILISTIA                      116

     XV. THE GOTHS AND VANDALS          126

    XVI. GOOD SAMARITANS                143

   XVII. GROPINGS                       154

  XVIII. THE ZWEIBUND                   165

    XIX. LOSS AND GAIN                  175

     XX. THE CONVALESCENT               187

    XXI. BROFFIN'S EQUATION             201

   XXII. IN THE BURGLAR-PROOF           218

  XXIII. CONVERGING ROADS               234

   XXIV. THE FORWARD LIGHT              248

    XXV. THE BRIDGE OF JEHENNAM         260

   XXVI. PITFALLS                       274

  XXVII. IN THE SHADOWS                 286

 XXVIII. BROKEN LINKS                   295

   XXIX. ALL THAT A MAN HATH            312

    XXX. THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES        332

   XXXI. NARROWING WALLS                347

  XXXII. THE LION'S SHARE               354

 XXXIII. GATES OF BRASS                 368

  XXXIV. THE ABYSS                      375

   XXXV. MARGERY'S ANSWER               384

  XXXVI. THE GRAY WOLF                  396

 XXXVII. THE QUALITY OF MERCY           408

XXXVIII. THE PENDULUM-SWING             416

  XXXIX. DUST AND ASHES                 428

     XL. APPLES OF ISTAKHAR             438

    XLI. THE DESERT AND THE SOWN        448




THE PRICE

I

AT CHAUDIERE'S


In the days when New Orleans still claimed distinction as the only
American city without trolleys, sky-scrapers, or fast trains--was it
yesterday? or the day before?--there was a dingy, cobwebbed cafe in an
arcade off Camp Street which was well-beloved of newspaperdom;
particularly of that wing of the force whose activities begin late and
end in the small hours.

"Chaudiere's," it was called, though I know not if that were the name of
the round-faced, round-bodied little Marseillais who took toll at the
desk. But all men knew the fame of its gumbo and its stuffed crabs, and
that its claret was neither very bad nor very dear. And if the walls
were dingy and the odors from the grille pungent and penetrating at
times, there went with the white-sanded floor, and the marble-topped
tables for two, an Old-World air of recreative comfort which is rarer
now, even in New Orleans, than it was yesterday or the day before.

It was at Chaudiere's that Griswold had eaten his first breakfast in the
Crescent City; and it was at Chaudiere's again that he was sharing a
farewell supper with Bainbridge, of the _Louisianian_. Six weeks lay
between that and this; forty-odd days of discouragement and failure
superadded upon other similar days and weeks and months. The breakfast,
he remembered, had been garnished with certain green sprigs of hope; but
at the supper-table he ate like a barbarian in arrears to his appetite
and the garnishings were the bitter herbs of humiliation and defeat.

Without meaning to, Bainbridge had been strewing the path with fresh
thorns for the defeated one. He had just been billeted for a run down
the Central American coast to write up the banana trade for his paper,
and he was boyishly jubilant over the assignment, which promised to be a
zestful pleasure trip. Chancing upon Griswold in the first flush of his
elation, he had dragged the New Yorker around to Chaudiere's to play
second knife and fork at a small parting feast. Not that it had required
much persuasion. Griswold had fasted for twenty-four hours, and he would
have broken bread thankfully with an enemy. And if Bainbridge were not a
friend in a purist's definition of the term, he was at least a friendly
acquaintance.

Until the twenty-four-hour fast was in some measure atoned for, the
burden of the table-talk fell upon Bainbridge, who lifted and carried it
generously on the strength of his windfall. But no topic can be
immortal; and when the vacation under pay had been threshed out in all
its anticipatory details it occurred to the host that his guest was less
than usually responsive; a fault not to be lightly condoned under the
joyous circumstances. Wherefore he protested.

"What's the matter with you to-night, Kenneth, old man? You're more than
commonly grumpy, it seems to me; and that's needless."

Griswold took the last roll from the joint bread-plate and buttered it
methodically.

"Am I?" he said. "Perhaps it is because I am more than commonly hungry.
But go on with your joy-talk: I'm listening."

"That's comforting, as far as it goes; but I should think you might say
something a little less carefully polarized. You don't have a chance to
congratulate lucky people every day."

Griswold looked up with a smile that was almost ill-natured, and quoted
cynically: "'Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that
which he hath.'"

Bainbridge's laugh was tolerant enough to take the edge from his retort.

"That's a pretty thing to fling at a man who never knifed you or
pistoled you or tried to poison you! An innocent by-stander might say
you envied me."

"I do," rejoined Griswold gravely. "I envy any man who can earn enough
money to pay for three meals a day and a place to sleep in."

"Oh, cat's foot!--anybody can do that," asserted Bainbridge, with the
air of one to whom the struggle for existence has been a mere athlete's
practice run.

"I know; that is your theory. But the facts disprove it. I can't, for
one."

"Oh, yes, you could, if you'd side-track some of your own theories and
come down to sawing wood like the rest of us. But you won't do that."

Griswold was a fair man, with reddish hair and beard and the quick and
sensitive skin of the type. A red flush of anger crept up under the
closely cropped beard, and his eyes were bright.

"That is not true, and you know it, Bainbridge," he contradicted,
speaking slowly lest his temper should break bounds. "Is it my fault, or
only my misfortune, that I can do nothing but write books for which I
can't find a publisher? Or that the work of a hack-writer is quite as
impossible for me as mine is for him?"

Bainbridge scoffed openly; but he was good-natured enough to make amends
when he saw that Griswold was moved.

"I take it all back," he said. "I suppose the book-chicken has come home
again to roost, and a returned manuscript accounts for anything. But
seriously, Kenneth, you ought to get down to bed-rock facts. Nobody but
a crazy phenomenon can find a publisher for his first book, nowadays,
unless he has had some sort of an introduction in the magazines or the
newspapers. You haven't had that; so far as I know, you haven't tried
for it."

"Oh, yes, I have--tried and failed. It isn't in me to do the salable
thing, and there isn't a magazine editor in the country who doesn't know
it by this time. They've been decent about it. Horton was kind enough.
He covered two pages of a letter telling me why the stuff I sent from
here might fit one of the reviews and why it wouldn't fit his magazine.
But that is beside the mark. I tell you, Bainbridge, the conditions are
all wrong when a man with a vital message to his kind can't get to
deliver it to the people who want to hear it."

Bainbridge ordered the small coffees and found his cigar case.

"That is about what I suspected," he commented impatiently. "You
couldn't keep your peculiar views muzzled even when you were writing a
bit of a pot-boiler on sugar-planting. Which brings us back to the old
contention: you drop your fool socialistic fad and write a book that a
reputable publisher can bring out without committing commercial suicide,
and you'll stand some show. Light up and fumigate that idea awhile."

Griswold took the proffered cigar half-absently, as he had taken the
last piece of bread.

"It doesn't need fumigating; if I could consider it seriously it ought
rather to be burnt with fire. You march in the ranks of the well-fed,
Bainbridge, and it is your _metier_ to be conservative. I don't, and
it's mine to be radical."

"What would you have?" demanded the man on the conservative side of the
table. "The world is as it is, and you can't remodel it."

"There is where you make the mistake common to those who cry Peace, when
there is no peace," was the quick retort. "I, and my kind, can remodel
it, and some day, when the burden has grown too heavy to be borne, we
will. The aristocracy of rank, birth, feudal tyranny went down in fire
and blood in France a century ago: the aristocracy of money will go down
here, when the time is ripe."

"That is good anarchy, but mighty bad ethics. I didn't know you had
reached that stage of the disease, Kenneth."

"Call it what you please; names don't change facts. Listen"--Griswold
leaned upon the table; his eyes grew hard and the blue in them became
metallic--"For more than a month I have tramped the streets of this
cursed city begging--yes, that is the word--begging for work of any kind
that would suffice to keep body and soul together; and for more than
half of that time I have lived on one meal a day. That is what we have
come to; we of the submerged majority. And that isn't all. The
wage-worker himself, when he is fortunate enough to find a chance to
earn his crust, is but a serf; a chattel among the other possessions of
some fellow man who has acquired him in the plutocratic redistribution
of the earth and the fulness thereof."

Bainbridge applauded in dumb show.

"Turn it loose and ease the soul-sickness, old man," he said
indulgently. "I know things haven't been coming your way, lately. What
is your remedy?"

Griswold was fairly started now, and ridicule was as fuel to the flame.

"The money-gatherers have set us the example. They have made us
understand that might is right; that he who has may hold--if he can. The
answer is simple: there is enough and to spare for all, and it belongs
to all; to him who sows the seed and waters it, as well as to him who
reaps the harvest. That is a violent remedy, you will say. So be it: it
is the only one that will cure the epidemic of greed. There is an
alternative, but it is only theoretical."

"And that?"

"It may be summed up in seven words: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself.' When the man who employs--and rules--uses the power that money
gives him to succor his fellow man, the revolution will be indefinitely
postponed. But as I say, it's only a theory."

Bainbridge glanced at his watch.

"I must be going," he said. "The _Adelantado_ drops down the river at
eleven. But in passing I'll venture a little prophecy. You're down on
your luck now, and a bit hot-hearted in consequence; but some day you
will strike it right and come out on top. When you do, you'll be a hard
master; tattoo that on your arm somewhere so you'll be reminded of it."

Griswold had risen with his entertainer, and he put his hands on the
table.

"God do so to me, and more, if I am, Bainbridge," he said soberly.

"That's all right: when the time comes, you just remember my little
fortune-telling stunt. But before we shake hands, let's get back to
concrete things for a minute or two. How are you fixed for the present,
and what are you going to do for the future?"

Griswold's smile was not pleasant to look at.

"I am 'fixed' to run twenty-four hours longer, thanks to your
hospitality. For that length of time I presume I shall continue to
conform to what we have been taught to believe is the immutable order of
things. After that----"

He paused, and Bainbridge put the question. "Well, after that; what
then?"

"Then, if the chance to earn it is still denied me, and I am
sufficiently hungry, I shall stretch forth my hand and take what I
need."

Bainbridge fished in his pocket and took out a ten-dollar bank-note. "Do
that first," he said, offering Griswold the money.

The proletary smiled and shook his head.

"No; not to keep from going hungry--not even to oblige you, Bainbridge.
It is quite possible that I shall end by becoming a robber, as you
paraphrasers would put it, but I sha'n't begin on my friends.
Good-night, and a safe voyage to you."




II

SPINDRIFT


The fruit steamer _Adelantado_, outward bound, was shuddering to the
first slow revolutions of her propeller when Bainbridge turned the key
in the door of the stuffy little state-room to which he had been
directed, and went on deck.

The lines had been cast off and the ship was falling by imperceptible
inches away from her broadside berth at the fruit wharf. Bainbridge
heard the distance-softened clang of a gong; the tremulous murmur of the
screw became more pronounced, and the vessel forged ahead until the
current caught the outward-swinging prow. Five minutes later the
_Adelantado_ had circled majestically in mid-stream and was passing the
lights of the city in review as she steamed at half-speed down the
river.

Bainbridge had no mind to go back to the stuffy state-room, late as it
was. Instead, he lighted a fresh cigar and found a chair on the port
side aft where he could sit and watch the lights wheel past in orderly
procession as the fruit steamer swept around the great crescent which
gives New Orleans its unofficial name.

While the comfortable feeling of elation, born of his unexpected bit of
good fortune, was still uppermost to lend complacency to his
reflections, he yet found room for a compassionate underthought having
for its object the man from whom he had lately parted. He was honestly
sorry for Griswold; sorry, but not actually apprehensive. He had known
the defeated one in New York, and was not unused to his rebellious
outbursts against the accepted order of things. Granting that his
theories were incendiary and crudely subversive of all the civilized
conventions, Griswold the man was nothing worse than an impressionable
enthusiast; a victim of the auto-suggestion which seizes upon those who
dwell too persistently upon the wrongs of the wronged.

So ran Bainbridge's epitomizing of the proletary's case; and he knew
that his opinion was shared with complete unanimity by all who had known
Griswold in Printing House Square. To a man they agreed in calling him
Utopian, altruistic, visionary. What milder epithets should be applied
to one who, with sufficient literary talent--not to say genius--to make
himself a working name in the ordinary way, must needs run amuck among
the theories and write a novel with a purpose? a novel, moreover, in
which the purpose so overshadowed the story as to make the book a mere
preachment.

As a matter of course, the publishers would have nothing to do with the
book. Bainbridge remembered, with considerable satisfaction, that he had
confidently predicted its failure, and had given Griswold plentiful good
advice while it was in process of writing. But Griswold, being quite as
obstinate as he was impressionable, had refused to profit by the
advice, and now the consequences of his stubbornness were upon him. He
had said truly that his literary gift was novelistic and nothing else;
and here he was, stranded and desperate, with the moribund book on his
hands, and with no chance to write another even if he were so minded,
since one can not write fasting.

Thus Bainbridge reflected, and was sorry that Griswold's invincible
pride had kept him from accepting a friendly stop-gap in his extremity.
Yet he smiled in spite of the regretful thought. It was amusing to
figure Griswold, who, as long as his modest patrimony had lasted had
been most emphatically a man not of the people, posing as an anarchist
and up in arms against the well-to-do world. None the less, he was to be
pitied.

"Poor beggar! he is in the doldrums just now, and it isn't quite fair to
hold him responsible for what he says or thinks--or for what he thinks
he thinks," said the reporter, letting the thought slip into speech.
"Just the same, I wish I had made him take that ten-dollar bill. It
might have-- Why, hello, Broffin! How are you, old man? Where the
dickens did you drop from?"

It was the inevitable steamer acquaintance who is always at hand to
prove the trite narrowness of the world, and Bainbridge kicked a chair
into comradely place for him.

Broffin, heavy-browed and clean-shaven save for a thick mustache that
hid the hard-bitted mouth, replaced the chair to suit himself and sat
down. In appearance he was a cross between a steamboat captain on a
vacation, and an up-river plantation overseer recovering from his annual
pleasure trip to the city. But his reply to Bainbridge's query proved
that he was neither.

"I didn't drop; I walked. More than that, I kept step with you all the
way from Chaudiere's to the levee. You'd be dead easy game for an
amateur."

"You'll get yourself disliked, the first thing you know," said
Bainbridge, laughing. "Can't you ever forget that you are in the
man-hunting business?"

"Yes; just as often, and for just as long, as you can forget that you
are in the news-hunting business."

"Tally!" said Bainbridge, and he laughed again. After which they sat in
silence until the _Adelantado_ doubled the bend in the great river and
the last outposts of the city's lights disappeared, leaving only a
softened glow in the upper air to temper the velvety blackness of the
April night. The steamer had passed Chalmette when Broffin said:

"Speaking of Chaudiere's reminds me: who was that fellow you were
telling good-by as you came out of the cafe? His face was as familiar as
a ship's figure-head, but I couldn't place him."

The question coupled in automatically with the reporter's train of
thought; hence he answered it rather more fully and freely than he might
have at another time and under other conditions. From establishing
Griswold's identity for his fellow passenger, he slipped by easy stages
into the story of the proletary's ups and downs, climaxing it with a
vivid little word-painting of the farewell supper at Chaudiere's.

"To hear him talk, you would size him up for a bloody-minded nihilist of
the thirty-third degree, ready and honing to sweep the existing order of
things into the farthest hence," he added. "But in reality he is one of
the finest fellows in the world, gone a fraction morbid over the
economic side of the social problem. He has a heart of gold, as I happen
to know. He used to spend a good bit of his time in the backwater, and
you know what the backwater of a big city will do to a man."

"I couldn't hold my job if I didn't," was the reply.

"That means that you know only half of it," Bainbridge asserted with
cheerful dogmatism. "You're thinking of the crooks it turns out, 'which
it is your nature to.' But Griswold wasn't looking for the crooks; he
was eternally and everlastingly breaking his heart over the sodden
miseries. One night he stumbled into a cellar somewhere down in the East
Side lower levels, looking for a fellow he had been trying to find work
for; a crippled 'longshoreman. When he got into the place he found the
man stiff and cold, the woman with the death rattle in her throat, and a
two-year-old baby creeping back and forth between the dead father and
the dying mother--starvation, you know, straight from the shoulder. They
say it doesn't happen; but it does."

"Of course it does!" growled the listener. "_I_ know."

"We all know; and most of us drop a little something into the hat and
pass on. But Griswold isn't built that way. He jumped into the breach
like a man and tried to save the mother. It was too late, and when the
woman died he took the child to his own eight-by-ten attic and nursed
and fed it until the missionary people took it off his hands. He did
that, mind you, when he was living on two meals a day, himself; and I'm
putting it up that he went shy on one of them to buy milk for that kid."

"Holy Smoke!--and he calls himself an anarchist?" was the gruff comment.
"It's a howling pity there ain't a lot more just like him--what?"

"That is what I say," Bainbridge agreed. Then, with a sudden twinge of
remorse for having told Griswold's story to a stranger, he changed the
subject with an abrupt question.

"Where are you headed for, Broffin?"

The man who might have passed for a steamboat captain or a plantation
overseer, and was neither, chuckled dryly.

"You don't expect me to give it away to you, and you a newspaper man, do
you? But I will--seeing you can't get it on the wires. I'm going down to
Guatemala after Mortsen."

"The Crescent Bank defaulter? By Jove! you've found him at last, have
you?"

The detective nodded. "It takes a good while, sometimes, but I don't
fall down very often when there's enough money in it to make the game
worth the candle. I've been two years, off and on, trying to locate
Mortsen: and now that I've found him, he is where he can't be
extradited. All the same, I'll bet you five to one he goes back with me
in the next steamer--what? Have a new smoke. No? Then let's go and turn
in; it's getting late in the night."




III

THE RIGHT OF MIGHT


Two days after the supper at Chaudiere's and the clearing of the fruit
steamer _Adelantado_ for the banana coast, or, more specifically, in the
forenoon of the second day, the unimpetuous routine of the business
quarter of New Orleans was rudely disturbed by the shock of a genuine
sensation.

To shatter at a single blow the most venerable of the routine
precedents, the sensational thing chose for its colliding point with
orderly system one of the oldest and most conservative of the city's
banks: the Bayou State Security. At ten o'clock, following the precise
habit of half a lifetime, Mr. Andrew Galbraith, president of the Bayou
State, entered his private room in the rear of the main banking
apartment, opened his desk, and addressed himself to the business of the
day. Punctually at ten-five, the stenographer, whose desk was in the
anteroom, brought in the mail; five minutes later the cashier entered
for his morning conference with his superior; and at half-past the hour
the president was left alone to read his correspondence.

Being a man whose mental processes were all serious, and whose hobby was
method, Mr. Galbraith had established a custom of giving himself a
quiet half-hour of inviolable seclusion in which to read and consider
his mail. During this sacred interval the stenographer, standing guard
in the outer office, had instructions to deny his chief to callers of
any and every degree. Wherefore, when, at twenty minutes to eleven, the
door of the private office opened to admit a stranger, the president was
justly annoyed.

"Well, sir; what now?" he demanded, impatiently, taking the intruder's
measure in a swift glance shot from beneath his bushy white eyebrows.

The unannounced visitor was a young man of rather prepossessing
appearance, a trifle tall for his breadth of shoulder, fair, with blue
eyes and a curling reddish beard and mustache, the former trimmed to a
point. So much the president was able to note in the appraisive
glance--and to remember afterward.

The caller made no reply to the curt question. He had turned and was
closing the door. There was a quiet insistence in the act that was like
the flick of a whip to Mr. Galbraith's irritation.

"If you have business with me, you'll have to excuse me for a few
minutes," he protested, still more impatiently. "Be good enough to take
a seat in the anteroom until I ring. MacFarland should have told you."

The young man drew up a chair and sat down, ignoring the request as if
he had failed to hear it. Ordinarily Mr. Andrew Galbraith's temper was
equable enough; the age-cooled temper of a methodical gentleman whose
long upper lip was in itself an advertisement of self-control. But such
a deliberate infraction of his rules, coupled with the stony impudence
of the visitor, made him spring up angrily to ring for the watchman.

The intruder was too quick for him. When his hand sought the bell-push
he found himself looking into the muzzle of a revolver, and so was fain
to fall back into his chair, gasping.

"Ah-h-h!" he stammered. And when the words could be managed: "So that's
it, is it?--you're a robber!"

"No," said the invader of the presidential privacies calmly, speaking
for the first time since his incoming. "I am not a robber, save in your
own very limited definition of the word. I am merely a poor man, Mr.
Galbraith--one of the uncounted thousands--and I want money. If you call
for help, I shall shoot you."

"You--you'd murder me?" The president's large-jointed hands were
clutching the arms of the pivot-chair, and he was fighting manfully for
courage and presence of mind to cope with the terrifying emergency.

"Not willingly, I assure you: I have as great a regard for human life as
you have--but no more. You would kill me this moment in self-defence, if
you could: I shall most certainly kill you if you attempt to give an
alarm. On the other hand, if you prove reasonable and obedient your life
is not in danger. It is merely a question of money, and if you are
amenable to reason----"

"If I'm--but I'm not amenable to your reasons!" blustered the president,
recovering a little from the first shock of terrified astoundment. "I
refuse to listen to them. I'll not have anything to do with you. Go
away!"

The young man's smile showed his teeth, but it also proved that he was
not wholly devoid of the sense of humor.

"Keep your temper, Mr. Galbraith," he advised coolly. "The moment is
mine, and I say you shall listen first and obey afterward. Otherwise you
die. Which is it to be? Choose quickly--time is precious."

The president yielded the first point, that of the receptive ear; but
grudgingly and as one under strict compulsion.

"Well, well, then; out with it. What have you to say for yourself?"

"This: You are rich: you represent the existing order of things. I am
poor, and I stand for my necessity, which is higher than any man-made
law or custom. You have more money than you can possibly use in any
legitimate personal channels: I have not the price of the next meal,
already twenty-four hours overdue. I came here this morning with my life
in my hand to invite you to share with me a portion of that which is
yours chiefly by the right of possession. If you do it, well and good:
if not, there will be a new president of the Bayou State Security. Do I
make myself sufficiently explicit?"

Andrew Galbraith glanced furtively at the paper-weight clock on his
desk. It was nearly eleven, and MacFarland would surely come in on the
stroke of the hour. If he could only fend off the catastrophe for a few
minutes, until help should come. He searched in his pockets and drew
forth a handful of coins.

"You say you are hungry: I'm na that well off that I canna remember the
time when I knew what it was to be on short commons, mysel'," he said;
and the unconscious lapse into the mother idiom was a measure of his
perturbation. "Take this, now, and be off wi' you, and we'll say no more
about it."

The invader of privacies glanced at the clock in his turn and shook his
head.

"You are merely trying to gain time, and you know it, Mr. Galbraith. My
stake in this game is much more than a handful of charity silver; and I
don't do you the injustice to believe that you hold your life so
cheaply; you who have so much money and, at best, so few years to live."

The president put the little heap of coins on the desk, but he did not
abandon the struggle for delay.

"What's your price, then?" he demanded, as one who may possibly consider
a compromise.

"One hundred thousand dollars--in cash."

"But man! ye're clean daft! Do ye think I have----"

"I am not here to argue," was the incisive interruption. "Take your pen
and fill out a check payable to your own order for one hundred thousand
dollars, and do it now. If that door opens before we have concluded, you
are a dead man!"

At this Andrew Galbraith saw that the end was nigh and gathered himself
for a final effort at time-killing. It was absurd; he had no such
balance to his personal credit; such a check would not be honored; it
would be an overdraft, and the teller would very properly-- In the midst
of his vehement protests the stranger sprang out of his chair, stepped
back a pace and raised his weapon.

"Mr. Galbraith, you are juggling with your life! Write that check while
there is yet time!"

A sound of subdued voices came from the anteroom, and the beleaguered
old man stole a swift upward glance at the face of his persecutor. There
was no mercy in the fierce blue eyes glaring down upon him; neither
compassion nor compunction, but rather madness and fell murder. The
summons came once again.

"Do it quickly, I say, before we are interrupted. Do you hear?"

Truly, the president both heard and understood; yet he hesitated one
other second.

"You will not? Then may God have mercy----"

The hammer of the levelled pistol clicked. Andrew Galbraith shut his
eyes and made a blind grasp for pen and check-book. His hands were
shaking as with a palsy, but the fear of death steadied them suddenly
when he came to write.

"Indorse it!" was the next command. The voices had ceased beyond the
partition, and the dead silence was relieved only by the labored
strokes of the president's pen and the tap-tap of the typewriter in the
adjacent anteroom.

The check was written and indorsed, and under the menace of the revolver
Andrew Galbraith was trying to give it to the robber. But the robber
would not take it.

"No, I don't want your paper: come with me to your paying teller and get
me the money. Make what explanation you see fit; but remember--if he
hesitates, you die."

They left the private office together, the younger man a short half-step
in the rear, with his pistol-bearing hand thrust under his coat.
MacFarland, the stenographer, was at his desk in the corner of the
anteroom. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the unwonted thing, the
president's forthfaring with a stranger who had somehow gained access to
the private room during the sacred half-hour, would have made him look
up and wonder. But this was the hundredth time, and Andrew Galbraith's
anxious glance aside was wasted upon MacFarland's back.

Still the president did not despair. In the public lobby there would be
more eyes to see, and perhaps some that would understand. Mr. Galbraith
took a firmer hold upon his self-possession and trusted that some happy
chance might yet intervene to save him.

But chance did not intervene. There was a goodly number of customers in
the public space, but not one of the half-dozen or more who nodded to
the president or passed the time of day with him saw the eye-appeal
which was the only one he dared to make. On the short walk around to the
paying teller's window, the robber kept even step with his victim, and
try as he would, Andrew Galbraith could not summon the courage to forget
the pistol muzzle menacing him in its coat-covered ambush.

At the paying wicket there was only one customer, instead of the group
the president had hoped to find; a sweet-faced young woman in a modest
travelling hat and a gray coat. She was getting a draft cashed, and when
she saw them she would have stood aside. It was the robber who
anticipated her intention and forbade it with a courteous gesture;
whereat she turned again to the window to conclude her small transaction
with the teller.

The few moments which followed were terribly trying ones for the
gray-haired president of the Bayou State Security. None the less, his
brain was busy with the chanceful possibilities. Failing all else, he
was determined to give the teller a warning signal, come what might. It
was a duty owed to society no less than to the bank and to himself. But
on the pinnacle of resolution, at the instant when, with the robber at
his elbow, he stepped to the window and presented the check, Andrew
Galbraith felt the gentle pressure of the pistol muzzle against his
side; nay, more; he fancied he could feel the cold chill of the metal
strike through and through him.

So it came about that the fine resolution had quite evaporated when he
said, with what composure there was in him: "You'll please give me
currency for that, Johnson."

The teller glanced at the check and then at his superior; not too
inquisitively, since it was not his business to question the president's
commands.

"How will you have it?" he asked; and it was the stranger at Mr.
Galbraith's elbow who answered.

"One thousand in fives, tens, and twenties, loose, if you please; the
remainder in the largest denominations, put up in a package."

The teller counted out the one thousand in small notes quickly; but he
had to leave the cage and go to the vault for the huge remainder. This
was the crucial moment of peril for the robber, and the president,
stealing a glance at the face of his persecutor, saw the blue eyes
blazing with excitement.

"It is your time to pray, Mr. Galbraith," said the spoiler in low tones.
"If you have given your man the signal----"

But the signal had not been given. The teller was re-entering the cage
with the bulky packet of money-paper.

"You needn't open it," said the young man at the president's elbow. "The
bank's count is good enough for me." And when the window wicket had been
unlatched and the money passed out, he stuffed the loose bills
carelessly into his pocket, put the package containing the ninety-nine
thousand dollars under his arm, nodded to the president, backed swiftly
to the street door and vanished.

Then it was that Mr. Andrew Galbraith suddenly found speech, opening
his thin lips and pouring forth a torrent of incoherence which presently
got itself translated into a vengeful hue and cry; and New Orleans the
unimpetuous had its sensation ready-made.




IV

_IO TRIUMPHE!_


If Kenneth Griswold, backing out of the street door of the Bayou State
Security and vanishing with his booty, had been nothing more than a
professional "strong-arm man," he would probably have been taken and
jailed within the hour, if only for the reason that his desperate cast
for fortune included no well-wrought-out plan of escape. But since he
was at once both wiser and less cunning than the practised bank robber,
he threw his pursuers off the scent by an expedient in which artlessness
and daring quite beyond the gifts of the journeyman criminal played
equal parts.

Once safely in the street, with a thousand dollars in his pocket and the
packet of bank-notes under his arm, he was seized by an impulse to do
some extravagant thing to celebrate his success. It had proved to be
such a simple matter, after all: one bold stroke; a tussle, happily
bloodless, with the plutocratic dragon whose hold upon his treasure was
so easily broken; and presto! the hungry proletary had become himself a
power in the world, strong to do good or evil, as the gods might direct.

This was the prompting to exultation as it might have been set in words;
but in Griswold's thought it was but a swift suggestion, followed
instantly by another which was much more to the immediate purpose. He
was hungry: there was a restaurant next door to the bank. Without
thinking overmuch of the risk he ran, and perhaps not at all of the
audacious subtlety of such an expedient at such a critical moment, he
went in, sat down at one of the small marble-topped tables, and calmly
ordered breakfast.

Since hunger is a lusty special pleader, making itself heard above any
pulpit drum of the higher faculties, it is quite probable that Griswold
dwelt less upon what he had done than upon what he was about to eat,
until the hue and cry in the street reminded him that the chase was
begun. But at this, not to appear suspiciously incurious, he put on the
mask of indifferent interest and asked the waiter concerning the uproar.

The serving man did not know what had happened, but he would go and find
out, if M'sieu' so desired. "M'sieu'" said breakfast first, by all
means, and information afterward. Both came in due season; and the
hungry one ate while he listened.

Transmuted into the broken English of the Gascon serving man, the story
of the robbery lost nothing in its sensational features.

"Ah! w'at you t'ink, M'sieu'? De bank on de nex' do' is been rob'!" And
upon this theme excited volubility descanted at large. The bank had been
surrounded by a gang of desperate men, with every exit guarded, while
the leader, a masked giant armed to the teeth, had compelled the
president at the muzzle of a pistol to pay a ransom of fifty--one
hundred--five hundred thousand dollars! With the money in hand the gang
had vanished, the masked giant firing the pistol at M'sieu' the
president as he went. Cross-examined, the waiter could not affirm
positively as to the shot. But as for the remaining details there could
be no doubt.

Griswold ordered a second cup of coffee, and while the waiter was
bringing it, conscience--not the newly acquired conscience, but the
conventional--bent its bow and sped its final arrow. It was suddenly
brought home to the enthusiast with sharp emphasis that to all civilized
mankind, save and excepting those few chosen ones who shared his
peculiar convictions, he was a common thief, a bandit, an outlaw. Public
opinion, potential or expressed, is at best but an intangible thing. But
for a few tumultuous seconds Griswold writhed under the ban of it as if
it had been a whip of scorpions. Then he smiled to think how strong the
bonds of custom had grown; and at the smile conscience flung away its
empty quiver.

Now it was over, however, the enthusiast was rather grateful for the
chastening. It served to remind him afresh of his mission. This money
which he had just wrested from the claws of the plutocratic dragon must
be held as a sacred trust; it must be devoted scrupulously to the cause
of the down-trodden and the oppressed. Precisely how it was to be
applied he had not yet determined; but that could be decided later.

Meanwhile, it was very evident that the dragon did not intend to accept
defeat without a struggle, and Griswold set his wits at work upon the
problem of escape.

"It's a little queer that I hadn't thought of that part of it before,"
he mused, sipping his coffee as one who need not hasten until the race
is actually begun. "I suppose the other fellow, the real robber, would
have figured himself safely out of it--or would have thought he
had--before he made the break. Since I did not, I've got it to do now,
and there isn't much time to throw away. Let me see--" he shut his eyes
and went into the inventive trance of the literary craftsman--"the
keynote must be originality; I must do that which the other fellow would
never think of doing."

On the strength of that decision he ventured to order a third cup of
coffee, and before it had cooled he had outlined a plan, basing it upon
a further cross-questioning of the Gascon waiter. The man had been to
the street door again, and by this time the sidewalk excitement had
subsided sufficiently to make room for an approach to the truth. The
story of an armed band surrounding the bank had been a canard. There had
been but one man concerned in the robbery, and the sidewalk gossip was
beginning to describe him with discomforting accuracy.

Griswold paid his score and went out boldly and with studied
nonchalance. He reasoned that, notwithstanding the growing accuracy of
the street report, he was still in no immediate danger so long as he
remained in such close proximity to the bank. It was safe to assume that
this was one of the things the professional "strong-arm man" would not
do. But it was also evident that he must speedily lose his identity if
he hoped to escape; and the lost identity must leave no clew to itself.

Griswold smiled when he remembered how, in fiction of the felon-catching
sort, and in real life, for that matter, the law-breaker always did
leave a clew for the pursuers. Thereupon arose a determination to
demonstrate practically that it was quite as possible to create an
inerrant fugitive as to conceive an infallible detective. Joining the
passers-by on the sidewalk, he made his way leisurely to Canal Street,
and thence diagonally through the old French quarter toward the French
Market. In a narrow alley giving upon the levee he finally found what he
was looking for; a dingy sailors' barber's shop. The barber was a negro,
fat, unctuous and sleepy-looking; and he was alone.

"Yes, sah; shave, boss?" asked the negro, bowing and scraping a foot
when Griswold entered.

"No; a hair-cut." The customer produced a silver half-dollar. "Go
somewhere and get me a cigar to smoke while you are doing it. Get a good
one, if you have to go to Canal Street," he added, climbing into the
rickety chair.

The fat negro shuffled out, scenting tips. The moment he was out of
sight, Griswold took up the scissors and began to hack awkwardly at his
beard and mustache; awkwardly, but swiftly and with well-considered
purpose. The result was a fairly complete metamorphosis easily wrought.
In place of the trim beard and curling mustache there was a rough
stubble, stiff and uneven, like that on the face of a man who had
neglected to shave for a week or two.

"There, I think that will answer," he told himself, standing back before
the cracked looking-glass to get the general effect. "And it is decently
original. The professional cracksman would probably have shaved,
whereupon the first amateur detective he met would reconstruct the beard
on the sunburned lines. Now for a pawnbroker; and the more avaricious he
happens to be, the better he will serve the purpose."

He went to the door and looked up and down the alley. The negro was not
yet in sight, and Griswold walked rapidly away in the direction opposite
to that taken by the obliging barber.

A pawnbroker's shop of the kind required was not far to seek in that
locality, and when it was found, Griswold drove a hard bargain with the
Portuguese Jew behind the counter. The pledge he offered was the suit he
was wearing, and the bargaining concluded in an exchange of the still
serviceable business suit for a pair of butternut trousers, a
second-hand coat too short in the sleeves, a flannel shirt, a cap, and a
red handkerchief; these and a sum of ready money, the smallness of which
he deplored piteously before he would consent to accept it.

The effect of the haggling was exactly what Griswold had prefigured. The
Portuguese, most suspicious of his tribe, suspecting everything but the
truth, flatly accused his customer of having stolen the pledge. And when
Griswold departed without denying the charge, suspicion became
conviction, and the pledged clothing, which might otherwise have given
the police the needed clew, was carefully hidden away against a time
when the Jew's apprehensions should be quieted.

Having thus disguised himself, Griswold made the transformation
artistically complete by walking a few squares in the dust of a loaded
cotton float on the levee. Then he made a tramp's bundle of the
manuscript of the moribund book, the pistol, and the money in the red
handkerchief; and having surveyed himself with some satisfaction in the
bar mirror of a riverside pot-house, a daring impulse to test his
disguise by going back to the restaurant where he had breakfasted seized
and bore him up-town.

The experiment was an unqualified success. The proprietor of the
bank-neighboring cafe not only failed to recognize him; he was driven
forth with revilings in idiomatic French and broken English.

"_Bete!_ Go back on da levee w'ere you belong to go. I'll been kipping
dis cafe for zhentlemen! _Scelerat!_ Go!"

Griswold went out, smiling between his teeth.

"That settles the question of identification and present safety," he
assured himself exultantly. Then: "I believe I could walk into the
Bayou State Security and not be recognized."

As before, the daring impulse was irresistible, and he gave place to it
on the spur of the moment. Fouling a five-dollar bill in the mud of the
gutter, he went boldly into the bank and asked the paying teller to give
him silver for it. The teller sniffed at the money, scowled at the man,
and turned back to his cash-book without a word. Griswold's smile grew
to an inward laugh when he reached the street.

"The dragon may have teeth and claws, but it can neither see nor smell,"
he said, contemptuously, turning his steps riverward again. "Now I have
only to choose my route and go in peace. How and where are the only
remaining questions to be answered."




V

THE _BELLE JULIE_


For an hour or more after his return to the river front, Griswold idled
up and down the levee; and the end of the interval found him still
undecided as to the manner and direction of his flight--to say nothing
of the choice of a destination, which was even more evasive than the
other and more immediately pressing decision.

It was somewhere in the midst of the reflective hour that the elate
triumph of success began to give place to the inevitable reaction. The
partition which stands upon the narrow dividing line between vagrancy
and crime is but a paper wall, and any hot-hearted insurrectionary may
break through it at will. But to accept the conditions of vagrancy one
must first embrace the loathsome thing itself. Griswold remembered the
glimpse he had had of himself in the bar mirror of the pot-house, and
the chains of his transformed identity began to gall him. It was to
little purpose that he girded at his compunctions, telling himself that
he was only playing a necessary part; that one needs must when the devil
drives. Custom, habit, convention, or whatever it may be which
differentiates between the law-abiding and the lawless, would have its
say; and from railing bitterly against the social conditions which made
his act at once a necessity and a crime, he began to feel a prickling
disgust for the subterfuges to which the crime had driven him.

Moreover, there was a growing fear that he might not always be able to
play consistently the double role whose lines were already becoming
intricate and confusing. To be true to his ideals, he must continue to
be in utter sincerity Griswold the brother-loving. That said itself. But
on the other hand, to escape the consequences of his act, he must hold
himself in instant readiness to be in savage earnest what a common thief
would be in similar straits; a thing of duplicity and double meanings
and ferocity, alert to turn and slay at any moment in the battle of
self-preservation.

He had thought that the supreme crisis was passed when, earlier in the
day, he had pawned the last of his keepsakes for the money to buy the
revolver. But he had yet to learn that there is no supreme crisis in the
human span, save that which ends it; that all the wayfaring duels with
fate are inconclusive; conflicts critical enough at the moment, but
lacking finality, and likely to be renewed indefinitely if one lives
beyond them.

He was confronting another of the false climaxes in the hour of aimless
wanderings on the river front. More than once he was tempted to buy back
his lost identity at any price. Never before had he realized what a
precious possession is the fearlessness of innocency; weighed against
it, the thick packet of bank-notes in the tramp's bundle, and all that
it might stand for, were as air-blown bubbles to refined gold. Yet he
would not go back; he could not go back. To restore the money would be
more than a confession of failure; it would be an abject recantation--a
flat denial of every article of his latest social creed, and a plunge
into primordial chaos in the matter of theories, out of which he could
emerge only as a criminal in fact.

When the conflict of indetermination became altogether insupportable, he
put it aside with the resolution which was the strong thread in the
loosely twisted warp of his character and forced himself to think
concretely toward a solution of the problem of flight. The possession of
the money made all things possible--in any field save the
theoretical--and the choice of dwelling or hiding-places seemed
infinite.

His first thought had been to go back to New York. But there the risk of
detection would be greater than elsewhere, and he decided that there was
no good reason why he should incur it. Besides, he argued, there were
other fields in which the sociological studies could be pursued under
conditions more favorable than those to be found in a great city. In his
mind's eye he saw himself domiciled in some thriving interior town,
working and studying among people who were not unindividualized by an
artificial environment. In such a community theory and practice might go
hand in hand; he could know and be known; and the money at his command
would be vastly more of a moulding and controlling influence than it
could possibly be in the smallest of circles in New York. The picture,
struck out upon the instant, pleased him, and having sufficiently
idealized it, he adopted it enthusiastically as an inspiration, leaving
the mere geographical detail to arrange itself as chance, or subsequent
events, might determine.

That part of the problem disposed of, there yet remained the choice of a
line of flight; and it was a small thing that finally decided the manner
of his going. For the third time in the hour of aimless wanderings he
found himself loitering opposite the berth of the _Belle Julie_, an
up-river steamboat whose bell gave sonorous warning of the approaching
moment of departure. Toiling roustabouts, trailing in and out like an
endless procession of human ants, were hurrying the last of the cargo
aboard. Griswold stood to look on. The toilers were negroes, most of
them, but with here and there among the blacks and yellows a paler face
so begrimed with sweat and dust as to be scarcely distinguishable from
the majority. The sight moved Griswold, as thankless toil always did;
and he fell to contrasting the hard lot of the laborers with that of the
group of passengers looking on idly from the comfortable shade of the
saloon-deck awning. Griswold's thought vocalized itself in compassionate
musings.

"Poor devils! They've been told that they are freemen, and perhaps they
believe it. But surely no slave of the Toulon galleys was ever in
bitterer bondage.... Free?--yes, free to toil and sweat, to bear
burdens and to be driven like cattle under the yoke! Oh, good
Lord!--look at that!"

The ant procession had attacked the final tier of boxes in the lading,
and one of the burden-bearers, a white man, had stumbled and fallen like
a crushed pack-animal under a load too heavy for him. Griswold was
beside him in a moment. The man could not rise, and Griswold dragged him
not untenderly out of the way of the others.

"Why didn't you stand from under and let it drop?" he demanded gruffly,
as an offset to the womanish tenderness; but when the man gasped for
breath and groaned, he took another tone: "Where are you hurt?"

The crushed one sat up and spat blood.

"I don't know: inside, somewheres. I been dyin' on my feet any time for
a year or two back."

"Consumption?" queried Griswold, briefly.

"I reckon so."

"Then you have no earthly business in a deck crew. Don't you know that?"

The man's smile was a ghastly face-wrinkling.

"Reckon I hain't got any business anywheres--out'n a horspital or a hole
in the ground. But I kind o' thought I'd like to be planted 'longside
the woman and the childer, if I could make out some way to git there."

"Where?"

The consumptive named a small river town in Iowa.

"And you were going to work your passage on the boat?"

"I was allowin' to try for it. But I reckon I'm done up, now."

In Griswold impulse was the dominant chord always struck by an appeal to
his sympathies. His compassion went straight to the mark, as it was sure
to do when his pockets were not empty.

"What is the fare by rail to your town?" he inquired.

"I don't know: I never asked. Somewheres between twenty and thirty
dollars, I reckon; and that's more money than I've seen sence the woman
died."

Griswold hastily counted out a hundred dollars from his pocket fund and
thrust the money into the man's hand.

"Take that and change places with me," he commanded, slipping on the
mask of gruffness again. "Pay your fare on the train, and I'll take your
job on the boat. Don't be a fool!" he added, when the man put his face
in his hands and began to choke. "It's a fair enough exchange, and I'll
get as much out of it one way as you will the other. What is your name?
I may have to borrow it."

"Gavitt--John Wesley Gavitt."

"All right; off with you," said the liberator, curtly; and with that he
shouldered the sick man's load and fell into line in the ant procession.

Once on board the steamer, he followed his file-leader aft and made it
his first care to find a safe hiding-place for the tramp's bundle in
the knotted handkerchief. That done, he stepped into the line again, and
became the sick man's substitute in fact.

Inured to hard living as he was, the substitute roustabout had made no
more than a half-dozen rounds between the levee and the cargo-deck of
the _Belle Julie_ before he was glad to note that the steamer's lading
was all but completed. It was toil of the shrewdest, and he drew breath
of blessed relief when the last man staggered up the plank with his
burden. The bell was clanging its final summons, and the slowly
revolving paddle-wheels were taking the strain from the mooring lines.
Being near the bow line Griswold was one of the two who sprang ashore at
the mate's bidding to cast off. He was backing the hawser out of the
last of its half-hitches when a carriage was driven rapidly down to the
stage and two tardy passengers hurried aboard. The mate bawled from his
station on the hurricane-deck.

"Now, then! Take a turn on that spring line out there and get them
trunks aboard! Lively!"

The larger of the two trunks fell to the late recruit; and when he had
set it down at the door of the designated state-room, he did
half-absently what John Gavitt might have done without blame: read the
tacked-on card, which bore the owner's name and address, written in a
firm round hand: "Charlotte Farnham, Wahaska, Minnesota."

"Thank you," said a musical voice at his elbow. "May I trouble you to
put it inside?"

Griswold wheeled as if the mild-toned request had been a blow, and was
properly ashamed. But when he saw the speaker, consternation promptly
slew all the other emotions. For the owner of the tagged trunk was the
young woman to whom, an hour or so earlier, he had given place at the
paying teller's wicket in the Bayou State Security.

She saw his confusion, charged it to the card-reading at which she had
surprised him, and smiled. Then he met her gaze fairly and became sane
again when he was assured that she did not recognize him: became sane,
and whipped off his cap, and dragged the trunk into the state-room.
After which he went to his place on the lower deck with a great
thankfulness throbbing in his heart and an inchoate resolve shaping
itself in his brain.

Late that night, when the _Belle Julie_ was well on her way up the great
river, he flung himself down upon the sacked coffee on the engine-room
guard to snatch a little rest between landings, and the resolve became
sufficiently cosmic to formulate itself in words.

"I'll call it an oracle," he mused. "One place is as good as another,
just so it is inconsequent enough. And I am sure I've never heard of
Wahaska."

Now Griswold the social rebel was, before all things else, Griswold the
imaginative literary craftsman; and no sooner was the question of his
ultimate destination settled thus arbitrarily than he began to prefigure
the place and its probable lacks and havings. This process brought him
by easy stages to pleasant idealizings of Miss Charlotte Farnham, who
was, thus far, the only tangible thing connected with the
destination-dream. A little farther along her personality laid hold of
him and the idealizings became purely literary.

"She is a magnificently strong type!" was his summing up of her, made
while he was lying flat on his back and staring absently at the flitting
shadows among the deck beams overhead. "Her face is as readable as only
the face of a woman instinctively good and pure in heart can be. Any man
who can put her between the covers of a book may put anything else he
pleases in it and snap his fingers at the world. If I am going to live
in the same town with her, I ought to jot her down on paper before I
lose the keen edge of the first impression."

He considered it for a moment, and then got up and went in search of a
pencil and a scrap of paper. The dozing night clerk gave him both, with
a sleepy malediction thrown in; and he went back to the engine-room and
scribbled his word-picture by the light of the swinging incandescent.

"Character-study: Young woman of the type Western Creole; not the
daughter of aliens, but born in the West, of parents who have migrated
from one of the older States. (I'll hazard that much as a guess.)

"_Detail_: Titian blonde, with hair like spun bronze; the complexion
which neither freckles nor tans; cool gray eyes with underdepths in them
that no man but her lover may ever quite fathom; a figure which would
be statuesque if it were not altogether human and womanly; features cast
in the Puritan mould, with the lines of character well emphasized; lips
that would be passionate but for--no, lips that _will_ be passionate
when the hour and the man arrive. A soul strong in the strength of
transparent purity, which would send her to the stake for a principle,
or to the Isle of Lepers with her lover. A typical heroine for a story
in which the hero is a man who might need to borrow a conscience."

He read it over thoughtfully when it was finished, changing a word here
and a phrase there with a craftsman's fidelity to the exactnesses. Then
he shook his head regretfully and tore the scrap of paper into tiny
squares, scattering them upon the brown flood surging past the
engine-room gangway.

"It won't do," he confessed reluctantly, as one who sacrifices good
literary material to a stern sense of the fitness of things. "It is
nothing less than a cold-blooded sacrilege. I can't make copy of her if
I write no more while the world stands."




VI

THE DECK-HAND


Charlotte Farnham's friends--their number was the number of those who
had seen her grow from childhood to maiden--and womanhood--commonly
identified her for inquiring strangers as "good old Doctor Bertie's
'only,'" adding, men and women alike, that she was as well-balanced and
sensible as she was good to look upon.

As Griswold had guessed, she stood but a single remove from an American
lineage much older than the America of the Middle West. Her father had
been a country physician in New Hampshire, migrating to the dry winters
of Minnesota for his young wife's health. The migration had been too
long postponed to save the mother's life; but it had made a beautiful
woman of the daughter, dowering her with the luxuriant physical charm
which is the proof that transplantation to fresher soil is not less
beneficial to human- than to plant-kind.

She had been spending the winter at Pass Christian with her aunt, who
was an invalid; and it was for the invalid's sake that she had decided
to make the return journey by river. Patient little Miss Gilman was the
least querulous of sufferers, but she was always very ill on a railway
train. Hence Charlotte, who was at once physician, nurse, mentor, and
dutiful kinswoman to the frail little lady who looked old enough to be
her grandmother, had chosen the longer, but less trying, route to the
far North.

So it had come about that their state-rooms had been taken on the _Belle
Julie_; and on the morning of the second day out from New Orleans, Miss
Gilman was so far from being travel-sick that she was able to sit with
Charlotte in the shade of the hurricane-deck aft, and to enjoy, with
what quavering enthusiasm there was in her, the matchless scenery of the
lower Mississippi.

At Baton Rouge the New Orleans papers came aboard, and Miss Farnham
bought a copy of the _Louisianian_. As a matter of course, the
first-page leader was a circumstantial account of the daring robbery of
the Bayou State Security, garnished with startling head-lines. Charlotte
read it, half-absently at first, and a second time with interest
awakened and a quickening of the pulse when she realized that she had
actually been a witness of the final act in the near-tragedy. Her little
gasp of belated horror brought a query from the invalid.

"What is it, Charlie, dear?"

For answer, Charlotte read the newspaper story of the robbery,
head-lines and all.

"For pity's sake! in broad daylight! How shockingly bold!" commented
Miss Gilman.

"Yes; but that wasn't what made me gasp. The paper says: 'A young lady
was at the teller's window when the robber came up with Mr.
Galbraith--' Aunt Fanny, _I_ was the 'young lady'!"

"You? horrors!" ejaculated the invalid, holding up wasted hands of
deprecation. "To think of it! Why, child, if anything had happened, a
terrible murder might have been committed right there before your very
face and eyes! Dear, dear; whatever are we coming to!"

Charlotte the well-balanced, smiled at the purely personal limitations
of her aunt's point of view.

"It is very dreadful, of course; but it is no worse just because I
happened to be there. Yet it seems ridiculously incredible. I can hardly
believe it, even now."

"Incredible? How?"

"Why, there wasn't anything about it to suggest a robbery. Now that I
know, I remember that the old gentleman did seem anxious or worried, or
at least, not quite comfortable some way; but the young man was smiling
pleasantly, and he looked like anything rather than a desperate
criminal. I can close my eyes and see him, just as I saw him yesterday.
He had a good face, Aunt Fanny; it was the face of a man whom one would
trust almost instinctively."

Miss Gilman's New England conservatism, unweakened by her long residence
in the West, took the alarm at once.

"Did you notice him particularly, Charlotte? Would you recognize him if
you should see him again?" she asked anxiously.

"Yes; I am quite sure I should."

"But no one in the bank knew you. They couldn't trace you by your
father's draft and letter of identification, could they?"

Charlotte was mystified. "I should suppose they could, if they wanted
to. But why? What if they could?"

"My dear child; don't you see? They are sure to catch the robber, sooner
or later, and if they know how to find you, you might be dragged into
court as a witness!"

Miss Farnham was not less averse to publicity than the conventionalities
demanded, but she had, or believed she had, very clear and well-defined
ideas of her own touching her duty in any matter involving a plain
question of right and wrong.

"I shouldn't wait to be dragged," she asserted quietly. "It would be a
simple duty to go willingly. The first thing I thought of was that I
ought to write at once to Mr. Galbraith, giving him my address."

Thereupon issued discussion. Miss Gilman's opinion upon such a momentous
question--a question involving an apparent conflict between the
proprieties and an act of simple justice--leaned heavily toward silence.
There could be no possible need for Charlotte's interference. Mr.
Galbraith and the teller would be able to identify the robber, and a
thousand eye-witnesses could do no more. At the end of the argument the
conservative one had extorted a conditional promise from her niece. The
matter should remain in abeyance until the question of conscientious
obligation had been submitted to Charlotte's father and decided by him.

Being by nature and inclination averse to shacklings, verbal or other,
Charlotte gave the promise reluctantly, and the subject was dismissed.
Not from the younger woman's thoughts, however. In the reflective field
the scene in the bank recurred again and again until presently it became
a haunting annoyance. To banish it finally she went to her state-room
and got a book for herself and a magazine for her aunt.

An hour later, when Miss Gilman had finished cutting the leaves of the
magazine, and was deep in the last instalment of the current serial,
Charlotte let her book slip from her fingers and gave herself to the
passive enjoyment of the slowly passing panorama which is the chief
charm of inland voyaging.

It was a delectable day, sweet-scented with the mingled perfume of roses
and jasmine and chinaberry trees wafted from the open-air conservatories
surrounding the plantation mansions on either bank. The majestic onrush
of the steamer, the rhythmic drumbeat of the machinery, the alternating
crash and pause of the great paddle-wheels, the unhasting backward sweep
of the brown flood, all these were in harmony with the sensuous languor
of time and place.

For the moment Charlotte Farnham yielded in pure delight to the spell of
the encompassments, fancying she could deny her lineage and look upon
this sylvan Southland world through the eyes of those to whom it was
the birthland. Then the haunting scene in the New Orleans bank returned
to disenchant her; and after striving vainly to put it aside, she
reopened her book. But by this time the story had lost its hold upon
her, and when she had read a page or two with only the vaguest possible
notion of what it was all about, she gave up in despair and let the
relentless recollection have its will of her.

From where she was sitting she could see the steamer's yawl swinging
from its tackle at the stern-staff; and after many minutes it was slowly
borne in upon her that the ropes were working loose. When it became
evident that the boat would shortly fall into the river and go adrift,
she got up and put the book aside, meaning to go forward and tell the
captain. But before she had taken the first step a man came aft to make
the loosened tackle fast, and she stood back to let him pass.

It was Griswold. Up to that moment he had thrown himself so zealously
into the impersonation of his latest role as to be able to stand
indifferently well in the shoes of the man whom he had supplanted. But
at this crisis the machinery of dissimulation slipped a cog. Where the
ordinary deck-hand would have gone about his errand heedless of the
presence of the two women passengers, the proxy John Wesley Gavitt must
needs take off his cap and apologize for passing in front of them.

Something half familiar in his manner of doing it attracted Charlotte's
attention, and her eyes followed him as he went on and hoisted the yawl
into place. When he came back she had a fair sight of his face and her
eyes met his. In the single swift glance half-formed suspicion became
undoubted certainty; she looked again and her heart gave a great bound
and then seemed suddenly to forget its office. While he was passing she
clung to the back of her chair and forebore to cry out or otherwise to
advertise her emotion. But when the strain was off she sank into her
seat and closed her eyes to grapple with the unnerving discovery. It was
useless to try to escape from the dismaying fact. The stubble-bearded
deck-hand with the manners of a gentleman was most unmistakably a later
reincarnation of the pleasantly smiling young man who had courteously
made way for her at the teller's wicket in the Bayou State Security; who
had smiled and given place to her while he was holding his pistol aimed
at President Galbraith.

It was said of Charlotte Farnham that she was sensible beyond her years,
and withal strong and straightforward in honesty of purpose. None the
less, she was a woman. And when she saw what was before her, conscience
turned traitor and fled away to give place to an uprush of hesitant
doubts born of the sharp trial of the moment.

She decided at once that there could be no question as to her duty. Of
all those who were seeking the escaping bank robber, it was doubtful if
any would recognize him as she had; and if she should hold her peace he
would escape, perhaps to commit other crimes for which she could then
justly be held accountable.

But, on the other hand, how could she bring herself to the point of
giving him over to the vengeance of the law--just vengeance, to be sure,
but cruel because it must inevitably crush out whatever spark of
penitence or good intention there might be remaining in him? What did
she know of his temptations? of the chain of circumstances which had
dragged him down into the company of the desperately criminal? Some such
compelling influence there must have been, she reasoned, since a child
might see that he was no hardened felon. It was a painful conflict, but
in the end the Puritan conscience triumphed and turned mercy out of
doors. Her duty was plain; she had no right to argue the question of
culpability.

She got upon her feet, steadying herself by the back of the chair. She
felt that she could not trust herself if she once admitted the thin edge
of the wedge of delay. The simple and straightforward thing to do was to
go immediately to the captain and tell him of her discovery, but she
shrank from the thought of what must follow. They would seize him: he
had proved that he was a desperate man, and there would be a struggle.
And when the struggle was over they would bring him to her and she would
have to stand forth as his accuser.

It was too shocking, and she caught at the suggestion of an alternative
with a gasp of relief. She might write to President Galbraith, giving
such a description of the deck-hand as would enable the officers to
identify him without her personal help. It was like dealing the man a
treacherous blow in the back, but she thought it would be kinder.

"Aunt Fanny," she began, with her face averted, "I promised you I
wouldn't write to Mr. Galbraith until after we reached home--until I had
told papa. I have been thinking about it since, and I--I think it must
be done at once."

Now Miss Gilman's conscience was also of the Puritan cast, and justice
had been given time to make its claim paramount to that of the
conventional proprieties. Hence the invalid yielded the point without
reopening the argument.

"I don't know but you are right, after all, Charlie, dear," she said.
"I've been thinking it over, too. But it seems like a very dreadful
thing for you to have to do."

"It _is_ very dreadful," said Charlotte, with a much deeper meaning in
the words than her aunt suspected. Nevertheless, she went away quickly
and locked herself in her state room to write the fateful letter which
should set the machinery of the law in motion and deliver the robber
deck-hand up to justice.




VII

GOLD OF TOLOSA


In yielding to the impulse which had prompted him to change places with
the broken-down deck-hand, Griswold had assumed that there was little
risk and at least an even chance that the substitution would never be
discovered. He knew that the river steamboats were manned by picked-up
crews, usually assembled at the last moment, and that it was more than
probable that the _Belle Julie's_ officers had not yet had time to
individualize the units of the main-deck squad. Therefore, he might take
the name and place of the disabled Gavitt with measurable safety.

But apart from this, he was not unwilling to add another chapter to his
experience among the toilers. He had been told that the life of a
roustabout on the Western rivers was the most dismal of all the gropings
in the social underworld, and he was the more eager to endure its
hardships as a participant. Being an enthusiast, he had early laid down
the foundation principle that one must see and feel and suffer if one
would write convincingly.

As to the experience, he immediately found himself in a fair way to
acquire it in great abundance. From the moment of his enlistment in the
_Belle Julie's_ crew it was heaped upon him unstintingly; good measure,
pressed down, shaken together, and running over. Without having
specialized himself in any way to M'Grath, the bullying chief mate, he
fancied he was singled out as the vessel into which the man might empty
the vials of his wrath without fear of reprisals. Curses, not
loud--since a generation of travellers has arisen to whom profanity,
however picturesque, is objectionable--but deep and corrosive; contumely
and abuse; tongue-lashings that stung like the flick of a whip; and now
and then, at a night landing when there were no upper-deck people
looking on to be shocked, blows. All these slave-drivings, or at least
his share of them, Griswold endured as became a man who had voluntarily
put himself in the way of them. But they were hardening. Griswold fought
manfully against the brutalizing effect of them, but with only partial
success. Because of them, he was sure that his theories in the
compassionate warp and woof of them must always afterward be shot
through with flame-colored threads of fiery resentment reaching back
through M'Grath to every master who wielded the whip of power; the power
of the man who has, over the man who has not.

In such a lurid light it was only natural that the ethical perspective
should be still further distorted; that any lingering doubt of the
justice of his late rebellion against the accepted order of things
should be banished by the persecutions of the bullying mate. It is easy
to postulate a storm-driven world when the personal horizon is dark and
lowering; easy, also, to justify the past by the present. From
theorizing never so resolutely upon the rights of man in the abstract to
robbing a bank is a broad step, and given an opportunity to reflect upon
it calmly after the fact, even such an imaginative enthusiast as
Griswold might have reconsidered. But the hasty plunge into the
underdepth of roustabout life was like the brine bath of the blacksmith
to heated steel; it served to temper him afresh.

Fortunately he was not altogether unequal to the physical test, severe
as it was. With all of his later privations, he had lived a clean life;
and his college training in athletics stood him in good stead.
Physically, as intellectually, the material in him was of the
fine-grained fibre in which quality counts for more than quantity.
Lacking something in mass, the lack was more than compensated by the
alertness and endurance which had made him at once the best man with the
foils and the safest oar in the boat in his college days. None the less,
the first night out of New Orleans, with its uncounted plantation
landings, had tried him keenly, and he was thankful when the second day
brought fewer stopping places and longer rest intervals.

It was in one of the resting intervals that he had been sent aft to
resecure the loosened tackle of the suspended small boat. He had come
upon Miss Farnham and her aunt unexpectedly, and so was off his guard.
But in any event, he argued, he should have obeyed the instinctive
impulse to excuse himself. He knew that the apology was a confession
that he was a masquerader in some sort, and he had felt the steady gaze
of the young woman's eyes while he was at work on the loosened tackle.
Later, when he passed her on his way forward he had seen the swift
change in her face betokening some sudden emotion, and the recollection
of it troubled him.

What if this clear-eyed young person had recognized him? He knew that
the New Orleans papers had come aboard; he had seen the folded copy of
the _Louisianian_ in the invalid's lap. Consequently, Miss Farnham knew
of the robbery, and the incidents were fresh in her mind. What would she
do if she had penetrated his disguise?

The query had its answer when he recalled his written estimate of her
character scribbled a few hours earlier by the light of the engine-room
incandescent. If her face were not merely a fair mask of the
conscientious probity it stood for, she would denounce him without
hesitation.

He tried to make himself doubt it, but the effort recoiled upon him.
Already, in his imaginings, she was beginning to assume the
characteristics of an ideal; and the ideal character with which he had
endowed her would be true to itself at any cost; it would be quite
sexless and just before it would be womanly and merciful. At least he
hoped it would. Ideals are much too precious to be shattered recklessly
by mere personal considerations; and he told himself, in a fine glow of
artistic self-effacement, that he should be sorry to purchase even so
great a boon as his liberty at the price of the broken ideal.

But the burning of sweet incense in the temple of the ideals is not
necessarily incompatible with a just regard for the commonplace
realities. In the aftermath of the fine artistic glow, Griswold found
himself straightway wrestling with the problem of present safety. If
Miss Farnham had recognized him, his chances of escape had suddenly
narrowed down to flight, immediate and speedy. He must leave the _Belle
Julie_ at the next landing and endeavor to make his way north by
wagon-road or rail, or by some later boat.

The emergency called for swift action, and his determination to leave
the steamer was taken at once. While he was weighing the manifest
dangers of a daylight desertion against the equally manifest hazard of
waiting for darkness, the whistle was blown for a landing and he
concluded not to wait. If Miss Farnham had identified him she would
doubtless lose no time in giving the alarm. She might even now be in
conference with the captain, he thought.

Griswold had a shock of genuine terror at this point in his reflections
and his skin prickled as at the touch of something loathsome. Up to that
moment he had suffered none of the pains of the hunted fugitive; but he
knew now that he had fairly entered the gates of the outlaw's inferno;
that however cunningly he might cast about to throw his pursuers off the
track, he would never again know what it was to be wholly free from the
terror of the arrow that flieth by day.

The force of the Scriptural simile came to him with startling emphasis,
bringing on a return of the prickling dismay. The stopping of the
paddle-wheels and the rattling clangor of the gang-plank winch aroused
him to action and he shook off the creeping numbness and ran aft to
rummage under the cargo on the engine-room guards for his precious
bundle. When his hand reached the place where it should have been, the
blood surged to his brain and set up a clamorous dinning in his ears
like the roaring of a cataract. The niche between the coffee sacks was
empty.




VIII

THE CHAIN-GANG


While Griswold was grappling afresh with the problem of escape, and
planning to desert the _Belle Julie_ at the next landing, Charlotte
Farnham was sitting behind the locked door of her state-room with a
writing pad on her knee over which for many minutes the suspended pen
merely hovered. She had fancied that her resolve, once fairly taken,
would not stumble over a simple matter of detail. But when she had tried
a dozen times to begin the letter to Mr. Galbraith, the simplicities
vanished and complexity stood in their room.

Try as she might to put the sham deck-hand into his proper place as an
impersonal unit of a class with which society is at war, he perversely
refused to surrender his individuality. At the end of every fresh effort
she was confronted by the inexorable summing-up: in a world of phantoms
there were only two real persons; a man who had sinned, and a woman who
was about to make him pay the penalty.

It was all very well to reason about it, and to say that he ought to be
made to pay the penalty; but that did not make it any less shocking that
she, Charlotte Farnham, should be the one to set the retributive
machinery in motion. Yet she knew she had the thing to do, and so, after
many ineffectual attempts, the letter was written and sealed and
addressed, and she went out to mail it at the clerk's office.

As it chanced, the engines of the steamer were slowing for a landing
when she latched her state-room door, and by the time she had walked the
length of the saloon the office was closed and the clerk had gone below
with his way-bills. It was an added hardship to have to wait, and she
knew well enough that delay would speedily reopen the entire vexed
question of responsibility. But there was nothing else to be done. She
told herself that she could not begin to breathe freely again until the
letter was out of her hands and safely beyond recall.

The doors giving upon the forward saloon-deck were open, and she heard
the harsh voice of the mate exploding in sharp commands as the steamer
lost way and edged slowly up to the river bank. A moment later she was
outside, leaning on the rail and looking down upon the crew grouped
about the inboard end of the uptilted landing-stage. He was there; the
man for whose destiny accident and the conventional sense of duty had
made her responsible; and as she looked she had a fleeting glimpse of
his face.

It was curiously haggard and woe-begone; so sorrowfully changed that for
an instant she almost doubted his identity. The sudden transformation
added fresh questionings, and she began to ask herself thoughtfully
what had brought it about. Had he recognized her and divined her
intention? But if that were the explanation, why had he not made his
escape? Why was he waiting for her to point him out to the officers of
the steamer?

The queries swept her out into a deeper sea of perplexity. What if he
were already repentant? In that event, the result of her dutiful service
to society would doubtless be to drive him back into impenitence and
despair. For a little time she clung desperately to her purpose,
hardening her heart and shutting her ears to the clamant appeal of the
reawakened sentiment of commiseration. Then the man turned slowly and
looked up at her as if the finger of her thought had touched him. There
was no sign of recognition in his eyes; and she constrained herself to
gaze down upon him coldly. But when the _Belle Julie's_ bow touched the
bank, and the waiting crew melted suddenly into a tenuous line of
burden-bearers, she fled through the deserted saloon to her state-room
and hid the fatal letter under the pillows in her berth.

Another hour had elapsed. It was nearly noon, and the stewards had
bridged the spaces in the row of square saloon-tables and were laying
the cloth for the mid-day meal. Charlotte opened her door guardedly, as
one fearing to face prying eyes, and finding the coast clear, slipped
out to rejoin her aunt under the awning abaft the paddle-box. Miss
Gilman shut her finger into the magazine to keep her place and looked up
in mild surprise.

"Where have you been?" she asked. "Has it taken you all this time to
write to the bank people?"

Charlotte's answer satisfied the strict letter of the inquiry, though it
slew the spirit.

"I wrote the letter quite awhile ago. I have been lying down, since."

The invalid reopened the magazine, and Charlotte was left to make peace
as best she might with her conscience for having told the half-truth. It
was characteristic of the inward monitor that even in such a trivial
matter it refused to be coerced. Accordingly, a little while afterward,
when Charlotte took her aunt's arm to lead her to the table, she said:

"I told you I had written to Mr. Galbraith, and so I have. But the
letter is not yet mailed." And, since the natural inference was that
there had been no opportunity to mail it, the conscientious little
confession went as wide of the mark as if it had never been made.

At the captain's end of the long table the talk rippled pointlessly
around the New Orleans bank robbery, and Miss Farnham took no part in it
until Captain Mayfield spoke of the reward of ten thousand dollars which
had been offered for the apprehension of the robber. The fact touched
her upon the ethical side, and she said:

"That is something that always seems so dreadfully barbarous; to set a
money price on the head of a human being."

The captain laughed.

"'Tis sort o' Middle-Aged, when you come to think of it. But it does the
police business oftener than anything else, I guess. A detective will
work mighty hard nowadays for ten thousand dollars."

"Yes, I suppose so; but it is barbarous," Charlotte persisted. "It is an
open appeal to the lowest motive in human nature--cupidity."

The bluff riverman nodded a qualified approval, but a loquacious little
gentleman across the table felt called upon to protest.

"But, my dear Miss Farnham, would you have us all turn thief-catchers
for the mere honor of the thing?"

"For the love of justice, or not at all, I should say," was the
straightforward return blow. "If I should see somebody picking your
pocket, ought I to weigh the chances of your offering a reward before
telling you of it?"

"Oh, no; of course not. But this is entirely different. A rich
corporation has been robbed, and it says to the thief-catchers--and to
everybody, for that matter--Here are ten thousand dollars if you will
find us the robber. For myself, I confess that the reward would be the
determining factor. If I knew where Mr. Galbraith's 'hold-up' is to be
found, I should certainly go out of my way to earn the money."

Miss Farnham's sense of the fitness of things was plainly affronted.

"Do you mean to say that you would accept the reward, Mr. Latrobe?"

"Most certainly I should; any one would."

The frank avowal stood for public opinion. Charlotte knew it and went
dumb in the presence of a new and more terrible phase of her
entanglement. She might call the reward blood money, and refuse
absolutely to touch it, but who, outside of her own little circle, would
know or believe that she had refused? And if all the remainder of the
world knew and should exonerate her, would not the wretched man himself
always believe that she had sold him for a price?

The benumbing thought left her tongue-tied and miserable; and after the
table-dispersal she sought out the captain to ask a question.

"Do you know the law in Louisiana, Captain Mayfield?" she began, with
more embarrassment than the simple inquiry would account for. "This man
who robbed the Bayou State Security yesterday; what is the penalty for
his crime?"

The captain shook his head. "I don't know: being only a riverman, I'm
not even a sea-lawyer. But maybe Mr. Latrobe could tell you. _Oh_, Mr.
Latrobe!"

The loquacious one was on his way forward to smoke, but he turned and
came back at the captain's call.

"The penalty?" he said, when the query had been repeated to him; "that
would depend upon a good many things that could only be brought out at
the trial. But under the circumstances--threatening to shoot the
president, and all that, you know--I should say it would go pretty hard
with him. He'll probably get the full limit of the law."

"And that is?" persisted Charlotte, determined to know the worst.

"In Louisiana, twenty years, I believe."

"Thank you; that is what I wished to find out."

The little man bowed and went his way; and Captain Mayfield, who was an
observant man in the field of river stages and other natural phenomena,
but not otherwise, did not remark Miss Farnham's sigh which was more
than half a sob.

"Twenty years!" she shuddered; "it might as well be for life. He would
be nearly fifty years old, if he lived through it."

It did not occur to the captain to wonder how Miss Farnham came to know
anything about the bank robber's age, but he spoke to the conditional
phrase in her comment.

"Yes; if he lives through it: that's a mighty big 'if' down here in the
levee country. Twenty years of the chain-gang would be about the same as
a life sentence to most white men, I judge."

Charlotte turned away quickly; and when she could trust herself in the
presence of her aunt, she led the way back to the shade of the
after-deck awning and tried, for her own sake, to talk about some of the
many things that had gone to make up the sum of their daily life before
this black cloud of perplexity had settled down. It was a dismaying
failure; and when the invalid said she would go and lie down for awhile,
Charlotte was thankful and went once more to lock herself and her
trouble in her state-room.

That evening, after dinner, she went forward with some of the other
passengers to the railed promenade which was the common evening
rendezvous. The _Belle Julie_ had tied up at a small town on the western
bank of the great river, and the ant procession of roustabouts was in
motion, going laden up the swing-stage and returning empty by the
foot-plank. Left to herself for a moment, Charlotte faced the rail and
again sought to single out the man whose fate she must decide.

She distinguished him presently; a grimy, perspiring unit in the crew,
tramping back and forth mechanically, staggering under the heaviest
loads, and staring stonily at the back of his file leader in the endless
round; a picture of misery and despair, Charlotte thought, and she was
turning away with the dangerous rebellion against the conventions
swelling again in her heart when Captain Mayfield joined her.

"I just wanted to show you," he said; and he pointed out a gang of men
repairing a slip in the levee embankment below the town landing. It was
a squad of prisoners in chains. The figures of the convicts were struck
out sharply against the dark background of undergrowth, and the
reflection of the sunset glow on the river lighted up their sullen faces
and burnished the use-worn links in their leg-fetters.

"The chain-gang;" said the captain, briefly. "That's about where the
fellow that robbed the Bayou State Security will bring up, if they catch
him. He'll have to be mighty tough and well-seasoned if he lives to
worry through twenty years of that, don't you think?"

But Miss Farnham could not answer; and even the unobservant captain of
river boats saw that she was moved and was sorry he had spoken.




IX

THE MIDDLE WATCH


In any path of performance there is but one step which is irrevocable,
namely, the final one, and in Charlotte Farnham's besetment this step
was the mailing of the letter to Mr. Galbraith. Many times during the
evening she wrought herself up to the plunging point, only to recoil on
the very brink; and when at length she gave up the struggle and went to
bed, the sealed letter was still under her pillow.

Now it is a well-accepted truism that an exasperated sense of duty, like
remorse and grief, fights best in the night-watches. It was of no avail
to protest that her intention was still unshaken. Conscience urged that
delay was little less culpable than refusal, since every hour gave the
criminal an added chance of escape. The logic was unanswerable, and
trembling lest the implacable inward monitor should presently insist
upon the immediate revealment of the fugitive's identity to Captain
Mayfield, she got up and dressed hurriedly, meaning to end the agony
once for all by giving the letter to the night clerk.

But once again the chapter of accidents intervened. While she was
unbolting her door, the mellow roar of the whistle and the jangling of
the engine-room bells warned her that the _Belle Julie_ was approaching
a landing. Remembering the cause of her earliest failure, she ran
quickly to the office, only to find it deserted and the door locked.

This time, however, she determined not to be diverted. Going back to the
state-room for a wrap she returned to wait for the clerk's reappearance.
This final pause soon proved to be the severest trial of all. The
minutes dragged leaden-winged; and to sit quietly in the silence and
solitude of the great saloon became a nerve-racking impossibility. When
it went past endurance, she rose and stepped out upon the
promenade-deck.

The electric search-light eye on the hurricane-deck was just over her
head, and its great white cone seemed to hiss as it poured its dazzling
flood of fictitious noonday upon the shelving river bank and the
sleeping hamlet beyond. The furnace doors were open, and the red glare
of the fires quickened the darkness under the beam of the electric into
lurid life. Out of the dusky underglow came the freight-carriers, giving
birth to a file of grotesque shadow monsters as they swung up the plank
into the field of the search-light.

The stopping-place was an unimportant one, and a few minutes sufficed
for the unloading of the small consignment of freight. The mate had left
his outlook upon the hurricane-deck and was down among the men,
hastening them with harsh commands and epithets which owed their
mildness to the presence of the silent onlooker beneath the electric.

The foot-plank had been drawn in, the steam winch was clattering, and
the landing-stage had begun to come aboard, when the two men whose duty
it was to cast off ran out on the tilting stage and dropped from its
shore end. One of them fell clumsily, tried to rise, and sank back into
the shadow; but the other scrambled up the steep bank and loosened the
half-hitches in the wet hawser. With the slackening of the line the
steamer began to move out into the stream, and the man at the
mooring-post looked around to see what had become of his companion.

"Get a move on youse!" bellowed the mate; but instead of obeying, the
man ran back and went on his knees beside the huddled figure in the
shadow.

At this point the watcher on the promenade-deck began vaguely to
understand that the first man was disabled in some way, and that the
other was trying to lift him. While she looked, the engine-room bells
jangled and the wheels began to turn. The mate forgot her and swore out
of a full heart.

She put her fingers in her ears to shut out the clamor of abusive
profanity; but the man on the bank paid no attention to the richly
emphasized command to come aboard. Instead, he ran swiftly to the
mooring-post, took a double turn of the trailing hawser around it and
stood by until the straining line snubbed the steamer's bow to the
shore. Then, deftly casting off again, he darted back to the disabled
man, hoisted him bodily to the high guard, and clambered aboard
himself, all this while M'Grath was brushing the impeding crew aside to
get at him.

Charlotte saw every move of the quick-witted salvage in the doing, and
wanted to cry out in sheer enthusiasm when it was done. Then, in the
light from the furnace doors, she saw the face of the chief actor: it
was the face of the man with the stubble beard.

The night was summer warm, but she shrank back and shivered as if a cold
wind had breathed upon her. Why must he make it still harder for her by
posing as the defender of the wretched negro? She would look on no
longer; she would.... The harsh voice of the mate, dominating the noise
of the machinery and the churning of the paddle-wheels, drew her
irresistibly to the rail. She could not hear what M'Grath was saying,
but she could read hot wrath in his gestures, and in the way the men
fell back out of his reach. All but one: the stubble-bearded white man
was facing him fearlessly, and he appeared to be trying to explain.

Griswold was trying to explain, but the bullying first officer would not
let him. It was a small matter: with the money gone, and the probability
that capture and arrest were deferred only from landing to landing, a
little abuse, more or less, counted as nothing. But he was grimly
determined to keep M'Grath from laying violent hands upon the negro who
had twisted his ankle in jumping from the uptilted landing-stage.

"No; this is one time when you don't skin anybody alive!" he retorted,
when a break in the stream of abuse gave him a chance. "You let the man
alone. He couldn't help it. Do you suppose he sprained an ankle
purposely to give you a chance to curse him out?"

The mate's reply was a brutal kick at the crippled negro. Griswold came
closer.

"Don't try that again!" he warned, angrily. "If you've got to take it
out on somebody, I'm your man."

This was mutiny, and M'Grath's remedy for that distemper was ever
heroic. In a flash his big fist shot out and the crew looked to see its
lighter champion go backward into the river at the impact. But the blow
did not land. Griswold saw it coming and swerved the necessary
body-breadth. The result was a demonstration of a simple theorem in
dynamics. M'Grath reeled under the impetus of his own unresisted effort,
stumbled forward against the low edge-line bulwark, clawed wildly at the
fickle air and dropped overboard like a stone.

At the splashing plunge Griswold saw, planned, and acted in the same
instant. The _Belle Julie_ was forging ahead at full speed, and if the
mate did not drown at once, the projecting paddle-wheel would batter the
life out of him as he passed under it.

Clearing the intervening obstacles in a hurdler's leap, Griswold raced
aft on the outer edge of the guards and jumped overboard in time to
grapple the drowning man when he was within a few feet of the churning
wheel. The struggle was short but fierce. Griswold got a strangling arm
around the big man's neck and strove to sink with him so that the wheel
might pass over them. He was only partly successful. The mate was
terror-crazed and fought blindly. There was no time for trick or
stratagem, and when the thunder of the wheel roared overhead, Griswold
felt the jar of a blow and the mate's struggles ceased abruptly. A
gasping moment later the worst was over and the rescuer had his head
out; was swimming gallantly in the wake of the steamer, supporting the
unconscious M'Grath and shouting lustily for help.

The help came quickly. The alarm had been promptly given, and the night
pilot was a man for an emergency. Before the little-used yawl could be
lowered, the steamer had swept a wide circle in mid-stream and the
search-light picked up the castaways. From that to placing the _Belle
Julie_ so that the two bits of human flotsam could be hauled in over the
bows was but a skilful hand's-turn of rudder-work, accomplished as
cleverly as if the great steamboat had been a power-driven launch to be
steered by a touch of the tiller.

All this Charlotte saw. She was looking on when the two men were dragged
aboard, the big Irishman still unconscious, and the rescuer in the final
ditch of exhaustion--breathless, sodden, reeling with weariness.

And afterward, when the _Belle Julie's_ prow was once more turned to the
north, Miss Farnham had no thought of stopping at the clerk's office
when she flew back to her state-room with the letter to Mr. Galbraith
hidden in her bosom and clutched tightly as if she were afraid it might
cry out its accusing secret of its own accord.




X

QUICKSANDS


On the morning following the rescue of the mate, Charlotte Farnham awoke
with the conviction that she had been miraculously saved from incurring
the penalties dealt out to those who rush blindly into the thick of
things without due thought and careful consideration.

In the light of a new day it seemed almost incredible that, only a few
hours earlier, she could have been so rash as to assume that there was
no possibility of a mistake; that she had been on the verge of sending a
possibly innocent man to answer as he could for the sins of the guilty.

Who could be sure? Could she go into court and swear that this man and
the man she had seen in the bank were one and the same? Yesterday she
had thought that she could; but to-day she was equally sure that she
could not.

But the Puritan conscience was not to be entirely silenced. Reason sits
in a higher seat than that occupied by the senses, and reason argued
that a man who would forgive his enemy, and instantly risk his life in
proof of the forgiveness, could not be a desperate criminal. Conscience
pointed out the alternative. A little careful investigation would
remove the doubt--or confirm it. Somebody on the boat must know the
deck-hand, or know enough about him to establish his real identity.

Naturally, Charlotte thought first of Captain Mayfield; and when
breakfast was over, and she had settled her aunt in the invalid's chair
under the shade of the after-awning, she went on her quest.

The captain was on the port promenade, forward, and he was about to
light his after-breakfast cigar. But he threw the match away when Miss
Farnham came out and took the chair he placed for her.

"Please smoke if you want to," she said, noting the clipped cigar; "I
don't mind it in the least."

"Thank you," said the master of the _Belle Julie_, shifting his chair to
leeward and finding another match. He had grown daughters of his own,
and Miss Farnham reminded him of the one who lived in St. Louis and took
her dead mother's place in a home which would otherwise have held no
welcome for a grizzled old river-sailor.

For a time Miss Farnham seemed to have forgotten what she came to say,
and the ash grew longer on the captain's cigar. It was another
delectable day, and the _Belle Julie_ was still churning the brown flood
in the majestic reaches of the lower river. Down on the fore-deck the
roustabouts were singing. It was some old-time plantation melody, and
Charlotte could not catch the words; but the blending harmony, rich in
the altogether inimitable timbre of the African song-voice, rose above
the throbbing of the engines and the splash of the paddles.

"They are happy, those men?" said Charlotte, turning suddenly upon the
silent old riverman at her side.

"The nigger 'rousties,' you mean?--oh, yes. I guess so."

"But it is such a hard life," she protested. "I don't see how they can
sing."

The captain smiled good-naturedly.

"It is a pretty hard life," he admitted. "But they're in a class by
themselves. You couldn't hire a river nigger to do anything else. Then,
again, a man doesn't miss what he's never had. They get a plenty to eat,
and the soft side of a cargo pile makes a pretty good bed, if you've
never slept in a better one."

Miss Farnham shook her head thoughtfully. "Isn't that putting them
terribly low in the scale of humanity? Surely there must be some among
them who are capable of better things." She was trying desperately hard
to lead up to the stubble-bearded man, and it was the most difficult
task she had ever set herself.

"Not among the black boys, I'm afraid. Now and then a white man drifts
into a crew, but that's a different matter."

"Better or worse?" she queried.

"Worse, usually. It's a pretty poor stick of a white man that can't find
something better than 'rousting' on a steamboat."

Here was her chance, and she took it courageously.

"Haven't you one man in the _Belle Julie's_ crew who has earned a better
recommendation than that, Captain Mayfield?"

"You mean that sick hobo who went into the river after M'Grath last
night? I didn't know that story had got back to the ladies' cabin."

"It hasn't. But I know it because I was looking on. I couldn't sleep,
and I had gone out to see them make a night landing. Why do you call him
'the sick hobo'?"

The captain was paying strict attention now, looking at her curiously
from beneath the grizzled eyebrows. But he saw only the classic profile.

"That's what he is--or at least, what he let on to be when he shipped
with us," he replied. Then: "You say you saw it: tell me what happened."

"I am not sure that I quite understood the beginning of it," she said
doubtfully. "Two men, the white man and a negro, went ashore to untie
the boat. They both jumped from the stage while it was going up, and it
was the white man who untied the rope alone. After the boat began to
swing away from the bank, he saw that the other man was hurt and went to
help him. Mr. M'Grath was angry and he shouted at them to come aboard.
With the boat going away from the shore, they couldn't; so the white man
ran and tied the rope again. Am I getting it awfully mixed up?"

"Not at all," said the captain. "What happened then?"

"The white man lifted the negro to the deck, untied the rope again, and
climbed on just as the boat was swinging away the second time. Mr.
M'Grath was furious. He fought his way to where the white man was
standing over the hurt negro and struck at him. The next thing I knew,
Mr. M'Grath was overboard and right down here in front of the
paddle-wheel, and the man he had tried to strike was jumping in after
him. I thought they would both be ground to death under the wheel."

"Is that all?"

"All but the rescue. The pilot turned the _Belle Julie_ around and they
were picked up. Mr. M'Grath was unconscious, and the other man was too
weak to stand up."

Captain Mayfield nodded. "He was sick when he came to us: consumption,
Mac said."

Miss Farnham was a doctor's daughter, and she had seen many victims of
the white death.

"I think that must have been a mistake," she ventured. "He doesn't look
at all like a tuberculosis patient."

Again the captain was curious.

"How could you tell, at that distance and in the night?" he asked
quizzically.

Embarrassment quickly flung down a handful of obstacles in Charlotte's
path, but she picked her way among them.

"I saw him yesterday morning quite close, and I looked at him
because--because I thought I had seen him somewhere before. Do you know
anything about him, Captain Mayfield?--who he is, I mean?"

"Not any more than I do about the rest of them. They're driftwood,
mostly, you understand. We pick them up and drop them, here and there
and everywhere. This fellow's name is Gavitt--John Wesley Gavitt--on the
clerk's book. Mac said he was a sick hobo, working his way to St.
Louis."

"How long before the beginning of a voyage do you hire the crew?" asked
Charlotte, trying not to seem too pointedly interested.

"Oh, they string along all through the loading for two or three days,
and from that right up to the last minute."

It was discouraging, and she was on the point of giving up. Her one hope
now lay in the fixing of the exact time of the man Gavitt's enlistment
in the _Belle Julie's_ crew, and there appeared to be only one way of
determining this.

"Does anybody know--could anybody tell just when this particular man was
hired, Captain Mayfield?" she asked.

"Not unless Mac happens to remember. No, hold on; I recollect now; it
was the day we left New Orleans--day before yesterday, that was."

"In the morning?"

If the good-natured captain was beginning to wonder why his pretty
passenger was cross-examining him so closely, he did not betray it.

"It was about noon; I believe. Two or three of the black boys had
skipped out at the last minute, as they always do, and we were
short-handed. Mac said the fellow didn't look as if he could stand much,
but he took him anyhow."

Once more the slender thread of investigation lay broken in her hands.
The robbery had been committed at or very near eleven o'clock, and an
hour would have given the robber time enough to disguise himself and
reach the steamer. But since the captain did not seem altogether
positive as to the exact hour, she tried again.

"Please try to remember exactly, Captain Mayfield," she pleaded. "I
_must_ find out, if I can--for reasons which I can't explain to any one.
Was it just at noon?"

Now this veteran master of packet boats was the last man in the world to
be heroically accurate when his sympathies were appealed to by a winsome
young woman in evident distress; and while he would cheerfully have
sworn that it was eleven o'clock or one o'clock when John Gavitt came
aboard, if he had known certainly which statement would relieve her, her
query left him no hint to steer by.

So he said: "Oh, I say, 'about noon,' but it might have been an hour or
two before, or any time after, till we cleared. But we'll find out.
We'll have the fellow up here and put him on the witness stand. Or I'll
go below and dig into him for you myself, if you say so."

"Not for the world!" she protested, aghast at the bare suggestion; and
for fear it might be repeated in some less evadable form, she made an
excuse of her duty and ran away to her aunt.

Later in the day, when she had sought in vain for some other, this
suggestion of Captain Mayfield's came back. While there was the smallest
chance that she had been mistaken, she dared not send the letter to Mr.
Galbraith; yet it was clearly her duty to get at the truth of the
matter, if she could.

But how? If Captain Mayfield could not remember the exact time of John
Gavitt's enrolment as a member of the _Belle Julie's_ crew, it was more
than probable that no one else could; no one but the man himself. It was
at this point that the captain's suggestion returned to strike fire like
steel upon reluctant flint. Could she go to the length of questioning
Gavitt? If she should, would he tell her the truth? And if he should
tell the truth, would it make the distressing duty any easier? Not
easier, she concluded, but possibly less puzzling.

Thus far the suggestion: but without the help of some third person, she
did not see how it could be carried out. She could neither go to him nor
summon him; and the alternative of taking the captain into her
confidence was rejected at once as being too hazardous. For the captain
might not scruple to take the matter into his own hands without
ceremony, sending the suspected man back to New Orleans to establish his
innocence--if he could.

Charlotte worried over the wretched entanglement all day, and was so
distrait and absent-minded that her aunt remarked it, naming it malaria
and prescribing quinine. Whereat Charlotte dissembled and put on a mask
of cheerfulness, keeping it on until after the evening meal and her
aunt's early retiring. But when she was released, she was glad enough to
go out on the promenade just forward of the starboard paddle-box, where
there were no after-dinner loungers, to be alone with her problem and
free to plunge once more into its intricacies.

It was possibly ten minutes later, while she stood leaning against a
stanchion and watching the lights of a distant town rise out of the
watery horizon ahead, that chance, the final arbiter in so many human
involvements, led her quickly into the valley of decision. She heard a
man's step on the steeply pitched stair leading down from the
hurricane-deck. Before she could turn away he was confronting her; the
man whose name on the _Belle Julie's_ crew roster was John Wesley
Gavitt.




XI

THE ANARCHIST


Griswold's appearance was less fortuitous than it seemed to be. As a
reward of merit for having saved the mate's life, he had been told off
to serve temporarily as man-of-all-work for the day pilot, who chanced
to be without a steersman. His watch in the pilot-house was over, and he
was on his way to the crew's quarters below when he stumbled upon Miss
Farnham. Mindful of his earlier slip, he passed her as if she had been
invisible. She let him go until her opportunity was all but lost; then,
plucking courage out of the heart of desperation, she spoke.

"One moment, if you please; I--I want to ask you something," she
faltered; and he wheeled obediently and faced her.

Followed a pause, inevitable, but none the less awkward for the one who
was responsible. Griswold felt, rather than saw, her embarrassment, and
was generous enough to try to help her.

"I think I know what you wish to say: you are quite at liberty to say
it," he offered, when the pause had grown into an obstacle which she
seemed powerless to surmount.

"Do you? I have been hoping you wouldn't," was the quick rejoinder.
Then: "Will you tell me at what time you joined the crew of the _Belle
Julie_?"

The question did not surprise him, nor did he attempt to evade it.

"Between twelve and one o'clock, the day before yesterday."

"Will you tell me where you were at eleven o'clock that day?"

"Yes, if you ask me."

"I do ask you."

"I was in a certain business building in New Orleans, as near to you as
I am now. Is that sufficiently definite?"

"It is. I thought perhaps--I had hoped--Oh, for goodness' sake, why did
you do it?" she burst out, no longer able to fence with the weapons of
indirectness.

He answered her frankly.

"It was the old story of one man's over-plenty and another man's need.
Have you ever known what it means to go hungry for sheer poverty's
sake?--but, of course, you haven't."

"No," she admitted.

"Well, I have; I was hungry that morning; very hungry. I know this
doesn't excuse the thing--to you. But perhaps it may help to explain
it."

"I think I can understand--a little. But surely----"

He stopped her with a quick little gesture.

"I know what you are going to say: that I should have been willing to
work, or even to beg, rather than steal. I was willing to work; I was
not willing to beg. I know it is all wrong from your point of view; but
I should be sorry to have you think that I did what _I_ believed to be
wrong."

"Surely you must know it is wrong?"

"Pardon me, but I can't admit that. If I could, you would be relieved of
what is doubtless a very painful duty. I should surrender myself at
once."

"But think of it; if you are right, every one else must be wrong!"

"No; not quite every one. But that is a very large question, and we
needn't go into it. I confess that my method was unconventional; a
little more summary than that of the usurers and the strictly legal
robbers, but quite as defensible. For they rob the poor and the
helpless, while I merely dispossessed one rich corporation of a portion
of its exactions from the many."

"Then you are not sorry? I saw you yesterday afternoon and hoped you
were."

He laughed unpleasantly. "I was sorry, then, and I am now; for the same
reason. I have lost the money."

"Lost it?" she gasped, "How?"

"I had hidden it, and I suppose some one else has found it. It is all
right, so far as the ownership is concerned; but I am still self-centred
enough to be chagrined about it."

"But that is nothing!" she protested, with sharp regret in her voice;
"now you can never return it!"

"I didn't intend to," he assured her, gravely. "I did have some notion
of redistributing it fairly among those who need it most; but that was
all."

"But you must have returned it in the end. You could never have been
content to keep it."

"Do you think so?" he rejoined. "I think I could have been quite content
to keep it. But that is past; it is gone, and I couldn't return it if I
wanted to."

"No," she acquiesced; "and that makes it all the harder."

"For you to do what you must do? But you mustn't think of that. I
shouldn't have made restitution in any event. Let me tell you what I
did. I had a weapon, as you have read. I tied it up with the money in a
handkerchief. There was always the chance of their catching me, and I
had made up my mind that my last free act would be to drop the bundle
into the river. So you see you need not hesitate on that score."

"Then you know what it is that I must do?"

"Assuredly. I knew it yesterday, when I saw that you had recognized me.
It was very merciful in you to reprieve me, even for a few hours; but
you will pardon me if I say it was wrong?"

"Wrong!" she burst out. "Is it generous to say that to me? Are you so
indifferent yourself that you think every one else is indifferent, too?"

He smiled under cover of the darkness, and the joy of finding that his
ideal was not going to be shattered was much greater than any thought of
the price he must pay to preserve it. When she paused, he had his
answer ready.

"I know you are not indifferent; you couldn't be. But you must be true
to yourself, at whatever cost. Will you go to Captain Mayfield now?"

She hesitated.

"I thought of doing that, at first," she began, postponing to a more
convenient season the unnerving reflection that she was actually
discussing the ways and means of it with him. "It seemed to be the
simplest thing to do. But then I saw what would happen; that I should be
obliged----"

Again he stopped her with a gesture.

"I understand. We must guard against that at all hazards. You must not
be dragged into it, you know, even remotely."

"How can you think of such things at such a time?" she queried.

"I should be unworthy to stand here talking to you if I didn't think of
them. But since you can't go to Captain Mayfield, what will you do? What
had you thought of doing?"

"I wrote a letter to--to Mr. Galbraith," she confessed.

"And you have not sent it?"

"No. If I had, I shouldn't have spoken to you."

"To be sure. I suppose you signed the letter?"

"Certainly."

"That was a mistake. You must rewrite it, leaving out your name, and
send it. All you need to say is that the man who robbed the Bayou State
Security is escaping on the _Belle Julie_; that he is disguised as a
deck-hand, and that his name on the steamer's books is John Wesley
Gavitt. That will be amply sufficient."

"But that isn't your name," she asserted.

"No; but that doesn't matter. It is the name that will find me."

She was silent for a moment. Then: "Why mustn't I sign it? They will pay
no attention to an anonymous letter. And, besides, it seems so--so
cowardly."

"They will telegraph to every river landing ahead of us within an hour
after your letter reaches New Orleans; you needn't doubt that. And the
suppression of your name isn't cowardly; it is merely a justifiable bit
of self-protection. It is your duty to give the alarm; but when you have
done that, your responsibility ceases. There are plenty of people who
can identify me if I am taken back to New Orleans. You don't want to be
summoned as a witness, and you needn't be."

She saw the direct, man-like wisdom of all this, and was quick to
appreciate his delicate tact in effacing the question of the reward
without even referring to it. But his stoicism was almost appalling.

"It is very shocking!" she murmured; "only you don't seem to realize it
at all."

"Don't I? You must remember that I have been arguing from your point of
view. My own is quite unchanged. It is your duty to do what you must
do; it is my affair to avert the consequences to myself, if I can
manage it without taking an unfair advantage of your frankness."

"What will you do?"

"It would be bad faith now for me to try to run away from the steamer,
as I meant to do. So far, you have bound me by your candor. But beyond
that I make no promises. My parole will be at an end when the officers
appear, and I shall do what I can to dodge, or to escape if I am taken.
Is that fair?"

"It is more than fair: I can't understand."

"What is it that you can't understand?"

"How you can do this; how you can do such things as the one you did last
night, and still----"

He finished the sentence for her.--"And still be a common robber of
banks, and the like. I fancy it is a bit puzzling--from your point of
view. Sometime, perhaps, we shall all understand things better than we
do now, but to that time, and beyond it, I shall be your grateful debtor
for what you have done to-night. May I go now?"

She gave him leave, and when he was gone, she went to her state-room to
write as he had suggested. An hour later she gave the newly written
letter to the night clerk; and the thing was done.

During the remainder of the slow up-river voyage to St. Louis, Charlotte
Farnham lived as one who has fired the fuse of a dynamite charge and is
momently braced for the shock of the explosion. Each morning she assured
herself that the strange man who could be a self-confessed felon one
moment and a chivalrous gentleman the next was still a member of the
_Belle Julie's_ crew; but she became a coward of landings, not daring to
look on for fear she should see him arrested and taken away.

And while the _Belle Julie_ put landing after landing astern and the
voyage grew older, Griswold, too, began to feel the pangs of suspense.
Though he had no thought of breaking his promise, the dread of capture
and trial and punishment grew until it became a threatening cloud to
obscure all horizons. It was to no purpose that he called himself hard
names and strove to rise superior to the overshadowing threat. It was
there, and it would not be ignored. And when he faced it fairly a new
dread arose in his heart; the fear that his fear might end by making him
a criminal in fact--a savage to slay and die rather than be taken alive.

In the ordinary course of things, Miss Farnham's letter should have
reached New Orleans in time to have procured Griswold's arrest at any
one of a score of landings south of Memphis. When the spires of the
Tennessee metropolis disappeared to the southward, he began to be afraid
that her resolution had failed, and to bewail his broken ideal.

He had no means of knowing that she had given her letter to the night
clerk within the hour of their interview on the saloon-deck promenade;
nor did he, or any one else, know that it had lain unnoticed and
overlooked on the clerk's desk until the _Belle Julie_ reached Cairo.
Such, however, was the pregnant fact; and to this purely accidental
delay Griswold owed his first sight of the chief city of Missouri lying
dim and shadowy under its mantle of coal smoke.

The _Belle Julie_ made her landing in the early evening, and Charlotte
was busy up to the last moment getting her own and her aunt's belongings
ready for the transfer to the upper river steamer on which they were to
complete their journey to Minnesota. Hence, it was not until the _Belle
Julie_ was edging her way up to the stone-paved levee that Charlotte
broke her self-imposed rule and slipped out upon the port promenade.

The swing-stage was poised in the air ready to be lowered, and two of
the deck-hands were dropping from the shore end to trail the bow line up
the paved slope to the nearest mooring-ring. There was an electric
arc-light opposite the steamer's berth, and Charlotte shaded her eyes
with her hands to follow the motions of the two bent figures under the
dripping hawser.

One of the men was wearing a cap, and there was a small bundle hanging
at his belt. She recognized him at once. At the mooring-ring he was the
one who stooped to make the line fast, and the other, a negro, stood
aside. At that moment the landing-stage fell, and in the confusion of
debarkation which promptly followed, the thrilling bit of by-play at the
mooring-ring passed unnoted by all save the silent watcher on the
saloon-deck.

While the man in the cap was still on his knees, two men stole from the
shadow of the nearest freight pyramid and flung themselves upon him. He
fought fiercely for a moment, and though he was more than doubly
outweighted, rose to his feet, striking out viciously and dragging his
assailants up with him. In the struggle the bundle dropped from his
belt, and Charlotte saw him kick it aside. The waiting negro caught it
deftly and vanished among the freight pyramids; whereupon one of the
attacking pair wrenched himself out of the three-man scuffle and darted
away in pursuit.

This left but a single antagonist for the fugitive, and Charlotte's
sympathies deserted her convictions for the moment. But while she was
biting her lip to keep from crying out, the fugitive stepped back and
held out his hands; and she saw the gleam of polished metal reflecting
the glare of the arc-light when the officer snapped the handcuffs upon
his wrists.

It was with a distinct sense of culpability oppressing her that she went
back to her aunt, and she was careful not to let the invalid see her
face. Fortunately, there was a thing to be done, and the transfer to the
other steamer came opportunely to help her to re-establish the balance
of things distorted.

She was sorry, but, after all, the man had only himself to blame. None
the less, the wish that some one else might have been his betrayer was
promising to grow later into remorseful and lasting regret when, with
her aunt, she left the _Belle Julie_, and walked up the levee to go
aboard the _Star of the North_.




XII

MOSES ICHTHYOPHAGUS


After suffering all the pangs of those who lose between the touch and
the clutch, Griswold had found the red-handkerchief bundle precisely
where it had been hidden; namely, buried safely in the deck-load of
sacked coffee on the engine-room guard.

It came to light in the final half-hour of the voyage, when he and his
mates were transferring the coffee to the main-deck, forward. It had not
been disturbed; and what had happened was obvious enough, after the
fact. After its hiding, arm's-length deep, in a cranny between the
sacks, some sudden jar of the boat had slightly shifted the cargo,
closing one cranny and opening another.

With the money once more in his possession he had a swift return of the
emotions which had thrilled him when he found himself standing on the
sidewalk in front of the Bayou State Security with the block of
bank-notes under his arm. Once more he was on fair fighting terms with
the world, and the star of hope, which had gone out like a candle in a
gust of wind at the discovery of his loss, swung high in the firmament,
shining all the more brightly for its long occultation.

As to the battle for the keeping which was probably awaiting him at the
St. Louis landing, the prospect of coming to blows, man-fashion, with
the enemy, was not wholly unwelcome. With all of his incompletenesses
this young rebel of life was no coward. If the New Orleans thief-takers
were waiting for him in the shadows of the great city's landing-place,
so be it; he would try to give them their money's worth: and an eager
impatience to be at it got into his blood.

The few necessary preliminaries were arranged while the _Belle Julie_
was backing and filling for the landing. Since to be taken with the
money in his possession was to give the enemy the chance of winning at
one stroke both the victory and the spoils, he made a confederate of the
negro whose part he had taken in the quarrel with M'Grath. The man was
grateful and loyal according to his gifts; and Griswold's need was too
pressing to stick at any trifle of unintelligence.

"Mose, you'll go ashore with me on the spring line," he said, when he
had found his man at the heel of the landing-stage.

"Yes, suh, Mars' Gravitt; dat's me, sholy."

"All right. You see this bundle. If anybody tackles me while we're
making fast, I'm going to drop it, and you must get it and run away. Do
you understand?"

The negro eyed the bundle suspiciously.

"Ain't no dinnymite, 'r nothin' er that sawt in hit, is dey, Cap'm?"

"No."

"Whut-all mus' I do when I's done tuk out wid hit?"

"Get away, first; then keep out of sight and hang around the levee for
an hour or two. If I don't turn up before you get tired, pitch the thing
into the river and go about your business. How much money does the
captain owe you?"

"Cap'm Mayfiel'? Shuh! he don't owe me nothin'. I done draw de las'
picayune dat was comin' to me yistiday--an' dat yaller nigger over
yonder got it in de crap-game, same as turrers."

Griswold put a twenty-dollar bill into the black palm, and when the crap
victim made out the figure of it by the glow of the furnace fires, his
eyes bulged. "Gorra-mighty!" he gasped; and would have given it back.

"No, keep it; it's yours. Do exactly as I have told you, and if I'm able
to keep my date with you, I'll double it. But if I don't show up,
remember--the bundle goes into the river just as it is. If you open it,
it'll conjure you worse than any Obi-man you ever heard of."

"No, _suh_! I ain't gwine open hit, Cap'm--not if dey's cunjah in hit;
no, suh!"

"Well, there is--the worst kind of conjure this old world has ever
known. But it won't hurt you if you don't meddle with it. Keep your wits
about you and be ready to grab it and run. Here we go."

The pilot had found his wharfage and was edging the _Belle Julie_ up to
it. The bow men paid out slack, and Griswold and the black, dropping
from the swinging stage, trailed the end of the wet hawser up to the
nearest mooring-ring. Though haste in making fast is the spring-line
man's first duty, Griswold took a fraction of a second to look around
him. The mooring-ring lay fair in the mock noonday of electric light,
and there was no cover near it save a tarpaulined pyramid of sugar
barrels. Up the levee slope the way was open to the one-sided
river-fronting street; and beyond the tarpaulin-covered sugar were more
freight pyramids, with shadowy alleys between them.

Satisfied with what he saw, Griswold bade the negro keep watch and knelt
to knot the hawser in the ring. The line was water-soaked and stiff, and
in the momentary struggle with it his caution relaxed its eyehold on the
pyramid of sugar barrels. The lapse was hardly more than a glance aside,
but it sufficed. While the negro sentinel was stammering, "L-l-lookout,
Mars' Cap'm!" the trap was sprung.

In deference to the up-coming passengers from the _Belle Julie_, the two
man-catchers tried to do their job quietly. But Griswold would not have
it so, and he was up and had twisted himself free when a blow from a
clubbed pistol drove him back to his knees. Half stunned by the
clubbing, he still made shift to spring afoot again, to drop his
handkerchief bundle and kick it aside, and to close with his assailants
while the negro was snatching up the treasure and darting away among the
freight pyramids. After that he had but one thought; to keep the two
plain-clothes men busy until the negro had made his escape. Even this
proved to be a forlorn hope, since the smaller of the two instantly
broke away to give chase, while the other stepped back, spun his weapon
in air, and levelled it.

Rage-blinded as he was, Griswold knew that the levelled pistol meant
surrender or death. In the fine battle-frenzy of the moment he was on
the verge of accepting the alternative. Life and the love of it were
merged in a fierce desire to rush Berserk-mad upon the weapon and the
man behind it, and his muscles were hardening for the spring when he
chanced to look past the levelled weapon to the _Belle Julie_; to the
saloon-deck guard where a solitary, gray-coated figure stood clinging to
a stanchion and looking on with what agonies of soul none might know.
Like a flash of revealing light it came to him that the death which
would be the lesser of two evils for him would brim a life-long cup of
trembling for the woman whose duty it had been to betray him, and he
thrust out his wrists for the manacles.

Quite naturally, the upflash of self-abnegation gave birth to renewed
hope; and when his captor had handcuffed him and was walking him toward
a closed carriage drawn up before the nearest saloon in the
river-fronting street, he ventured to ask what he was wanted for.

"You'll find that out soon enough," was the curt reply, and nothing more
was said until the carriage was reached and the door had been jerked
open. "Get in!" commanded the majesty of the law, and when the door was
slammed upon the captive, the plain-clothes man turned to the driver, a
little wizened Irishman with a face like a shrivelled winter apple.
"What time does that New Orleans fast train pull out?"

Griswold heard the reply: "Sivin-forty-five, sorr," and something in the
thin, piping voice gave him fresh courage. Through the open window of
the carriage he saw his captor glance at his watch and begin an
impatient sentry-beat up and down under the electric transparency
advertising the particular brand of whiskey specialized by the saloon.
He was evidently waiting for his colleague to bring in the negro, and
time pressed.

While he looked, Griswold was conscious of a curious change creeping
into heart and brain. From typifying himself as an escaping criminal the
psychological objective was slowly but surely becoming the subjective.
He _was_ a criminal. The conclusion brought no self-accusation, no
prickings of conscience. On the contrary, it swept the ground clear of
all the ethical obstructions, leaving only a vast subtlety and
furtiveness, the sly ferocity of the trapped animal.

Through half of the sentry-beat the big man's back was turned:
Griswold's eyes measured the distance, and the new subtlety weighed the
chances of a cautious opening of the carriage door, a tiger spring to
the pavement, and a battering out of the man's brains with the
handcuffs. There were few passers: it might be done.

It was not because it was too cold-blooded that he put the suggestion
aside. It was rather because the man-catcher himself suggested another
expedient. The spring evening was raw and chilly, and the open doors of
the saloon volleyed light and warmth and a beckoning invitation.
Griswold's gift, prostituted to the service of the changed point of
view, bade him read in the red face, the loose lip, and the bibulous
eyes the temptation that was gripping the plain-clothes man. "Wait,"
whispered the colorless inner voice; "wait, and be ready when he goes in
to get the drink he has promised himself he will never again be weak
enough to take while he is on duty. It won't be long."

Griswold waited. By a careful contortion of the manacled hands, which
seemed suddenly to have become endowed with the crafty deftness of the
hands of a pickpocket, he found his working capital in a pocket of the
short-sleeved coat. It had been diminished only by the hundred dollars
put into John Gavitt's hands, and the twenty he had given the negro. He
wished he might have had a glimpse of the little Irish cabman's face.
Since he had not, he made two hundred dollars of the money into a
compact roll and put the remainder back into the inner pocket.

It was only a minute or two after this that the red-faced man's
impatience blossomed into the thirst that will not be denied, and he
went into the saloon to get a drink, first putting the cabman on guard.

"Get down here and keep an eye on this dicky-bird," he ordered. "Slug
him if he tries to make a break."

But the cabman hung back.

"I'm no fightin' man, sorr; an', besides, I don't dare lave me harrses,"
he objected. But the officer broke in angrily.

"What the devil are you afraid of? He's got the clamps on, and couldn't
hurt you if he wanted to. Come down here!"

The little Irishman clambered down from his box reluctantly, with the
reins looped over his arm. When he peered in at the open window of the
carriage the big man had passed beyond the swinging screens of the
saloon entrance and Griswold seized his opportunity quickly.

"What's your job worth, my man?" he whispered.

The cabman snatched a swift glance over his shoulder before he ventured
to answer.

"Don't yez be timptin' a poor man wid a wife an' sivin childer hangin'
to um--don't yez do it, sorr!"

Griswold, the brother-keeping, would have thought twice before opening
any door of temptation for a brother man. But the new Griswold had no
compunctions.

"It's two hundred dollars to you if you can get me away from here before
that red-faced drunkard comes back. Have a runaway--anything! Here's the
money!"

For a single timorous instant the cabman hesitated. Then he took the
roll of money and crammed it into his pocket without looking at it.
Before Griswold could brace himself there was a quick _whish_ of the
whip, a piping cry from the driver, and the horses sprang away at a
reckless gallop, with the little Irishman hanging to the reins and
shouting feebly like a faint-hearted Automedon.

Griswold caught a passing glimpse of the red-faced man wiping his lips
in the doorway of the saloon as the carriage bounded forward; and when
the critical instant came, he was careful to fall out on the riverward
side of the vehicle. It was a desperate expedient, since he could not
wait to choose the favorable moment, and the handcuffs made him
practically helpless. Chance saved the clumsy escape from resulting in a
speedy recapture. When he tumbled out of the lurching carriage he was
hurled violently against something that figured as a wall of solid
masonry and was half stunned by the concussion. None the less, he had
wit enough to lie motionless in the shadow of the wall, and the hue and
cry, augmented by this time to a yelling mob, swept past without
discovering him.

When it was safe to do so, he sat up and felt for broken bones. There
were none; and he looked about him. The wall of masonry resolved itself
into a cargo of brick piled on the levee side of the street, and obeying
the primary impulse of a fugitive, he quickly put the sheltering bulk of
it between himself and the lighted thoroughfare.

The next step had to be resolutely thought out. How was he to get rid of
the handcuffs? Any policeman would have a key, and there were doubtless
plenty of locksmiths in St. Louis. But both of these sources of
assistance were out of the question. Whom, then? The answer came in one
word--M'Grath. On a day when the up-river voyage was no more than fairly
begun, one of the negroes in the crew had procured a bottle of bad
whiskey. To pacify him the mate had put him in irons, using two pairs of
handcuffs for the purpose. Therefore, M'Grath must have a key.

But would M'Grath do it? That remained to be seen; and since hesitation
was no part of Griswold's equipment, he covered the fetters as well as
he could with a scrap of bagging, and walked boldly down the levee and
aboard the _Belle Julie_, falling into line with the returning file of
roustabouts.

The mate was at the heel of the foot-plank, and he saw at once what the
scrap of sacking was meant to hide.

"Hello, there, Gavitt!" he called, not less gruffly than of yore, but
without the customary imprecation; "What are ye doing with thim things
on?"

Griswold told a straight story, concealing nothing: not even the
detective's refusal to tell him what he was arrested for.

M'Grath was smiling grimly when the tale was finished. "And did he let
ye come back to collect yer day-pay, then?" he asked, ironically.

"Hardly. He shoved me into a cab and then went into a saloon to get a
drink. While he was gone, the horses ran away and I got out," said
Griswold, still adhering to the exact facts.

"Ye'd ought to find that cabby and buy him a seegyar," was the mate's
comment. "So ye legged it, did ye?"

"Yes; when I got a show. But I can't get these things off."

This time M'Grath's smile was a grin.

"I'll bet ye can't. They ain't made f'r to come off. Never mind; peg
along afther me. You did be doing me a good turn wan black night, and
I'm not forgetting it."

He led the way up to his quarters in the texas, and telling Griswold to
wait, went down on his knees to rummage in the locker beneath the berth.

"I've got a couple o' pair av thim things in here, somewhere, and maybe
the key to 'em will fit yours," he went on, adding: "What's become av
Mose?"

Again Griswold told the exact truth.

"The last I saw of him he was making a run for it up the levee, with one
of the plain-clothes men chasing him."

M'Grath found his handcuffs and tried the key in those upon Griswold's
wrists. It fitted.

"Now ye're fut- and hand-loose, I'll say to ye what I wouldn't say to a
cripple. If ye've been telling me the truth, 'tis only the half av it.
What have ye been doing, Gavitt?"

Griswold smiled. "Toting cargo on the _Belle Julie_, since you've known
me. You'd swear to that, wouldn't you?"

"But before that?"

"Loafing around New Orleans for a month or two."

The big mate pushed him to a seat on the after berth and sat down
opposite.

"Because ye fished me out o' the river whin ye had good cause to lave me
be, I'll tell ye a thing or two for the good av yer soul. Thing number
wan is that ye're not Gavitt; ye're no more like him than I am. Let that
go, an' come to thing number two; ye've been up to some deviltry. How do
I know? Because, at the last landing below this a little man comes
aboard an' spots you. Is that all? It is not. Whin the _Belle Julie_
swings in, he's the first man off, making a clane jump av a good tin
feet from the engine-room guards. I saw 'im."

Griswold nodded and said, "I was wondering how they came to place me so
easily. This fellow knew I would be one of the two to carry out the
spring line?"

"He did, f'r I told him."

"Meaning to get me pulled?"

"Meaning nothing but wanting to be rid av the bothering little man. He
said he was a friend av yours, and didn't care to be speaking to ye
while ye was mixing with the naygurs. But that's all over and gone.
What'll ye be doing next?"

Griswold took a leaf out of the past. Safety in a former peril had grown
out of a breakfast deliberately eaten in a cafe next door to the Bayou
State Security.

"What would I do but finish my job on the _Julie_?" he said, pushing the
theory to its logical conclusion.

The mate shook his head. "Ye needn't do that; the cops might be coming
down here and running you in again. How much pay have ye drawn?"

"Not any."

M'Grath took a greasy wallet from his pocket and counted out a
deck-hand's wages for the trip.

"Take this, and I'll be getting it back from the clerk. It might not be
good f'r ye to show up at the office. Where's yer hat?"

"It was lost in the shuffle out yonder at the mooring-ring."

The mate found an old one of his own, together with a long-tailed coat,
much the worse for wear.

"Do you be taking these. They'll not be so likely to pick you up before
ye can get up-town if ye look a little less like a hobo."

Griswold suffered a sudden return to the meliorating humanities.

"I've been calling you all the hard names I could lay tongue to,
M'Grath, and there have been times when I would have given the price of
a good farm for the privilege of standing up to you on a bit of green
grass with nobody looking on. I take it all back. You say you haven't
forgotten: neither will I forget, and maybe my turn will come again,
some day."

"Go along with you," growled the rough-tongued Irishman, whose very
kindness had a tang of brutality in it. "If you're coming across the
naygur, Mose, anywhere, sind him back and tell him I'll see that he gets
real money f'r helping us unload. Off with ye, now, whilst they're
catching up with yer runaway cab."

Griswold went leisurely, as befitted his theory, and upon reaching the
levee, turned aside among the freight pyramids in search of his
confederate. Now that there was time to recall the facts he feared that
the negro had been taken. He had secured but a few yards' start in the
race, and his pursuer was a white man, able to back speed with
intelligence. Griswold had a sickening fit of despair when he
contemplated the possibility of failure with the goal almost in sight;
and the reaction, when he stumbled upon the negro skulking in the
shadows of a lumber cargo, was sharp enough to make him faint and dizzy.

The negro did not recognize him at first and was about to run away when
Griswold shook off the benumbing weakness and called out.

"T'ank de good Lawd! is dat you-all, Cap'm Gravitt? I's dat shuck up I
couldn' recconize my ol' mammy! Tek dishyer cunjah-bag o' yourn 'fo' I
gwine drap hit. Hit's des been _bu'nin'_ my han's ev' sense I done tuk
out wid it!"

Griswold took the handkerchief bundle, and the mere touch of it put new
life into him.

"Where is the fellow who was chasing you, Mose?" he asked.

"I's nev' gwine tell you dat; no, suh. Las' time I seed him, he's des
t'arin' off strips up de levee after turrer fellah."

"What other fellow?"

The negro laughed and did a double shuffle at the mere recollection of
it.

"Hi-yah! Turrer fellah is de fellah what done tuk my job. Hit was des
dis-a-way: when I t'ink dat white man gwine catch me, sho_ly_, I des
drap down in de darkes' cawneh I kin fin'; dat's what I done, yas, suh.
He des keep on agoin', _spat, spat, spat_, an' when he come out front de
_Gineral Jackson_ over yondeh, one dem boys what's wukkin' on her, _he_
tuk out, an' dat white man des tu'n hisself loose an' mek his laigs go
lak he gwine shek 'um plum off; yas, sah!"

Griswold suffered another lapse into the humanities when he saw the list
of participants in his act growing steadily with each fresh
complication, and he said, "I'm sorry for that, Mose."

"Nev' you min' 'bout dat, Cap'm. Dat boy he been doin' somepin to mek
him touchous, 'less'n he nev' tuk out dat-a-way, no, suh!"

"Maybe so. Well, we can't help it now. Here is the other twenty I
promised you."

"T'ank you, suh; t'ank you kin'ly Cap'm. You-all's des de whites' white
man ev' I knowned. You sholy is."

"What are you going to do with yourself, now?" Griswold inquired.

"Who, me? I's gwine up yondeh to dat resteraw an' git me de bigges'
mess o' fried fish I kin hol'--dat's me; yas, suh."

"M'Grath says he'll pay you levee wages if you'll come back to the boat
and help get the cargo out of her."

"Reckon I ain't gwine back to de _Julie_: no, suh. Dat'd be gittin' rich
too fas' for dis niggeh. Good-night, Cap'm Gravitt; an' t'ank you
kin'ly, suh."

Griswold went his way musing upon the little object-lesson afforded by
the negro's determination. Here was a fellow man who was one of the
feeblest of the under dogs in the great social fight; and with money
enough in hand to give him at least a breathing interval, his highest
ambition was a mess of fried fish.

The object-lesson was suggestive, if not specially encouraging, and
Griswold made a mental note of it for further study when the question of
present safety should be more satisfactorily answered.




XIII

GRISWOLD EMERGENT


Half an hour or such a matter after the hue-and-cry runaway from the
curb in front of the saloon two doors above, Mr. Abram Sonneschein,
dealer in second-hand clothing and sweat-shop bargains, saw a possible
customer drifting across the street, and made ready the grappling hooks
of commercial enterprise.

The drifter was apparently a passenger from some lately arrived
steamboat; but even to the trained eye of so acute an observer as Mr.
Sonneschein he presented difficulties in the way of classification. Only
temporarily, however. The long-tailed coat and the wide-brimmed, soft
felt hat were the insignia of the down-river, back-country planter, and
the merchant drew his conclusions accordingly.

"My, my! Rachel," he remarked to his helpmate behind the counter. "See
dis chay from de backvoods across der street coming! Maype ve could sell
him some odder t'ings to go vit dot coat, ain'd it? Come right in,
_mein_ frient; dis is der blace you vas looking for," this last to the
drifter, with a detaining finger hooked persuasively into a buttonhole
of the long-tailed coat.

So much for the grappling. But the possible customer was not to be
landed so easily. Twice and yet once again he broke away from the
detaining finger; and when at last he finally allowed himself to be
drawn into the garish, ill-smelling little shop, he proved to be
discouragingly indifferent and hard to please in the matter of prices,
hanging back and taking refuge in countrified reticence when Mr.
Sonneschein's eloquence grew pathetically pressing.

"I did think maybe I'd buy me a suit of clothes," he admitted, finally,
drawling the words to make his speech fit the countrified role, "but
there isn't any hurry. I reckon I'll wait a spell and look around and
see what kind of fashions they're wearing now."

This was a tacit acknowledgment that he had money to spend, and the
eager merchant redoubled his efforts. His perseverance was rewarded, at
length, and when the ship of bargain and sale was bowling merrily along
before a fair breeze of suggestion, Mr. Sonneschein interlarded his
solicitations with an account of the recent miscarriage of justice in
front of the near-at-hand saloon.

The customer listened with apparent incuriosity, as one whom these
doings in the city world touched but remotely; but the two or three
questions he asked were nicely calculated to bring out the more
important facts. The detectives had cautiously kept their own counsel as
to the details of their quest. Mr. Sonneschein had gossiped with the
policeman on the beat, and the policeman had talked with the red-faced
man who had come alone in the cab, and had taken an unofficial drink
with the roundsman before going down to the steamboat landing. He and
his "partner" were from New Orleans, and they were after a man who was
wanted for big money: that was all he would tell the roundsman.

"I suppose they've caught him again long before this," said the hesitant
customer, trying on a coat which might have been modelled upon a man
twice his size, and surveying himself in the shop looking-glass while
Mr. Sonneschein lovingly smoothed the lapels into place and gathered a
generous handful of the surplus material at the back.

"I don't know if dey have--ain'd dot der elegantist fit in der vorld,
now. See, Rachel; ain'd dot schplendit?"

"They didn't happen to mention the fellow's name, did they?" asked the
prospective purchaser.

"Not much dey didn't! Dem dedectifs iss too schmart for dot. Dey don't
give it avay when somepody else might got der rewards. How you like dot
schplendit coat, now?"

"Seems tolerable big, doesn't it?" said the customer, whose speech still
fitted his part to the final drawl. "Suppose we try something else. So
there is a reward, is there?"

Mr. Sonneschein took the reward for granted and expressed a devout wish
that he might be able to finger it. Whereupon the customer said he
wished _he_ might; and here the topic died a natural death and the
business of buying and selling went on without further interruption.

There was little suggestion of the tramp roustabout, and still less,
perhaps, of the gentleman, about the person who presently emerged from
the Sonneschein emporium. Nevertheless, he appeared to be well satisfied
with his acquisitions, bearing himself as a purchaser who has by no
means had the worse in the bargaining. At the first street corner he
inquired his way of a policeman and was directed cityward. A square
farther on he selected a barber's shop of cleanly promise, went in,
tossed his newly acquired hand-bag to the porter, and took the first
vacant chair.

"A hair-cut, a clean shave--not too close, and a bath afterward," was
his laconic order; and a modest tip facilitated things and provided the
little luxuries.

An hour later no one who had known him bearded and unkempt would have
recognized the clean-shaven, athletic-looking young man who ran down the
steps of the barber's shop and went swinging along on his way up-town.
But the transformation was still incomplete. Reaching the retail
district, he strolled purposefully up one street and down another,
passing many brilliantly lighted shops until he found one exactly to his
liking. A courteous salesman caught him up at the door, and led the way
to the designated departments.

By this time Mr. Sonneschein's hesitant and countrified customer had
undergone a complete metamorphosis. No longer reluctant and hard to
please, he passed rapidly from counter to counter, making his selections
with man-like celerity and certainty and bargaining not at all. When he
was quite through, there was enough to furnish a generous travelling
wardrobe; a head-to-foot change of garmentings with a surplus to fill
two lordly suit-cases; so he bought the suit-cases also, and had them
taken with his other purchases, to the dressing-room.

Here, in quiet and great comfort, he made his second change of clothing,
first carefully removing from each garment all the little tags and
trademarks which declared it St. Louis-bought. These tags, together with
the Gavitt and the Sonneschein costumes, were crowded into the
Sonneschein hand-bag, with the soiled red handkerchief to keep them
company; and he was carrying this hand-bag when he reappeared to the
waiting salesman.

"I see you have steam heat," he remarked. "Is your boiler-room
accessible?"

"Yes, sir; it's in the basement," was the reply, and the courteous clerk
wondered if his liberal customer were thinking of adding the heating
plant to his purchases.

Griswold saw the wonder and smiled. "No; I don't want to buy it," he
explained, with the exact touch of familiarity which bridges all chasms.
"But I'm just up from the coast, where they have a good bit of fever the
year round, and it's as well to be on the safe side. May I trouble you
to show me the way?"

"Certainly," said the salesman, wondering no more; and when he had led
the way to the boiler-room, and had seen his customer thrust the
hand-bag well back among the coals in the furnace, he thought it a
worthy precaution and one which, if generally practiced, would
considerably accelerate the clothing trade.

All traces of the deck-hand Gavitt, and of the Sonneschein
planter-customer having been thus obliterated, there remained only the
paying of his bill and the summoning of a cab. Oddly enough, the cab,
when it came, proved to be a four-wheeler driven by a little,
wizen-faced man whose thin, high-pitched voice was singularly familiar.

"The Hotel Chouteau?--yis, sorr. Will you plaze hand me thim grips? I
can't lave me harrses."

The driver's excuse instantly tied the knot of recognition, and the man
who had just cremated his former identities swore softly.

"Beg your pardon, sorr; was ye spakin' to me?"

"No; I was merely remarking that the world isn't as big as it might be."

"Faith, then, it's full big enough for a man wid a wife and sivin
childer hangin' to um. Get in, sorr, and I'll have you at the Chouteau
in t'ree shakes av a dead lamb's tail."

The little cabman was better than his word, but on the short drive to
the hotel he found time to work out a small problem, not entirely to his
satisfaction, but to at least a partial conclusion.

"'Tis the divil's own self he is, and there's nothing left av him but
thim eyes and that scar on his forrud, and his manner of spakin'. But
thim I'd swear to if I'd live to be as old as Father M'Guinness--rest
his sowl."




XIV

PHILISTIA


All things considered, it was the Griswold of the college-graduate
days--the days of the slender patrimony which had capitalized the
literary beginning--who presented himself at the counter of the Hotel
Chouteau at half-past nine o'clock on the evening of the _Belle Julie's_
arrival at St. Louis, wrote his name in the guest-book, and permitted an
attentive bell-boy to relieve him of his two suit-cases.

The clerk, a rotund little man with a promising bald spot and a
permanent smile, had appraised his latest guest in the moment of
book-signing, and the result was a small triumph for the Olive Street
furnishing house. Next to the genuinely tailor-made stands the quality
of verisimilitude; and the keynote of the clerk's greeting was
respectful affability.

"Glad to have you with us, Mr. Griswold. Would you like a room, or a
suite?"

Griswold was sufficiently human to roll the long-submerged courtesy
prefix as a sweet morsel under his tongue. With a day to spare he might
have clinched the clerk's respect by taking a suite; the more luxurious,
the better. But St. Louis, with at least two men in it who would sweep
the corners in their search for him, was only a place to put behind
him. So he said: "Neither; if I have time to get my supper and catch a
train. Have you a railway guide?"

"There is one in the writing-room. But possibly I can tell you what you
wish to know. Which way are you going?"

Without stopping to think of the critical happenings which had
intervened since the forming of the impulsive resolution fixing his
destination, Griswold named the chosen field for the hazard of fresh
fortunes, and its direction.

"North; to a town in Minnesota called Wahaska. Do you happen to know the
place?"

"I know it very well, indeed; southern Minnesota is my old
stamping-ground. Are you acquainted in Wahaska?--but I know you are not,
or you wouldn't pronounce it 'Wayhaska'."

"You are quite right; I know next to nothing about the town. But I have
been given the impression that it is a quiet little place out of the
beaten track, where a man might spend a summer without having to share
it with a lot of other city runaways of his kind."

The clerk smiled and shook his head.

"You might have done that a few years ago, but there's a fine lake, you
know, and some New Orleans people have built a resort house. I
understand it does a pretty fair business in the season."

Having assured himself that the New Orleans leaf in his book of
experience was safely turned and securely pasted down, Griswold was
nettled to find that the mere mention of the name sent creeping little
chills of apprehension trickling up and down his spine. But innate
stubbornness scoffed at the warning; derided and craved further details.

"How large a place is it?"

"Oh, four or five thousand, I should say; possibly more: big enough and
busy enough so that a hundred-room resort house doesn't make it a
souvenir town. It's a nice little city; modern, progressive, and
business-like; trolleys, electric lights, and some manufacturing. Good
people, too. _Front!_ Check the gentleman's grips and show him the cafe.
I'm sorry we can't give you dinner, but the dining-room closes at nine."

"Plenty of time, is there?" Griswold asked.

"Oh, yes; didn't I tell you? Your train leaves the Terminal at
eleven-thirty; but you can get into the sleeper any time after eight
o'clock."

The guest had crossed the lobby to the cafe, and the clerk was still
dallying with the memories stirred up by the mention of his boyhood
home, when a little man with weak eyes and a face that out-caricatured
all the caricatures of the Irish, sidled up to the registry desk. The
round-bodied clerk knew him and spoke in terms of accommodation.

"What is it, Patsy?"

"The young gentleman ye was spakin' to: is he gone?"

"He is in the cafe, getting his supper. What did you want of him?"

The weak-eyed little man was running a slow finger down the list of
names on the guest-book, blinking as if the writing or the glare of the
lights on the page dazzled him.

"I drove him, and he did be overpaying me, I think. What was ye saying
his name would be?"

"It's right there, under your finger: Kenneth Griswold, New York."

"Um. And I wondher, now, where does he be living, whin he's at home?"

"I don't know; New York, I suppose, since he registers from there."

"And does he be staying here f'r awhile?"

"No; he is on his way to Minnesota."

"Um." A long pause followed in which the cabman appeared to be counting
the coins in his pocket by the sense of touch. Then: "Would yez be
writing that down for me on a bit av paper, Misther Edwards?--his name,
and the name av the place where he does be going, I mane?"

"So you can write to him and refund the over-payment after you've been
to confession?" laughed the clerk. Nevertheless, he wrote the name and
address on a card for the petitioner.

"Thank ye, sorr; thank ye kindly. Whin a man has a wife and sivin
childer hangin' to um--" but here the singsong voice of the porter
calling the Burlington westbound silenced all other sounds and the clerk
heard no more.

Seated at a well-appointed table in the Chouteau cafe, Griswold had
ample time to overtake himself in the race reconstructive, and for the
moment the point of view became frankly Philistine. The luxurious hotel,
with its air of invincible respectability; the snowy napery, the cut
glass, the shaded lights, the deferential service; all these appealed
irresistibly to the epicurean in him. It was as if he had come suddenly
to his own again after an undeserved season of deprivation, and the
effect of it was to push the hardships and perils of the preceding weeks
and months into a far-away past.

He ordered his supper deliberately, and while he waited for its serving,
imagination cleared the stage and set the scenes for the drama of the
future. That future, with all its opportunities for the realizing of
ideals, was now safely assured. He could go whither he pleased and do
what seemed right in his own eyes, and there was none to say him nay.

It was good to be able to pick and choose in a whole worldful of
possibilities, and he gave himself a broad credit mark for persevering
in the resolution which held him steadfastly to the modest, workaday
plan struck out in the beginning. Apart from Miss Farnham's recognition
of him on the _Belle Julie_--a recognition which, he persuaded himself,
would never carry over from Gavitt the deck-hand to Griswold the student
and benefactor of his kind--there was nothing to fear; no reason why he
should not make Wahaska his workshop.

In this minor city of the clerk's describing he would find the
environment most favorable for a re-writing of his book and for a
renewal of his studies. Here, too, he might hope to become by
unostentatious degrees the beneficent god-in-the-car of his worthier
ambition, raising the fallen, succoring the helpless, and fighting the
battles of the oppressed.

Farther along, when she should have quite forgotten the _Belle Julie's_
deck-hand, he would meet Miss Farnham on an equal social footing; and
the conclusion of the whole matter should be a triumphant demonstration
to her by their refutable logic of good deeds and a life well-lived that
in his case, at least, the end justified the means.

Just here, however, there was an unresolved discord in the imaginative
theme. It was struck by the reflection that since he could never take
her fully into his confidence her approval would always lack the seal of
completeness. She knew the masquerading deck-hand, and what he had done;
and she would know Griswold the benefactor, and what he meant to do. But
until she could link the two together, there could be no demonstration.
Though he should build the bastion of good deeds mountain high, it could
never figure as a bastion to her unless she might come to know what it
was designed to defend.

Having a sensitive ear for the imaginative harmonies, the unresolved
discord annoyed him. The effort to eliminate it brought him face to face
with a blunt demand, a query that was almost psychic in its clear-cut
distinctness. Why did these forecastings of the future always lead him
up to the closed door of this young woman's approval and leave him
there?

For one whose experience had all been bought on a rising market,
Griswold was singularly heart-whole and normal in his attitude toward
women. Beautiful women he had met before, among them a few who had lent
themselves facilely to the idealizing process; but in each instance it
was the artistic temperament, and not the heart, that was touched and
inspired. Was Charlotte Farnham going to prove the exception? Since he
could ask the question calmly and with no perceptible quickening of the
pulses, he concluded that she was not. Nevertheless----

The train of reflective thought was broken abruptly by the seating of
two other supper guests at his table; a big-framed man in the grizzled
fifties, and a young woman who looked as if she might have stepped the
moment before out of the fitting-rooms of the most famous of Parisian
dressmakers.

Griswold's supper was served, and for a time he made shift to ignore the
couple at the other end of the table. Then an overheard word, the name
of the town which he had chosen as his future abiding place, made him
suddenly observant.

It was the young woman who had named Wahaska, and he saw now that his
first impression had been at fault; she was not overdressed. Also he saw
that she was piquantly pretty; a bravura type, slightly suggesting the
Rialto at its best, perhaps, but equally suggestive of sophistication,
travel, and a serene disregard of chaperonage.

The young woman's companion was undeniably her father. Gray,
heavy-browed, and with a face that was a life-mask of crude strength and
elemental shrewdness, the man had bequeathed no single feature to the
alertly beautiful daughter; yet the resemblance was unmistakable.
Griswold did not listen designedly, but he could not help overhearing
much of the talk at the other end of the table. From it he gathered that
the young woman was lately returned from some Florida winter resort;
that her father had met her by appointment in St. Louis; and that the
two were going on together; perhaps to Wahaska, since that was the
place-name oftenest on the lips of the daughter.

Griswold was only moderately interested. The deliberately ordered
supper, enticing in anticipation, had fallen short of the zestful
promise in the fact. It came to him with a little shock that at least
one part of him, the civilized appetite, had become debased by the
plunge into the deck-hand depths, and he fought the suggestion fiercely.
It was an article in his creed that environment is always subjective,
and when one opens the door to an exception a host of ominous shapes may
be ready to crowd in. He was fighting off the evil shapes while he
listened; otherwise his interest might have been more acute.

It was at this point that the apex of Philistine contentment was passed
and the reaction set in. He had been spending strength and vitality
recklessly and the accounting was at hand. The descent began when he
took himself sharply to task for the high-priced supper. What right had
he to order costly food that he could not eat when the price of this
single meal would feed a family for a week?

After that, nothing that the obsequious and attentive waiter could bring
proved tempting enough to recall the vanished appetite. Never having
known what it was to be sick, Griswold disregarded the warning, drank a
cup of strong coffee, and went out to the lobby to get a cigar, leaving
his table companions in the midst of their meal. To his surprise and
chagrin the carefully selected "perfecto" made him dizzy and faint,
bringing a disquieting recurrence of the vertigo which had seized him
while he was searching for his negro treasure-bearer on the levee.

"I've had an overdose of excitement, I guess," he said to himself,
flinging the cigar away. "The best thing for me to do is to go down to
the train and get to bed."

He went about it listlessly, with a curious buzzing in his ears and a
certain dimness of sight which was quite disconcerting; and when a cab
was summoned he was glad enough to let a respectfully sympathetic porter
lend him a shoulder to the sidewalk.

The drive in the open air was sufficiently tonic to help him through the
details of ticket-buying and embarkation; and afterward sleep came so
quickly that he did not know when the Pullman porter drew the curtains
to adjust the screen in the window at his feet, though he did awake
drowsily later on at the sound of voices in the aisle, awoke to realize
vaguely that his two table companions of the Hotel Chouteau cafe were to
be his fellow travellers in the Pullman.

The train was made up ready to leave, and the locomotive was filling the
great train-shed with stertorous hissings, when a red-faced man slipped
through the gates to saunter over to the Pullman and to peck
inquisitively at the porter.

"Much of a load to-night, George?"

"No, sah; mighty light: four young ladies goin' up to de school in
Faribault, Mistah Grierson and his daughter, and a gentleman from de
Chouteau."

"A gentleman from the Chouteau? When did he come down?"

The porter knew the calling of the red-faced man only by intuition; but
Griswold's tip was warming in his pocket and he lied at random and on
general principles.

"Been heah all de evenin'; come down right early afte' suppeh, and went
to baid like he was sick or tarr'd or somethin'."

"What sort of a looking man is he?"

"Little, smooth-faced, narr'-chisted gentleman; look like he might
be----"

But the train was moving out and the red-faced man had turned away.
Whereupon the porter broke his simile in the midst, picked up his
carpet-covered step, and climbed aboard.




XV

THE GOTHS AND VANDALS


In the day of its beginnings, Wahaska was a minor trading-post on the
north-western frontier, and an outfitting station for the hunters and
trappers of the upper Mississippi and Minnesota lake region.

Later, it became the market town of a wheat-growing district, and a
foundation of modest prosperity was laid by well-to-do farmers
gravitating to their county seat to give their children the benefit of a
graded school. Later still came the passing of the wheat, a re-peopling
of the farms by a fresh influx of home-seekers from the Old World, and
the birth, in Wahaska and elsewhere, of the industrial era.

Jasper Grierson was a product of the wheat-growing period. The son of
one of the earliest of the New-York-State homesteaders in the wheat
belt, he came of age in the year of the Civil War draft, and was
unpatriotic enough, some said, to dodge conscription, or the chance of
it, by throwing up his hostler's job in a Wahaska livery stable and
vanishing into the dim limbo of the Farther West. Also, tradition added
that he was well-spared by most; that he was ill-spared, indeed, by only
one, and that one a woman.

After the westward vanishing, Wahaska saw him no more until he returned
in his vigorous prime, a veteran soldier of fortune upon whom the
goddess had poured a golden shower out of some cornucopia of the
Colorado mines. Although rumor, occasionally naming him during the years
of absence, had never mentioned a wife, he was accompanied by a
daughter, a dark-eyed, red-lipped young woman, a rather striking beauty
of a type unfamiliar to Wahaska and owing nothing, it would seem, to the
grim, gray-wolf Jasper.

With the return to his birthplace, Jasper Grierson began a campaign, the
planning of which had tided him over many an obstacle in the road to
fortune. It had given him the keenest thrill of joy of which a frankly
sordid nature is capable to descend upon his native town rich enough to
buy and sell any round dozen of the well-to-do farmers; and when he had
looked about him he settled down to the attainment of his heart's
desire, which was to have the casting vote in the business affairs of
the community which had once known him as a helper in a livery stable.

Losing sight of the irresistible energy and momentum of wealth as
wealth, men said that fortune favored him from the outset. It was only a
half-truth, but it sufficed to account for what was really a campaign of
conquest. Grierson's touch was Midas-like, turning all things to gold;
and even in Wahaska there were Mammon worshippers enough to hail him as
a public benefactor whose wealth and enterprise would shortly make of
the overgrown village a town, and of the town a thriving city.

Since the time was ripe, Wahaska did presently burst its
swaddling-bands. Commercial enterprise is sheep-like; where one leads,
others will follow; and the mere following breeds success, if only by
the sheer impetus of the massed forward movement. Jasper Grierson was
the man of the hour, but the price paid for leadership by the led is apt
to be high. When Wahaska became a city, with a charter and a bonded
debt, electric lights, water-works, and a trolley system, Grierson's
interest predominated in every considerable business venture in it, save
and excepting the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works.

He was the president of one bank, and the principal stockholder in the
other, which was practically an allied institution; he was the sole
owner of the grain elevator, the saw- and planing-mills, the box
factory, and a dozen smaller industries in which his name did not
appear. Also, it was his money, or rather his skill as a promoter, which
had transformed the Wahaska & Pineboro Railroad from a logging switch,
built to serve the saw-mill, into an important and independent
connecting link in the great lake region system.

In each of these commercial or industrial chariots the returned native
sat in the driver's seat; and those who remembered him as a loutish
young farmhand overlooked the educative results of continued success and
marvelled at his gifts, wondering how and where he had acquired them.

While the father was thus gratifying a purely Gothic lust for conquest,
the daughter figured, in at least one small circle, as a beautiful young
Vandal, with a passion for overturning all the well-settled traditions.
At first her attitude toward Wahaska and the Wahaskans had been serenely
tolerant; the tolerance of the barbarian who neither understands, nor
sympathizes with, the homely virtues and the customs which have grown
out of them. Then resentment awoke, and with it a soaring ambition to
reconstruct the social fabric of the countrified town upon a model of
her own devising.

In this charitable undertaking she was aided and abetted by her father,
who indulgently paid the bills. At her instigation he built an imposing
red brick mansion on the sloping shore of Lake Minnedaska, named it--or
suffered her to name it--"Mereside," had an artist of parts up from
Chicago to design the decorations and superintend the furnishings, had a
landscape gardener from Philadelphia to lay out the grounds, and, when
all was in readiness, gave a house-warming to which the invitations were
in some sense mandatory, since by that time he had a finger in nearly
every commercial and industrial pie in Wahaska.

After the house-warming, which was a social event quite without
precedent in Wahaskan annals, Miss Grierson's leadership was tacitly
acknowledged by a majority of the ex-farmers' wives and daughters,
though they still discussed her with more or less frankness in the
sewing-circles and at neighborhood tea-drinkings. Crystallized into
accusation, there was little to be urged against her save that she was
pretty and rich, and that her leaning toward modernity was sometimes a
little startling. But being human, the missionary seamstresses and the
tea-drinkers made the most of these drawbacks, whetting criticism to a
cutting edge now and then with curious speculations about Margery's
mother, and wondering why Jasper Grierson or the daughter never
mentioned her.

Meanwhile, the big house on the lake front continued to set the social
pace. Afternoon teas began to supersede the sewing-circles; not a few of
the imitators attained to the formal dignity of visiting cards with
"Wednesdays" or "Thursdays" appearing in neat script in the lower
left-hand corner; and in some of the more advanced households the
principal meal of the day drifted from its noontide anchorage to
unwonted moorings among the evening hours--greatly to the distress of
the men, for whom even hot weather was no longer an excuse for appearing
in shirt-sleeves.

For these innovations Miss Grierson was indirectly, though not less
intentionally, responsible; and her satisfaction was in just proportion
to the results attained. But in spite of these successes there were
still obstacles to be surmounted. From the first there had been a
perverse minority refusing stubbornly to bow the head in the house
of--Grierson. The Farnhams were of it, and the Raymers, with a following
of a few of the families called "old" as age is reckoned in the Middle
West. The men of this minority were slow to admit the omnipotence of
Jasper Grierson's money, and the women were still slower to accept Miss
Grierson on terms of social equality.

At the house-warming this minority had been represented only by
variously worded regrets. At a reception, given to mark the closing of
Mereside, socially, on the eve of Miss Margery's departure for the
winter in Florida, the regrets were still polite and still unanimous.
Miss Margery laughed defiantly and set her white teeth on a determined
resolution to reduce this inner citadel of conservatism at all costs.
Accordingly, she opened the campaign on the morning after the reception;
began it at the breakfast-table when she was pouring her father's
coffee.

"You know everybody, and everybody's business, poppa: who is the
treasurer of St. John's?" she inquired.

"How should I know?" grumbled the magnate, whose familiarity with church
affairs was limited to certain writings of a legal nature concerning the
Presbyterian house of worship upon which he held a mortgage.

"You ought to know," asserted Miss Margery, with some asperity. "Isn't
it Mr. Edward Raymer?"

Jasper Grierson frowned thoughtfully into space. "Why, yes; come to
think of it, I guess he is the man. Anyway, he's one of their--what do
you call 'em--trustees?"

"Wardens," corrected Margery.

"Yes, that's it; I knew it was something connected with a penitentiary.
What do you want of him?"

"Nothing much of him: but I want a check for five hundred dollars
payable to his order."

Jasper Grierson's laugh was suggestive of the noise made by a rusty
door-hinge. The tilting of the golden cornucopia had made him a ruthless
money-grubber, but he never questioned his daughter's demands.

"Going in for the real old simon-pure, blue-ribbon brand of
respectability this time, ain't you Madgie?" he chuckled; but he wrote
the check on the spot.

Two hours later, Miss Grierson's cutter, driven by herself, paraded in
Main Street to the delight of any eye aesthetic. The clean-limbed,
high-bred Kentuckian, the steel-shod, tulip-bodied vehicle, and the
faultlessly arrayed young woman tucked in among the costly fur lap robes
were three parts of a harmonious whole; and more than one pair of eyes
looked, and turned to look again; with envy if they were young eyes and
feminine; with frank admiration if they were any age and masculine. For
Miss Grierson, panoplied for conquest, was the latest reincarnation of
the woman who has been turning men's heads and quickening the blood in
their veins since that antediluvian morning when the sons of God saw the
daughters of men that they were fair.

Miss Margery drove daily in good weather, but on this crisp January
morning her outing had an objective other than the spectacular. When the
clean-limbed Kentuckian had measured the length of Main Street, he was
sent on across the railroad tracks into the industrial half of the town,
and was finally halted in front of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works.

Raymer was at his desk when the smart equipage drew up before the office
door; and a moment later he was at the curb, bareheaded, offering to
help the daughter of men out of the robe wrappings.

"Perhaps I'd better not get out," she said. "Duke doesn't stand well.
Can I see Mr. Edward Raymer for a minute or two?"

Raymer bowed and blushed a little. He knew her so well, by eye-intimacy
at least, that he had been sure she knew him in the same way--as indeed
she did.

"I--that is my name. What can I do for you, Miss Grierson?"

"Oh, _thank_ you," she burst out, with exactly the proper shade of
impulsiveness. "Do you know, I was really afraid I might have to
introduce myself? I----"

The interruption was of Raymer's making. One of his employees appearing
opportunely, he sent the man to the horse's head, and once more held out
his hands to Miss Grierson.

"You must come in and get warm," he insisted. "I am sure you have found
it very cold driving this morning. Let me help you."

She made a driver's hitch in the reins and let him lift her to the
sidewalk. The ease with which he did it gave her a pleasant little
thrill of the sort that comes with the realization of a thing hoped for.
When she was not too busy with the social triumphs, strength, manly
strength, was a passion with Miss Grierson.

Raymer held the office door open for her, and in the grimy little den
which had been his father's before him, placed a chair for her at the
desk-end.

"Now you can tell me in comfort what I can do for you," he said,
bridging the interruption.

"Oh, it's only a little thing. I came to see you about renting a pew in
St. John's; that is our church, you know."

Raymer did not know, but he was politic enough not to say so.

"I am quite at your service," he hastened to say. "Shall I show you a
plan of the sittings?"

She protested prettily that it wasn't at all necessary; that any
assignment agreeable to him and least subversive of the rights and
preferences of others would be quite satisfactory. But he got out the
blue-print plan and dusted it, and in the putting together of heads over
it many miles in the gap of unacquaintance were safely and swiftly flung
to the rear.

When the sittings were finally decided upon she opened her purse.

"It is so good of you to take time from your business to wait on me,"
she told him; and then, in naive confusion: "I--I asked poppa to make
out a check, but I don't know whether it is big enough."

Raymer took the order to pay, glanced at the amount, and from that to
the velvety eyes with the half-abashed query in them. Miss Grierson's
eyes were her most effective weapon. With them she could look anything,
from daggers drawn to kisses. Just now the look was of child-like
beseeching, but Raymer withstood it--or thought he did.

"It is more than twice as much as we get for the best locations," he
demurred. "Wait a minute and I'll write you a check for the difference
and give you a receipt."

But at the word she was on her feet in an eager flutter of protest.

"Oh, please don't!" she pleaded. "If it is really too much, can't you
put the difference in the missionary box, or in the--in the rector's
salary?--as a little donation from us, you know?"

Then Edward Raymer found that he had not withstood the eye-attack and he
surrendered at discretion, compromising on a receipt for the pew-rent.
Thus the small matter of business was concluded; but Miss Margery was
not yet ready to go. From St. John's and its affairs official she passed
deftly to the junior warden of St. John's and his affairs personal. Was
the machine works the place where they made steam-engines and things?
And did the sign, "No Admittance," on the doors mean that no visitors
were allowed? If not, she would so much like to----

Raymer smiled and put himself once more at her service, this time as
guide and megaphonist. It was all very noisy and grimy, but if she
cared to go through the works he would be glad to go with her.

He did not know how glad he was going to be until they had passed
through the clamorous machine-shop and had reached the comparatively
quiet foundry. One of Miss Margery's gifts was the ability to become for
the moment an active and sympathetic sharer in any one's enthusiasms. In
the foundry she looked and listened, and was unsophisticated only to the
degree that invites explanation. It was a master-stroke of finesse. A
man is never so transparent as when he forgets himself in his own
trade-talk; and Raymer was unrolling himself as a scroll for Miss
Grierson to read as she ran.

"And you say that is one of the columns for poppa's new block?" she
asked, while they stood to watch the workmen drawing a pattern out of
the sand of the mould.

"No; that is the pattern: that is wood, and it is used to make the print
in the sand into which the melted iron is poured. This part of the mould
they are lifting with the crane is called the 'cope,' and the lower half
is the 'drag.' When they have drawn the patterns, they will lock the two
halves together and the mould will be ready for the pouring. You ought
to come some afternoon while we are pouring; it would interest you if
you've never seen it."

"Oh, may I? I shall remember that, when I come back from Florida."

"You are going away?" he said quickly.

"Yes; for a few weeks."

"Wahaska will miss you."

"Will it? I wish I could believe that, Mr. Raymer. But I don't know.
Sometimes----"

"You mustn't doubt it for a moment. When you drove up a few minutes ago
I was thinking that you were the one bit of redeeming color in our
rather commonplace picture."

She let him look into what she wished him to believe were the very
ultimate depths of the velvety eyes when she said: "You shouldn't
flatter, Mr. Raymer. For one thing, you don't do it easily; and for
another, it's disappointing."

They were passing out of the foundry on their way back to the office and
he held the weighted door open for her.

"A bit of honest praise isn't flattery," he protested. "But supposing it
were a mere compliment--why should you find it disappointing?"

"Because one has to have anchors of some sort; anchors in sincerity and
straightforwardness, in the honesty of purpose that will say, '_No-no!_'
and slap the best-beloved baby's hands, if that's what is needed. That
is your proper role, Mr. Raymer, and you must never hesitate to take
it."

It was the one small lapse from the strict conventionalities, but it
sufficed to cut out all the middle distances. The tour of the works
which had begun in passing acquaintance ended in friendship, precisely
as Miss Grierson had meant it should; and when Raymer was tucking her
into the cutter and wrapping her in the fur robes, she added the
finishing touch, or rather the touch for which all the other touches
had been the preliminaries.

"I'm so glad I had the courage to come and see you this morning. We have
been dreadfully remiss in church matters, but I am going to try to make
up for it in the future. I'm sorry you couldn't come to us last evening.
Please tell your mother and sister that I _do_ hope we'll meet,
sometime. I should so dearly love to know them. Thank you so much for
everything. Good-by."

Raymer watched her as she drove away, noted her skilful handling of the
fiery Kentuckian and her straight seat in the flying cutter, and the
smile which a day or two earlier might have been mildly satirical was
now openly approbative.

"She is a shrewd little strategist," was his comment; "but all the same
she is a mighty pretty girl, and as good and sensible as she is shrewd.
I wonder why mother and Gertrude haven't called on her?"

Having thus mined the Raymer outworks, Miss Grierson next turned her
batteries upon the Farnhams. They were Methodists, and having learned
that the doctor's hobby was a struggling mission work in Pottery Flat,
Margery called the paternal check-book again into service, and the
cutter drew up before the doctor's office in Main Street.

"Good-morning, doctor," she began cheerfully, bursting in upon the head
of the First-Church board of administrators as a charming embodiment of
youthful enthusiasm, "I'm running errands for poppa this morning. Mr.
Rodney was telling us about that little First-Church mission in Pottery
Flat, and poppa wanted to help. But we are not Methodists, you know, and
he was afraid--that is, he didn't quite know how you might----"

It was an exceedingly clever bit of acting, and the good doctor
capitulated at once, discrediting, for the first time in his life, the
intuition of his home womankind.

"Now that is very thoughtful and kind of you, Miss Margery," he said,
wiping his glasses and looking a second time at the generous figure of
the piece of money-paper. "I appreciate it the more because I know you
must have a great many other calls upon your charity. We've been wanting
to put a trained worker in charge of that mission for I don't know how
long, and this gift of yours makes it possible."

"The kindness is in allowing us to help," murmured the small diplomat.
"You'll let me know when more is needed? Promise me that, Doctor
Farnham."

"I shouldn't be a good Methodist if I didn't," laughed the doctor. Then
he remembered the Mereside reception and the regrets, and was moved to
make amends. "I'm sorry we couldn't be neighborly last night; but my
sister-in-law is very frail, and Charlotte doesn't go out much. They are
both getting ready to go to Pass Christian, but I'm sure they'll call
before they go South."

"I shall be ever so glad to welcome them," purred Miss Margery, "and I
do hope they will come before I leave. I'm going to Palm Beach next
week, you know."

"I'll tell them," volunteered the doctor. "They'll find time to run in,
I'm sure."

But for some reason the vicarious promise was not kept; and the Raymers
held aloof; and the Oswalds and the Barrs relinquished the new public
library project when it became noised about that Jasper Grierson and his
daughter were moving in it.

Miss Margery possessed her soul in patience up to the final day of her
home staying, and the explosion might have been indefinitely postponed
if, on that last day, the Raymers, mother and daughter, had not
pointedly taken pains to avoid her at the _lingerie_ counter in
Thorwalden's. It was as the match to the fuse, and when Miss Grierson
left the department store there were red spots in her cheeks and the
dark eyes were flashing.

"They think I'm a jay!" she said, with a snap of the white teeth. "They
need a lesson, and they're going to get it before I leave. I'm not going
to sing small all the time!"

It was surely the goddess of discord who ordained that the blow should
be struck while the iron was hot. Five minutes after the rebuff in
Thorwalden's, Miss Grierson met Raymer as he was coming out of the
Farmers' and Merchants' Bank. There was an exchange of commonplaces, but
in the midst of it Miss Margery broke off abruptly to say: "Mr. Raymer,
please tell me what I have done to offend your mother and sister."

If she had been in the mood to compromise, half of the deferred payment
of triumph might have been discharged on the spot by Raymer's
blundering attempt at disavowal.

"Why, Miss Margery! I don't know--that is--er--really, you must be
mistaken, I'm sure!"

"I am not mistaken, and I'd like to know," she persisted, looking him
hardily in the eyes. "It must be something I have been doing, and if I
can find out what it is, I'll reform."

Raymer got away as soon as he could; and when the opportunity offered,
was besotted enough to repeat the question to his mother and sister.
Mrs. Raymer was a large and placid matron of the immovable type, and her
smile emphasized her opinion of Miss Grierson.

"The mere fact of her saying such a thing to you ought to be a
sufficient answer, I should think," was her mild retort.

"I don't see why," Raymer objected.

"What would you think if Gertrude did such a thing?"

"Oh, well; that is different. In the first place Gertrude wouldn't do
it, and----"

"Precisely. And Miss Grierson shouldn't have done it. It is because she
can do such things that a few of us think she wouldn't be a pleasant
person to know, socially."

"But why?" insisted Raymer, with masculine obtuseness.

It was his sister who undertook to make the reason plain to him.

"It isn't anything she does, or doesn't do, particularly; it is the
atmosphere in which she lives and moves and has her being. If it weren't
for her father's money, she would be--well, it is rather hard to say
just what she would be. But she always makes me think of the bonanza
people--the pick and shovel one day and a million the next. I believe
she is a frank little savage, at heart."

"I don't," the brother contended, doggedly. "She may be a trifle new and
fresh for Wahaska, but she is clever and bright, and honest enough to
ignore a social code which makes a mock of sincerity and a virtue of
hypocrisy. I like her all the better for the way she flared out at me.
There isn't one young woman in a thousand who would have had the nerve
and the courage to do it."

"Or the impudence," added Mrs. Raymer, when her son had left the room.
Then: "I do hope Edward isn't going to let that girl come between him
and Charlotte!"

The daughter laughed.

"I should say there is room for a regiment to march between them, as it
is. Miss Gilman took particular pains to let him know what train they
were leaving on, and I happen to know he never went near the station to
tell them good-by."




XVI

GOOD SAMARITANS


Since she had undertaken to show Wahaska precisely how to deport itself
in the conventional field, Miss Grierson took a maid and a chaperon with
her when she went to Florida. But when she returned in April, the maid
had been left behind to marry the gamekeeper of one of the millionaire
estates on Lake Worth, and little Miss Matthews, the ex-seamstress
chaperon, had been dropped off in Illinois to visit relatives.

This is how it chanced that Margery, unwilling to set the Wahaskans a
bad example, had telegraphed her father to meet her in St. Louis. Also,
it shall account as it may for the far-reaching stroke of fate which
seated the Griersons at Griswold's table in the Hotel Chouteau cafe, and
afterward made them his fellow travellers in the north-bound
sleeping-car _Anita_.

When Jasper Grierson travelled alone he was democratic enough to be
satisfied with a section in the body of the car. But when Margery's
tastes were to be consulted, the drawing-room was none too good. Indeed,
as it transpired on the journey northward from St. Louis, the _Anita's_
drawing-room proved to be not good enough.

"It is simply a crude insult, the way they wear out their old,
broken-down cars on us up here!" she was protesting to her father, when
they came back from the late dining-car breakfast. "You ought to do
something about it." Miss Margery was at the moment fresh from "Florida
Specials" and the solid-Pullman vestibuled luxuries of eastern winter
travel.

Jasper Grierson's smile was a capitalistic acquirement, and some of his
fellow-townsmen described it as "cast-iron." But for his daughter it was
always indulgent.

"I don't own the railroad yet, Madgie; you'll have to give me a little
more time," he pleaded, clipping the tip from a black cigar of heroic
proportions and reaching for the box of safety matches.

"I'll begin now, if you are going to smoke that dreadful thing in this
stuffy little den," was the unfilial retort; and the daughter found a
magazine and exchanged the drawing-room with its threat of asphyxiation
for a seat in the body of the car.

For a little while the magazine, or rather the pictures in it, sufficed
for a time-killer. Farther along, the panorama of eastern Iowa unrolling
itself beside the path of the train served as an alternative to the
pictured pages. When both the book and the out-door prospect palled upon
her, Miss Margery tried to interest herself in her immediate
surroundings.

The material was not promising. Two old ladies dozing in the section
diagonally across the aisle, four school-girls munching chocolates and
restlessly shifting from seat to seat in the farther half of the car,
and the conductor methodically making out his reports in the section
opposite, summed up the human interest, or at least the visible part of
it. Half-way down the car one of the sections was still curtained and
bulkheaded; and when Miss Grierson curled up in her seat and closed her
eyes she was wondering vaguely why the porter had left this one section
undisturbed in the morning scene-shifting.

The northward-flying train was crossing a river, and the dining-car
waiter was crying the luncheon summons, when Margery awoke to realize
the comforting fact that she had successfully slept the forenoon away.
With the eye-opening came a recurrence of the last-remembered waking
thought--the wonder why the curtained section was still undisturbed.
When she was leaving the _Anita_ with her father, the explanation
suggested itself: of course, the occupant of the middle section must be
ill.

Luncheon over, there was nothing to remind her of the probable invalid
in Number Six until late in the afternoon when, looking through the open
door of the drawing-room, she saw the porter carrying a glass of water
to the invisible sufferer. Quite suddenly her interest became acute. Who
was the sick one? and why was he, or she, travelling without an
attendant?

With Margery Grierson, to question was to ascertain; and the Pullman
conductor, once more checking his diagrams in Section Eleven, offered
the readiest means of enlightenment. A few minutes later Margery
rejoined her father in the private compartment.

"Do you remember the nice-looking young man who sat at the table with us
in the Chouteau last night?" she began abruptly.

The gray-wolf Jasper nodded. He had an excellent memory for faces.

"What did you think of him?" The query followed the nod like a nimble
boxer's return blow.

"I thought he paid a whole lot more attention to you than he did to his
supper. Why?"

"He is on this car; sick with a fever of some kind, and out of his head.
He is going to Wahaska."

"How do you know it's the same one?"

"I made the conductor take me to see him. He talked to me in Italian and
called me '_Carlotta mia_.'"

"Humph! he didn't look like a dago."

"He isn't; it's just because he is delirious."

There was a long pause, broken finally by a curt "Well?" from the
father.

"I've been thinking," was the slow response. "Of course, there is a
chance that he has friends in Wahaska, and that some one will be at the
train to meet him. But it is only a chance."

"Why doesn't the conductor telegraph ahead and find out?"

"He doesn't know the man's name. I tried to get him to look for a card,
or to break into the suit-cases under the berth, but he says the
regulations won't let him."

"Well?" said the father again, this time with a more decided upward
inflection. Then he added: "You've made up your mind what you're going
to do: say it."

Margery's decision was announced crisply. "There is no hospital to send
him to--which is Wahaska's shame. Maybe he will be met and taken care of
by his friends: if he is, well and good; if he isn't, we'll put him in
the carriage and take him home with us."

The cast-iron smile with the indulgent attachment wrinkled frostily upon
Jasper Grierson's heavy face.

"The Good Samaritan act, eh? I've known you a long time, Madgie, but I
never can tell when you're going to break out in a brand-new spot.
Didn't lose any of your unexpectedness in Florida, did you?"

Miss Margery tossed her pretty head, and the dark eyes snapped.

"Somebody in the family has to think of something besides making money,"
she retorted. "Please lend me your pencil; I want to do some wiring."

All other gifts apart, Miss Grierson could boast of a degree of
executive ability little inferior to her father's; did boast of it when
the occasion offered; and by the time the whistle was sounding for
Wahaska, all the arrangements had been made for the provisional rescue
of the sick man in Lower Six.

At the station a single inquiry served to give the Good Samaritan
intention the right of way. There were no friends to meet Lower Six; but
the Grierson carriage was waiting, with the coachman and a Mereside
gardener for bearers. From that to putting the sick man to bed in one of
the guest-chambers of the lake-fronting mansion at the opposite end of
the town was a mere bit of routine for one so capable as Miss Grierson;
and twenty minutes after the successful transfer, she had Dr. Farnham at
the nameless one's bedside, and was telephoning the college infirmary
for a nurse.

Naturally, there were explanations to be made when the doctor came down.
To her first anxious question the answer came gravely: "You have a very
sick man on your hands, Miss Margery." Then the inevitable: "Who is he?"

She spread her hands in a pretty affectation of embarrassment.

"What will you think of me, Doctor Farnham, when I tell you that I
haven't the littlest atom of an idea?"

Charlotte's father was a small man, with kindly eyes and the firm,
straight-lined mouth of his Puritan forebears. "Tell me about it," he
said concisely.

"There is almost nothing to tell. He was sick and out of his head, and
his ticket read to Wahaska. No one on the train seemed to know anything
about him; and he couldn't tell us anything himself. So when we found
there was no one to meet him at the station, we put him into the
carriage and brought him home. There didn't seem to be anything else to
do."

A shrewd smile flickered for an instant in the kindly eyes of Wahaska's
best-beloved physician.

"Almost any one else would have found plenty of other things to do--or
not to do," was his comment. "Are you prepared to go on, Miss Margery?"

"Taking care of him until he is able to take care of
himself?--certainly," was the quick reply.

"Then I'll tell you that it is likely to be a long siege, and probably a
pretty serious one. I can't tell positively without the microscope, but
I'm calling it malaria, with complications. There seems to be a general
break-down, as if he had been overworking or starving himself. You'll
need help."

"I know; I've just been 'phoning the college, but they can't spare
anybody out of the infirmary. Find me some one, doctor."

Dr. Farnham took time to think.

"Let me see: you'll need a good, strong fellow who can be patient and
kind and inflexible and even brutal, by turns. I wonder if we couldn't
get Sven Oleson? The Raymers had him when Edward was down with typhoid,
and he was a treasure when we could make him understand what was
wanted."

There were fine little lines coming and going between Miss Margery's
straight black brows. "We needn't do it by halves, doctor," she said
decisively. "If it would be better to wire St. Paul or Minneapolis and
get a trained nurse----"

"--You'd stand the extra expense, of course," laughed the doctor. "You
are all the world's good angel when you set out to be, Miss Margery. But
it won't be necessary; Oleson will do, if I can get him. And I'll send
him or somebody else before bedtime. Meanwhile, there's nothing to do
but to keep your patient quiet; and he'll do that for himself for a few
hours. I gave him a bit of an anodyne before I came down."

Margery went to the outer door with her kindly counsellor, playing the
part of the gracious hostess as one who is, or who means to be,
precisely letter-perfect.

"It will soon be time for your daughter and Miss Gilman to come home,
won't it, doctor?" she asked.

"Yes. I had a letter from Charlotte to-day. They are coming by boat to
Winona, and they should have left St. Louis this morning." Then, to
match the neighborly interest: "You are looking extremely well, Miss
Margery. Your few weeks in Florida were pleasant ones, I know."

"Yes; they were pleasant. But I'm always well. Has poppa been working
himself to death while I've been away?"

There was the faintest glimmer of an amused smile in the doctor's eyes
when he said: "No, not quite, I guess. He has been out here with the
masons and carpenters who are building the stables, every fine day, I
think, and that was by way of being a recreation for him."

Margery nodded brightly. "I thought perhaps he would do that if I went
away. But I mustn't keep you. Be sure and telephone me about Sven. I'll
send the cart after him if you tell me to."

The doctor promised; and after he was gone, she went slowly up-stairs
and let herself softly into the room of shaded lights. The sick man was
resting quietly, and he did not stir when she crossed to the bed and
laid a cool palm on his forehead.

"You poor castaway!" she murmured. "I wonder who you are, and to whom
you belong? I suppose somebody has got to be mean and sneaky and find
out. Would you rather it would be I than some one else who might care
even less than I do?"

The sleeping man opened unseeing eyes and closed them again heavily. "I
found the money, _Carlotta mia_; you didn't know that, did you?" he
muttered; and then the narcotic seized and held him again.

His clothes were on a chair, and when she had carried them to a light
that could be shaded completely from the bed and its occupant, she
searched the pockets one by one. It was a little surprising to find all
but two of them quite empty; no cards, no letters, no pen, pencil,
pocket-knife, or purse; nothing but a handkerchief, and in one pocket of
the waistcoat a small roll of paper money, a few coins and two small
keys.

She held the coat up to the electric and examined it closely; the
workmanship, the trimmings. It was not tailor-made, she decided, and by
all the little signs and tokens it was quite new. And the same was true
of the other garments. But there was no tag or trade-mark on any of them
to show where they came from.

Failing to find the necessary clew to the castaway's identity in this
preliminary search, she went on resolutely, dragging the two suit-cases
over to the lighted corner and unlocking them with the keys taken from
the pocket of the waistcoat.

The first yielded nothing but clothing, all new and evidently unworn.
The second held more clothing, a man's toilet appliances, also new and
unused, but apparently no scrap of writing or hint of a name. With a
little sigh of bafflement she took the last tightly rolled bundle of
clothing from the suit-case. While she was lifting it a pistol fell out.

In times past, Jasper Grierson's daughter had known weapons and their
faults and excellences. "That places him--a little," she mused, putting
the pistol aside after she had glanced at it: "He's from the East; he
doesn't know a gun from a piece of common hardware."

Further search in the tightly rolled bundle was rewarded by the
discovery of a typewritten book manuscript, unsigned, and with it an
oblong packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. She slipped
the string and removed the wrapping. The brick-shaped packet proved to
be a thick block of bank-notes held together by heavy rubber bands
snapped over the ends.

While the little ormolu clock on the dressing-case was whirring softly
and chiming the hour she stared at the money-block as if the sight of it
had fascinated her. Then she sprang up and flew to the door, not to
escape, but to turn the key noiselessly in the lock. Secure against
interruption, she pulled the rubber bands from the packet. The block was
built up in layers, each layer banded with a paper slip on which was
printed in red the name of the certifying bank and the amount. "Bayou
State Security, $5,000." There were twenty of these layers in all,
nineteen of them unbroken. But through the printed figures on the
twentieth a pen-stroke had been drawn, and underneath was written
"$4,000."

Quite coolly and methodically Margery Grierson verified the bank's count
as indicated by the paper bands. There were one hundred thousand
dollars, lacking the one thousand taken from the broken packet. The
counting completed, she replaced the rubber bands and the brown-paper
wrapping. Then she repacked the suit-cases, arranging the contents as
nearly as might be just as she had found them, locking the cases and
returning the keys to the waistcoat pocket from which she had taken
them.

When all was done, she tiptoed across to the bed, with the brown-paper
packet under her arm. The sick man stirred uneasily and began to mutter
again. She bent to catch the words, and when she heard, the light of
understanding leaped swiftly into the dark eyes. For the mumbled words
were the echo of a fierce threat: "Sign it: sign it _now_, or, by God,
I'll shoot to kill!"




XVII

GROPINGS


The robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank was already an old story
when Mr. Matthew Broffin, chief of the New Orleans branch of a notable
detective agency, returned from Guatemala with the forger Mortsen as his
travelling companion.

Broffin was a successful man in his calling. Beginning as a deputy
marshal in the "moonshining" districts of Kentucky and Tennessee, he had
shifted first to the Secret Service, and later to the more highly
specialized ranks of the private agencies. With nothing very spectacular
to his credit, he had earned repute as a follower of long trails, and as
an acute unraveller of tangled clews. Hence, his docket was never empty.

It was not altogether for the sake of the reward that he took over the
case of the bank robbery a few days after his return from Central
America. As a matter of fact, there was an express-company case waiting
which promised more money. But emulation counts for something, even in
the thief-catching field; and since two members of his own staff had
fired and missed their mark in St. Louis, there was a blunder to be
retrieved.

Reasoning logically upon the new problem, Broffin did not at once try to
take up the chase at the point to which it had been carried by the two
who had failed. Since the man had disappeared, the first necessity was
the establishing of his true identity, and for a week Broffin devoted
himself to the task of disentangling the two personalities: that of the
decently dressed, parlor-anarchist bank-raider, and that of the man who
figured in the anonymous letter as Gavitt, the deck-hand.

At the end of the week two facts were sufficiently apparent. The first
was that there had been a real John Gavitt, a consumptive roustabout on
the New Orleans river-front; a person easily traceable up to the time of
his disappearance on or about the day of the robbery, and whose
description, gathered from those who had known him well, tallied not at
all with the best obtainable word-picture of the bank-robber. Fact the
second was a corollary of the first: by some means the robber had
contrived to change places with Gavitt; to take his place in the _Belle
Julie's_ crew and to assume his name.

Broffin called this step in the outworking of his problem an incident
closed when he had wired the post-master of the little Iowa river town
from which the true Gavitt had migrated, and had received the expected
reply. John Wesley Gavitt had reached home two days after the date of
the bank robbery, had died within the week, and had been buried beside
his wife.

The next step was purely constructive; an attempt to build, upon the
description given by President Galbraith and the teller Johnson, a
likeness which would fit some notorious "strong-arm man" known to the
criminal records and the rogues' galleries. Broffin was not greatly
disappointed when the effort failed.

"It's just about as I've been putting it up, all along," he mused,
lighting his pipe and filling with a fragrant cloud the cramped little
office in which he did his research work. "The fellow ain't a crook;
he's an amateur, and this is his first break. That being the lay-out,
he's liable to do all the things, the different kinds of things, that a
sure-enough 'strong-arm man' wouldn't do."

It was to Bainbridge, sitting at the desk's end and turning the leaves
of a rogues'-gallery reprint, that the musing conclusion was directed.
The reporter was freshly returned from his jaunt to the banana coast,
and he had climbed Broffin's stair to get the story of the Mortsen
capture.

"He did one of the different things when he worked his way out of here
in a deck crew," suggested Bainbridge. "The real thug wouldn't have done
anything so honestly toilsome as that."

"Hardly," Broffin acquiesced. "There was about one chance in a thousand,
and on that chance I've been looking for a picture that would fit him.
There ain't any."

The reporter was glancing over his notes of the Mortsen story, and he
got up to go.

"Well, I'm glad it's your job and not mine," he said, by way of
leave-taking. "If your guess is right, it's like looking for the
traditional needle in the haystack."

"Ump," said Broffin; and for a good hour after the reporter had gone he
sat slowly swinging in the creaking office chair, smoking pipe after
pipe and thinking.

At the end of the reflective revery he closed his desk, locked his
office, and went once more to the bank. It was the hour of the noon
lull, and Johnson, the paying teller, was free to talk.

"I hope I'll get through bothering you, some day, Mr. Johnson," Broffin
began. "But when I get stuck, I have to come to you. What Mr. Galbraith
don't remember would crowd a dictionary."

The teller made good-natured apologies for his chief. "Mr. Galbraith was
a good bit upset, naturally. It was a pretty bad wrench for a man of his
age."

"Sure, it was; and he's feeling it yet. That's why I'm letting him alone
when I can. Just go once more carefully over the part of it that you
saw, won't you?"

Johnson retold the story of the cashing of the president's check,
circumstantially, and with the exactness of a man trained in a school of
business accuracy.

"You'd make a good witness, Mr. Johnson," was Broffin's comment. "You
can tell the same story twice, hand-running, which is more than most
folks can do. Would you know the young woman if you'd see her again?"

"Hardly, I think."

"You say she was cashing a draft: how was she identified?"

"She had credentials from her home bank, with her signature attested."

"Of course, she didn't surrender her letter of identification?"

"No; we don't require it when the letter is a general one and not a
credit letter."

Broffin pulled thoughtfully at his drooping mustaches. He was
rearranging the pieces on the mental chess-board. He had not yet asked
either of the questions he had come to ask. Without knowing the science
even by name, he was still enough of a psychologist to prepare the way
by leading the mind of the witness cleverly over the details of its own
memory picture.

"You say the hold-up made way for the lady here at the window: you saw
him do it?"

"Yes."

"Did any sign of recognition pass between them--anything to make you
think that they might be acquainted with each other?"

This was one of the two critical questions, and the teller took time to
consider.

"It's pretty hard to tag that with a definite 'yes' or 'no,'" he said,
when the memory-searching moment had passed. "He spoke to her; of that I
am quite sure, though I didn't hear what he said. She nodded and smiled.
She had a beautiful face, and I remember how it lighted up when he spoke
and stepped back."

"Then they might have been acquainted, you think?" Broffin said, adding
quickly: "Don't let the fact that she afterward tried to set the dogs on
him twist your judgment any. She might have known the man, and still be
unwilling, afterward, to shield the criminal."

Again Johnson took time to be accurate.

"I'll admit that my impression at the time was that they were
acquainted," he averred, at the end of the ends. "Of course you can't
bank much on that. He might have said to a perfect stranger, 'After
you,' or whatever it was that he did say; and she would acknowledge the
courtesy with the nod and the smile--any well-bred woman would. But you
can take it for what it is worth; my thought at the moment was that they
had met before; casually, perhaps, as people meet on trains or in
hotels; that there was at least recognition on both sides."

Broffin was nodding slowly. It was not often that he made a confidant of
a witness, even in the smaller details of a case, but he evidently
considered the helpful teller an exception.

"I've been working around to that notion myself, by the smalls, as the
cat eat the grind-rock," he said. "I said to myself, Would he, with the
big pull-off still trembling on the edge--would he have held back for a
woman he didn't know? And if he _did_ know her, it would be a good,
chunky reason why he shouldn't crowd in and take his turn: he'd _have_
to make good or lose whatever little ante he'd been putting up in the
sociable game. Now one other little thing: you counted him out the
single thousand in small bills first, you said: then what happened?"

"Then I went to the vault."

"And when you came back, the young woman was gone?"

"Oh, yes; she went while Mr. Galbraith was handing me his check."

"She left before you started for the vault?"

"Yes."

"You didn't notice whether she said 'Good-by' or 'Thank you,' or
anything like that, I reckon?"

"No."

"But she might have, and you not see it?"

"Yes; she might have."

"All right; then we'll go on," Broffin continued, and the time having
arrived for the putting of the second critical question, he planted it
fairly. "You opened the wicket and passed the money out to the hold-up.
He took it and backed to the door--this nearest door. Mr. Galbraith
tells me he gave the alarm as quick as he could draw his breath. How
much time did the fellow have before somebody went after him?"

Johnson's answer was gratifyingly prompt.

"You might say, no time at all. There were a number of people in the
bank--perhaps a dozen or more--standing around waiting their turns at
the different wickets. I should say that every single one of them made a
rush for the doors, and I remember thinking at the time that the fellow
couldn't possibly get away."

"Yet he did get away; made his drop-out so neatly that none of the
rushers got to the doors soon enough to catch a sight of him?"

"That is the curious fact. Not a man of them saw him. They all told the
same story. The sidewalk wasn't crowded at the time: we are on the sunny
side of the street, and as you see now, the crowd is on the other side
in the shade. Yet the fellow had vanished before the nimblest one of
them got to the doors."

Broffin drew a deep breath and nodded slowly. The added details were
fitting the new theory to a nicety. In conversation with the president
he had previously marked the fact that the robber had claimed to be
starving.

"Thank you, Mr. Johnson; I reckon that's all for this time," he said to
the teller, and a minute later he was buying a cigar of the little
Gascon proprietor of the restaurant next door to the bank.

"You have an excellent memory, I've been told, Monsieur Pouillard," he
said, at the lighting of the cigar. "Do you recollect the day of the
bank robbery next door pretty well?"

The Gascon shrugged amiably. "_Vraiment_, M'sieu' Broffin; it ees not
possib' that one forgets."

"It was rather late for breakfast, and not quite late enough for lunch:
were you feeding many people just then?"

"H-onlee one; he is yo'ng man w'at don' nevveh come on my 'otel biffo'.
He is sit on dat secon' table; _oui_!"

Broffin pushed the probe of inquiry a little deeper. How did M.
Pouillard happen to remember? _Mais_, it was because the young man was
very droll; he was of the cold blood. When Victor, _le garcon_, would
have brought news of the _emeute_, he had said, breakfast first, and the
news afterward.

Questioned in his turn, the serving-man corroborated his employer's
particulars and was able to add a few of his own. The young man was
fair, with blue eyes and a reddish beard and mustaches. The mustaches
were untrimmed, but the beard was clipped to a point, _a les moeurs des
etudiants des Beaux Arts_. The waiter had once served tables in a Paris
cafe, and he seldom lost an opportunity of advertising the fact. Pressed
to account for his accurate memory picture of a chance patron, he
confessed naively; the tip had been princely and the young man was one
to mark and to remember--and to serve again.

Broffin left the restaurant with one more link in the chain neatly
forged. There was an excellent reason why none of the first-aid pursuers
had been able to catch a glimpse of the "strong-arm man." He had merely
stepped from the bank entrance to Monsieur Pouillard's. Between the cafe
breakfast and the departure of the _Belle Julie_ there lay an hour and a
quarter. In that interval he could easily perfect his simple disguise.
Broffin was not specially interested in the incidental minutiae. It was
the identity of the man with the untrimmed mustaches and the pointed
beard that must be established.

After another week of patient groping, Broffin was obliged to confess
that the problem of identification was too difficult to be solved on
conventional lines. It presented no point of attack. With neither a name
nor a pictured face for reference, inquiry was crippled at the very
outset. None of the many boarding- and rooming-houses he visited had
lost a lodger answering the verbal description of the missing man. Very
reluctantly, for bull-dog tenacity was the detective's ruling
characteristic, he was forced to the conclusion that the only untried
solution lay in Teller Johnson's unfortified impression that the chance
meeting at his wicket was not the first meeting between the robber and
the young woman with the draft to be cashed.

It was the slenderest of threads, and Broffin realized sweatingly how
difficult it might be to follow. Assuming that there had been a previous
meeting or meetings, or rather the passing acquaintance which was all
that the young woman's later betrayal of the man made conceivable, would
the writer of the accusing letter be willing to add to her burden of
responsibility by giving the true name and standing of the man whose
real identity--if she knew it--she had been careful to conceal in the
unsigned note to Mr. Galbraith? Broffin read the note again--"a
deck-hand, whose name on the mate's book is John Wesley Gavitt," was the
description she had given. It might, or it might not, be an
equivocation; but the longer Broffin dwelt upon it the more he leaned
toward the conclusion to which his theory and the few known facts
pointed. The young woman knew the man in his proper person; she had been
reluctant to betray him--that, he decided, was sufficiently proved by
the lapse of time intervening between the date of her note and its
postmark date; having finally decided to give him up, she had told only
what was absolutely necessary, leaving him free to conceal his real name
and identity if he would--and could.

Having come thus far on the road to convincement, Broffin knew what he
had to do and set about the doing of it methodically. A telegram to the
clerk of the _Belle Julie_ served to place the steamer in the lower
river; and boarding a night train he planned to reach Vicksburg in time
to intercept the witnesses whose evidence would determine roughly how
many hundreds or thousands of miles he could safely cut out of the
zigzag journeyings to which the following up of the hypothetical clew
would lead.

For, cost what it might, he was determined to find the writer of the
unsigned letter.




XVIII

THE ZWEIBUND


On his second visit to the sick man lodged in the padded luxuries of one
of the guest-rooms at Mereside, made on the morning following the
Grierson home-coming, Dr. Farnham found the hospital status established,
with the good-natured Swede installed as nurse, the bells muffled, and
Miss Margery playing the part of Sister Superior and dressing it, from
the dainty, felt-soled slippers to the smooth banding of her hair.

An hour later, however, it was the Margery of the Wahaskan Renaissance,
joyously clad and radiant, who was holding the reins over a big English
trap horse, parading down Main Street and smiling greetings to
everybody.

By one of the chances which he was willing to call fortunate, Edward
Raymer was at the curb to help her down from her high seat in the trap
when she pulled the big horse to a stand in front of her father's bank.

"I'm the luckiest man in Red Earth County; I was just wondering when I
should get in line to tell you how glad we are to have you back," he
said, with his eyes shining.

"Are you, really? You are not half as glad as I am to be back. There is
no place like home, you know."

"There isn't, and there oughtn't to be," was his quick response. "I've
been hoping you'd come to look upon Wahaska as your home, and now I know
you do."

"Why shouldn't I?" she laughed, and she was reaching for a paper-wrapped
package on the trap seat when he got it for her.

"You are going somewhere?--may I carry it for you?" he asked; but she
shook her head and took it from him.

"Only into the bank," she explained; and she was beginning to tell him
he must come to Mereside when the sick-man episode obtruded itself, and
the invitation was broken in the midst, very prettily, very effectively.

"I know," Raymer said, in instant sympathy. "You have your hands full
just now. Will you let me say that it's the finest thing I ever heard
of--your taking that poor fellow home and caring for him?"

Gertrude Raymer had once said in her brother's hearing that Miss
Grierson's color would be charming if it were only natural. Looking into
Miss Grierson's eyes Raymer saw the refutation of the slander in the
suffusing wave of generous embarrassment deepening in warm tints on the
perfect neck and cheek.

"Oh, dear me!" she said in pathetic protest; "is it all over town so
soon? I'm afraid we are still dreadfully 'country' in Wahaska, Mr.
Raymer. Please cut it down to the bare, commonplace facts whenever you
have a chance, won't you? The poor man was sick, and nobody knew him,
and somebody _had_ to take care of him."

Like the doctor, Raymer asked the inevitable question, "Who is he, Miss
Margery?" and, like the doctor again, he received the same answer, "I
haven't the smallest notion of an idea. But that doesn't make the
slightest difference," she went on. "He is a fellow human being, sick
and helpless. That ought to be enough for any of us to know."

Raymer stood watching her as she tripped lightly into the bank, and when
he went to catch his car the conservative minority had lost whatever
countenance or support he had ever given it.

"She's pure gold when you dig down through the little top layer of
harmless scheming for the social Grand-Viziership," he told himself,
tingling with the exultant thrills of the discoverer of buried treasure.
"If all Wahaska doesn't open its doors to her after this, it'll sure
earn what's coming to it."

True to her latest characterization of herself, Margery had a nod and a
pleasant smile for the young men behind the brass grilles as she passed
on her way to the president's room in the rear. She found her father at
his desk, thoughtfully munching the unburned half of one of the huge
cigars, and named her errand.

"I want a safety-deposit box big enough to hold this," she said briefly,
exhibiting the paper-wrapped packet.

Jasper Grierson, deeply immersed in a matter of business to which he had
given the better part of the forenoon, replied without looking up: "Go
and tell Murray; he'll fix you out," and it was not until after she had
gone that it occurred to him to wonder what use she was going to make of
a private box in the safety vault--a wonder that had lost itself in a
multiplicity of other things before he saw her again.

       *       *       *       *       *

For a week after his unmarked arrival in Wahaska, the castaway in the
upper room at Mereside made hard work of it, giving the good little
doctor with the kindly eyes and the straight-line Puritan lips a rather
anxious fight to gain the upper hand of the still unnamed malady.

During the week there were many callers at the lake-fronting mansion;
some coming frankly to welcome the returned house-mistress, others to
make the welcoming an excuse for finding out the particulars in the
castaway episode. But neither faith nor good works seemed to have any
effect on the rebellious minority, and at the end of the week Raymer
once more had the pleasure of lifting Miss Grierson from the high trap
at the door of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank, and of exchanging a few
words with her before she went in to see her father.

As on any other business day, President Grierson was solidly planted in
his heavy arm-chair before a desk well littered with work. He nodded
absently to his daughter as she entered, and knowing that the nod meant
that he would come to the surface of things--her surface--when he
could, she turned aside to the window and waited.

Though she had seen him develop day by day in less than three of the
thirty-odd years of his Western exile, her father offered a constant
succession of surprises to her. When she opened the door to
retrospection, which was not often, she remembered that the man who had
stumbled upon the rich quartz vein in Yellow Dog Gulch could scarcely
sign his name legibly to the papers recording his claim; that in those
days there was no prophecy of the ambitious present in the man, half
drunkard and half outlaw, whose name in the Yellow Dog district had been
a synonym for--but these were unpleasant memories, and Margery rarely
indulged them.

Just now she put them aside by turning her back upon the window and
taking credit for the tasteful and luxurious appointments of the private
office, with its soft-piled rug and heavy mahogany furnishings. Her
father was careless of such things; totally indifferent to them in
business hours; but she saw to it that his surroundings kept pace with
the march of prosperity. Here in Wahaska, as elsewhere, a little
judicious display counted for much, even if there were a few bigoted
persons who affected to despise it.

She was in the midst of a meditated attack upon the steamship
lithographs on the walls--sole remaining landmarks of the ante-Grierson
period--when her father wheeled in his pivot-chair and questioned her
with a lift of his shaggy eyebrows.

"Want to see me, Madgie?"

"Just a moment." She crossed the room and stood at the end of the big
desk. He reached mechanically for his check-book, but she smiled and
stopped him. "No; it isn't money, this time: it's something that money
can't buy. I met Mr. Edward Raymer at the front door a few minutes ago;
does he have an account with you?"

"Yes."

"Is it an accommodation to the bank, or to him?"

Jasper Grierson's laugh was grimly contemptuous.

"The bank isn't making anything out of him. The shoe is on the other
foot."

"Do you mean that he is a borrower?"

"Not yet; but he wants to be. He was in to see me about it just now."

"What is the matter? Isn't he making money with his plant?"

"Oh, yes; his business is good enough. But he's like all the other young
fools, nowadays; he ain't content to bet on a sure thing and grow with
his capital. He wants to widen out and build and put in new machinery
and cut a bigger dash generally. Thinks he's been too slow and sure."

"Are you going to stake him?" Margery waged relentless war with her
birthright inclination to lapse into the speech of the mining-camps, but
she stumbled now and then in talking to her father.

"I don't know; I guess not. Somehow, I've never had much use for him;
and, besides, I've had another plan in mind."

"And that was?"

"To organize another company and build a plant big enough to run him
out."

Margery was turning the leaves of an illustrated prospectus of an Idaho
irrigation company, and was apparently much more deeply interested in
the electrotyped pictures than in the fortunes of Mr. Edward Raymer. And
when she went on, she ignored the obliterative business suggestion and
remained in the narrower channel of the personalities.

"Why haven't you any use for him?"

"Oh, I don't know: because, until just lately, he has never seemed to
have much use for me, I guess. It's a stand-off, so far as likings go. I
offered to reincorporate his outfit for him six months ago, and told him
I'd take fifty-one per cent of the reorganization stock myself; but he
wouldn't talk about it. Said what little he had was his own, and he
proposed to keep it."

"But now he is willing to let you help him?"

"Not much; he don't look at it in that light. He wants to borrow money
from the bank and put up the stock of his close corporation as
collateral. It's safe enough, but I don't believe I'll do it."

The chatelaine of Mereside laid the prospectus aside and came abruptly
to the point.

"I want you to do it," she said, decisively.

"The devil you do!" Then, with the dry door-hinge chuckle: "It was a
waste of good money to put in the ice plant while you're here, Madgie.
What's in the wind, now?"

"Maybe I'll tell you--sometime."

The president chuckled again and tilted to the comfortable angle in the
arm-chair.

"Tell me now; you don't need to beat any of the bushes with me, little
girl. If you say the word, I'll pinch him for you."

"I didn't say that I wanted him pinched. But I do want you to put him
under obligations to you--the heavier the better. His mother and sister
have gone out of their way to snub me, and I want to play even."

Grierson wagged his huge head, and this time the chuckle grew to a
guffaw.

"I thought maybe that was the game. But it won't work with him; not for
a single minute."

"Why won't it?"

"Because he ain't the man to go to his women-folks when he gets into hot
water. He'll keep it to himself; and they'll go on bluffing you, same as
ever."

Miss Grierson pulled on her gauntlets and made ready to go, leisurely,
as befitted her pose.

"That is where you are mistaken," she objected, coolly. "It isn't very
often that I can give you a business tip, but this is one of the times
when I can. When John Raymer died, he left an undivided half of his
estate to his wife, the other half to be shared equally by the two
children. At the present moment, every dollar the entire family has is
invested in the iron plant. So, you see, I know what I am doing."

Jasper Grierson turned the leaf of a calendar-pad and made a brief
memorandum.

"I _savez_: I'll break the three-cornered syndicate for you."

"You will do nothing of the kind," asserted the radiant daughter of men,
with serene assurance. "You will let Mr. Raymer get himself into hot
water, as you call it, and then, when I say the word, you'll reach in
and pull him out."

"Oh, that's the how of it, is it? All right; anything you say goes as it
lays. But I'm going to make one condition, this time: you'll have to
keep cases on the game yourself, and say when. I can't be bothered
keeping the run of your society tea-parties."

"I don't want you to. Don't be late for dinner: we are going to the
Rodneys' for the evening."

When she was gone, the president selected another of the overgrown
cigars from a box in the desk drawer, lighted it, and tilted back in the
big arm-chair to envelop himself in a cloud of smoke. It was his single
expensive habit--the never-empty box of Brobdingnagian cigars in the
drawer--and the indulgence helped him to push the Yellow-Dog period into
a remoter past.

After a time the smoke cloud became articulate, rumbling forth
chucklings and Elizabethan oaths, mingling with musings idiomatic and
profane. "By God, I believe she thought she was fooling me--I do, for a
fact! But it's too thin. Of course, she wants to make the women kow-tow,
but that ain't all there is to it--not by a jugful. But it's all right:
she plays her own hand, and she's bully good and able to play it. If
she's after Raymer's scalp, he might as well get ready to wear a wig,
right now. I'll back her to win, every time."

Accordingly, when Mr. Edward Raymer came out of the president's room at
the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank the following morning, he was treading
upon air. For in his mind's eye there was a fair picture of a great and
successful industry to be built upon the substantial extension of credit
promised by the capitalist whose presence chamber he had just quitted.




XIX

LOSS AND GAIN


Striving feebly as one who gathers up the shards and fragments after an
explosion, Griswold remembered cloudily the supper of tasteless courses
at the Hotel Chouteau, still less distinctly, a drive through the
streets to a great, echoing railway station, a glare of lights too
painful to be borne, and, last of all, an overpowering weariness
shutting down upon him like a sudden closing in of darkness become thick
and stifling.

Afterward there were vague impressions, momentary breaches in the wall
of inclosing darkness when he had realized that he was curiously
helpless, and that he was still on the train going somewhere, though he
could not remember where. In one of these intervals a woman had stood
beside him, and he seemed to remember that she had put her cool hand on
his forehead.

Of the transition from the train to the bed in the upper room at
Mereside, he recalled nothing, though the personalities of two
strangers, the doctor and the nurse, obtruded themselves frequently in
the later phases of the troubled dream, like figures in a shadow
pantomime. Also, that suggestion of the presence of the woman with the
cool palm became self-repeating; and finally, when complete
consciousness returned, the dream impression was still so sharply
defined that he was not surprised to find her standing at his bedside.

He did not recognize her. The memory of his supper companions of the
Hotel Chouteau cafe was deeply buried under the dream debris, and the
present moment was full of mild bewilderment. Yet the friendliness in
her eyes seemed to shine out of some past which ought to be remembered.

Before he could frame any of the queries which came thronging to the
door of the returned consciousness, she smiled and shook her head and
forbade him.

"No, you mustn't talk," she said, with gentle authority. "It's the
doctor's orders. By and by, when you are stronger, you may ask all the
questions you please; but not now."

He wagged his head on the pillow. "Can't I even ask where I am?" he
begged.

"Since you have asked, I'll tell you that much. You are in Wahaska,
Minnesota, in the house of your friends; and you have nothing to do but
to get well as fast and as comfortably as you can."

Her voice was even more remindful than her face of that elusive past
which ought to be remembered, and he closed his eyes to try to recall
it. When he opened them again, she was gone and her place was taken by
one of the figures of the dream; a man with a thick mop of fair hair and
a face of blank good-nature, and whose store of English seemed to be
comprised in a single sentence: "_Ja, ja_; Hae bane poorty vell, t'ank
yo'."

Later in the day the doctor came; and when the professional requirements
were satisfied, Griswold learned the bare facts of his succoring. It was
characteristic of the Griswold of other days that the immense obligation
under which the Griersons had placed him made him gasp and perspire
afresh.

"Who ever heard of such a thing, doctor?" he protested weakly. And then:
"How am I ever going to repay them?"

Dr. Farnham was crisply explicit. "You may leave Mr. Grierson out of
your problem. Miss Margery is an only child, and if she sees fit to turn
Mereside into a temporary hospital, he is abundantly able to indulge
her."

"Then I am indebted to the daughter, alone?"

"Entirely, I should say."

Griswold looked long and earnestly at the face of his professional
adviser. It was a good face, clearly lined, benevolent; and, above all,
trustworthy.

"Tell me one thing more, doctor, if you can. What was the motive? Was it
just heavenly good-heartedness?--or----"

The doctor's smile was the least possible shade wintry.

"When you have lived a few years longer in this world of ours, you will
not probe too deeply into motives; you will take the deed as the
sufficient exponent of the prompting behind it. If I say so much, you
will understand that I am not impugning Miss Grierson's motives. There
are times when she is the good angel of everybody in sight."

"And this is one of the times?" persisted the analyst.

"We shall say that this is one of the times: say it and stick to it,
Mr.----"

The pause after the courtesy title was significant, and Griswold filled
it promptly. "Griswold--Kenneth Griswold. Do you mean to say that you
haven't known my name, doctor?"

"We have not. We took the Good Samaritan's privilege and ransacked your
belongings--Miss Margery and I--thinking that there might be relatives
or friends who should be notified."

"And you found nothing?" queried the sick man, a cold fear gripping at
his heart.

"Absolutely nothing to tell us who you were; no cards, letters, or
memoranda of any kind. The conclusion was obvious: some one had taken
advantage of your illness on the train and had picked your pockets."

Griswold moistened his lips and swallowed hard. "There were two
suit-cases: were they lost?"

"No; they are here."

"And you found nothing in them?"

"Nothing but clothing and your toilet tools, a pistol, and a typewritten
book manuscript bearing no signature."

Griswold turned his face away and shut his eyes. Once more his stake in
the game of life was gone.

"There was another package of--of papers in one of the grips," he said,
faintly; "quite a large package wrapped in brown paper."

"Valuables?" queried the doctor, sympathetically curious.

"Y-yes; rather valuable."

"We found nothing but the manuscript. Could any one else make use of the
papers you speak of?"

Griswold was too feeble to prevaricate successfully.

"There was money in the package," he said, leaving the physician to
infer what he pleased.

"Ah; then you were robbed. It's a pity we didn't know it at the time. It
is pretty late to begin looking for the thief now, I'm afraid."

"Quite too late," said Griswold monotonously.

The doctor rose to go.

"Don't let the material loss depress you, Mr. Griswold," he said, with
encouraging kindliness. "The one loss that couldn't have been retrieved
is a danger past for you now, I'm glad to say. Be cheerful and patient,
and we'll soon have you a sound man again. You have a magnificent
constitution and fine recuperative powers; otherwise we should have
buried you within a week of your arrival."

It was not until after the doctor had gone that Griswold was able to
face the new misfortune with anything like a sober measure of
equanimity. Imaginative to the degree which facilely transforms the
suppositional into the real, he was still singularly free from
superstition. Nevertheless, all the legends clustering about the
proverbial slipperiness of ill-gotten gains paraded themselves
insistently. It was only by the supremest effort of will that he could
push them aside and address himself to the practical matter of getting
well. That was the first thing to be considered; with or without money,
he must relieve the Griersons of their self-assumed burden at the
earliest possible moment.

This was the thought with which he sank into the first natural sleep of
convalescence. But during the days which followed, Margery was able to
modify it without dulling the keen edge of his obligation. What perfect
hospitality could do was done, without ostentation, with the exact
degree of spontaneity which made it appear as a service rendered to a
kinsman. It was one of the gifts of the daughter of men to be able to
ignore all the middle distances between an introduction and a
friendship; and by the time Griswold was strong enough to let the big,
gentle Swede plant him in a Morris chair in the sun-warmed bay-window,
the friendship was a fact accomplished.

"Do you know, you're the most wonderful person I have ever known?" he
said to Margery, on the first of the sunning days when she had come to
perch in the window-seat opposite his chair.

"It's propinquity," she laughed. "You haven't seen any other woman for
days and weeks. Wait until you are strong enough to come down to one of
my 'evenings.'"

"No, it isn't propinquity," he denied.

"Then it's the unaccustomed. You are from the well-behaved East. There
are some people even here in Wahaska who will tell you that I have never
properly learned how to behave."

"Your looking-glass will tell you why they say that," he said gravely.

Her smile showed the perfect rows of white teeth. "You are recovering
rapidly, Mr. Kenneth; don't you think so? Or was that only a little
return of the fever?"

He brushed the bit of mockery aside. "I want to be serious to-day--if
you'll let me. There are a lot of things I'd like to know."

"About Wahaska?"

"About you, first. Where did we meet?--before I came out of the fever
woods and saw you standing by the bed?"

"We didn't 'meet,' in the accepted meaning of the word. My father and I
happened to sit at your table one evening in the Hotel Chouteau, in St.
Louis."

"Ah; I knew there was a day back of the other days. Do you believe in
destiny?"

She nodded brightly. "Sometimes I do; when it brings things out the way
I want them to come out."

"I've often wondered," he went on musingly. "Think of it: somewhere back
in the past you took the first step in a path which was to lead you to
that late supper in the Chouteau. Somewhere in my past I took the first
step in the crooked trail that was to lead me there."

"Well?" she encouraged.

"The paths crossed--and I am your poor debtor," he finished. "I can
never hope to repay you and your father for what you have done."

"Oh, yes you can," she asserted lightly. "You can pass it along to the
man farther down. Forget it, and tell me what you want to know about
Wahaska."

"First, I'd like to know my doctor's name."

"The idea!" she exclaimed. "Hasn't there been anybody to introduce you?
He is Wahaska's best-beloved 'Doctor Bertie'; otherwise Doctor Herbert
C. Farnham."

"_Doctor Farnham?_--not Miss Char----" He bit the name in two in the
middle, but the mischief was done.

"Yes; Charlotte's father," was the calm reply. Then: "Where did you meet
Miss Farnham?"

"I haven't met her," he protested instantly; "she--she doesn't know me
from Adam. But I have seen her, and I happened to learn her name and her
home address."

Miss Margery's pretty face took on an expression of polite disinterest,
but behind the mask the active brain was busily fitting the pegs of
deduction into their proper holes. Her involuntary guest did not know
the father; therefore he must have seen the daughter while she was away
from home. Charlotte Farnham had been South, at Pass Christian, and
doubtless in New Orleans. The convalescent had also been in New Orleans,
as his money packet with its Bayou State Security labels sufficiently
testified.

Miss Grierson got up to draw one of the window shades. It had become
imperative that she should have time to think and an excuse for hiding
her face from the eyes which seemed to be trying masterfully to read her
inmost thoughts.

"You think it is strange that I should know Miss Farnham's name and
address without having met her?" Griswold asked, when the pause had
become a keen agony.

Miss Grierson's rejoinder was flippant. "Oh, no; she is pretty enough to
account for a stranger thing than that."

"She is more than pretty," said Griswold, impulsively; "she has the
beauty of those who have high ideals, and live up to them."

"I thought you said you didn't know her," was the swift retort.

"I said I hadn't met her, and that she doesn't know me."

"Oh," said the small fitter of deduction pegs; and afterward she talked,
and made the convalescent talk, pointedly of other things.

This occurred in the forenoon of a pleasant day in May. In the afternoon
of the same day, Miss Grierson's trap was halted before the door of the
temporary quarters of the Wahaska Public Library. Raymer saw the trap
and crossed the street, remembering--what he would otherwise have
forgotten--that his sister had asked him to get a book on orchids.

Miss Margery was in the reference room, wading absently through the
newspaper files. She nodded brightly when Raymer entered--and was not in
the least dust-blinded by the library card in his hand.

"You are just in time to help me," she told him. "Do you remember the
story of that daring bank robbery in New Orleans a few weeks ago?--the
one in which a man made the president draw a check and get it cashed for
him?"

Raymer did remember it, chiefly because he had talked about it at the
time with Jasper Grierson, and had wondered curiously how the president
of the Farmers' and Merchants' would deport himself under like
conditions.

"Do you remember the date?" she asked.

Since it was tied to his first business interview with Grierson _pere_,
Raymer was able to recall the date, approximately, and together they
turned the file of the _Pioneer Press_ until they came to the number
containing the Associated Press story of the crime. It was fairly
circumstantial; the young woman at the teller's window figured in it,
and there was a sketchy description of the robber.

"If you should meet the man face to face, would you recognise him from
the description?" she flashed up at Raymer.

"Not in a thousand years," he confessed. "Would you?"

"No; not from the description," she admitted. Then she passed to a
matter apparently quite irrelevant.

"Didn't I see Miss Farnham's return noticed in the _Wahaskan_ the other
day?"

With Charlotte's father a daily visitor at Mereside, it seemed
incredible that Miss Grierson had not heard of the daughter's
home-coming. But Raymer answered in good faith.

"You may have seen it some time ago. She and Miss Gilman have been home
for three or four weeks."

"Somebody said they were coming up the river by boat; did they?"

"Yes, all the way from New Orleans."

"That must have been delightful, if they were fortunate enough to get a
good boat. I've been told that the table is simply impossible on some of
them."

"So it is. But they came up as far as St. Louis on one of the Anchor
Lines--the _Belle Julie_--and even Miss Gilman admits that the
accommodations were excellent."

She nodded absently and began to turn the leaves of the newspaper file.
Raymer took it as his dismissal and went to the desk to get the orchid
book. When he looked in again on his way to the street, Miss Grierson
had gone, leaving the file of the _Pioneer Press_ open on the reading
desk. Almost involuntarily he glanced at the first-page headings,
thrilling to a little shock of surprise when one of them proved to be
the caption of another Associated Press despatch giving a twenty-line
story of the capture and second escape of the Bayou State Security
robber on the levee at St. Louis.

The reading of the bit of stale news impressed him curiously. Why had
Miss Margery interested herself in the details of the New Orleans bank
robbery? Why--with no apparent special reason--should she have
remembered it at all? or remembering it, have known where to look for
the two newspaper references?

Raymer left the library speculating vaguely on the unaccountable
tangents at which the feminine mind could now and then fly off from the
well-defined circle of the conventionally usual. On rare occasions his
mother or Gertrude did it, and he had long since learned the folly of
trying to reduce the small problem to terms of known quantities
masculine.

"Just the same, I'd like to know why, this time," he said to himself, as
he crossed the street to the Manufacturers' Club. "Miss Grierson isn't
at all the person to do things without an object."




XX

THE CONVALESCENT


After a few more days in the Morris chair; days during which he was idly
contented when Margery was with him, and vaguely dissatisfied when she
was not; Griswold was permitted to go below stairs, where he met, for
the first time since the Grierson roof had given him shelter, the master
of Mereside.

The little visit to Jasper Grierson's library was not prolonged beyond
the invalid's strength; but notwithstanding its brevity there were inert
currents of antagonism evolved which Margery, present and endeavoring to
serve as a lightning-arrester, could neither ground nor turn aside.

For Griswold there was an immediate recrudescence of the unfavorable
first impression gained at the Hotel Chouteau supper-table. He recalled
his own descriptive formula struck out as a tag for the hard-faced,
heavy-browed man at the end of the cafe table--"crudely strong,
elementally shrewd, with a touch, or more than a touch, of the savage:
the gray-wolf type"--and he found no present reason for changing the
record.

Thus the convalescent debtor to the Grierson hospitality. And as for the
Wahaskan money lord, it is to be presumed that he saw nothing more than
a hollow-eyed, impractical story-writer (he had been told of the
manuscript found in Griswold's hand-baggage), who chanced to be
Margery's latest and least accountable fad.

Griswold took away from the rather constrained ice-breaking in the
banker's library a renewed resolve to cut his obligation to Jasper
Grierson as short as possible. How he should begin again the mordant
struggle for existence was still an unsolved problem. Of the
one-thousand-dollar spending fund there remained something less than
half: for a few weeks or months he could live and pay his way; but after
that.... Curiously enough, the alternative of another attack upon the
plutocratic dragon did not suggest itself. That, he told himself, was an
experiment tried and found wanting. But in any event, he must not
outstay his welcome at Mereside; and with this thought in mind he crept
down-stairs daily after the library episode, and would give Margery no
peace because she would not let him go abroad in the town.

"Not to-day, but to-morrow," she said, finally, when there was no longer
any good reason for denying him. "Wait until to-morrow, and if it's a
fine day, I'll drive you in the trap."

"But why not to-day?" he complained.

"'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless'--what
shall I say; patient, or guest, or--friend?" she laughed, garbling the
quotation to fit the occasion.

"Shakespeare said 'child,'" he suggested mildly.

"And so shall I," she gibed--but the gibe itself was almost a caress.
"Sometimes you remind me of an impatient boy who has been promised a
peach and can't wait until it ripens. But if you must have a reason why
I won't drive you this afternoon, you may. We are going to have a tiny
little social function at Mereside this evening, and I want you to be
fresh and rested for it."

"Oh, my dear Miss Margery!" protested the convalescent, reluctant to his
finger-tips; "not to meet your friends! I am only your poor charity
patient, and----"

"That will do," she declared, tyrannizing over him with a fine
affectation of austere hostess-ship. "_I_ say you are to come
down-stairs this evening to meet a few of our friends. And you will
come."

"Certainly, I shall come, if you wish it," he assented, remembering
afresh his immense obligation; and when the time was ripe he made
himself presentable and felt his way down the dimly lighted library
stair, being minded to slip into the social pool by the route which
promised the smallest splash and the fewest ripples.

It was a stirring of the Philistine in him that led him to prefigure
weariness and banality in the prospect. Without in the least suspecting
it, Griswold was a Brahmin of the severest sect on his social side;
easily disposed to hold aloof and to criticise, and, as a man
Eastern-bred, serenely assured that nothing truly acceptable in the
social sense could come out of the Nazareth of the West.

For this cause he was properly humiliated when he entered the spacious
double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng
of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was
immediately able to lose himself--and any lingering trace of
self-consciousness--in a company which, if appearances were to be
trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map.
Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the
prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; and Margery's greeting
and welcome brought a grateful sense of relief and a certain recovery of
self-possession for which, a few minutes earlier, he had thought there
could be no possible Wahaskan demand.

"Thank you so much for coming down, and for resolving heroically not to
be bored," she began brightly. "And now that you've made your little
concession, I'll make mine. I sha'n't ask anything at all of
you"--piling the cushions in the corner of a wide window-seat and making
him sit down; "you are just to be an invalid this evening, you know, and
you needn't meet any more people than you want to."

When she had patted the pillows into place and was gone to welcome still
later comers, Griswold had a chance to look around him. The readjusting
mechanism was still at work. Beyond question it was all very different,
strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the
piano, with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise
conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum
of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not
in bad taste--on the contrary, they were in exceedingly good taste.
Griswold smiled when he remembered that he had been looking forward to
something suggesting a cross between a neighborhood tea-drinking and a
church social. He was agreeably disappointed to find that the keynote
was distinctly well-mannered, passably urban, undeniably conventional.

And the charming young hostess.... From his corner of the window-seat
Griswold had a comprehensive view of the two great rooms, and beyond
them through a pillared opening to the candle-lighted dining-room where
the refreshments were served. Though the rooms were well filled, there
was but a single personality pervading them for the eager student of
types. Admitting that there were other women more beautiful, Griswold,
groping always for the fitting figure and the apt phrase, told himself
that Miss Grierson's crowning gift was an acute sense of the eternal
harmonies; she was always "in character."

Hitherto he had known her only as his benefactress and the thoughtful
caretaker for his comfort. But now, at this first sight of her in the
broader social field, she shone upon and dazzled him. Admitting that the
later charm might be subtly sensuous--he refused to analyze it too
closely--it was undeniable that it warmed him to a newer and a stronger
life; that he could bask in its generous glow like some hibernating
thing of the wild answering to the first thrilling of the spring-tide.
True, Miss Grierson bore little resemblance to any ideal of his past
imaginings. She might even be the _Aspasia_ to Charlotte Farnham's
_Saint Cecilia_. But even so, was not the daughter of Axiochus well
beloved of men and of heroes?

It was some little time afterward, and Jasper Grierson, stalking like a
grim and rather unwilling master of ceremonies among his guests, had
gruffly introduced three or four of the men, when Griswold gladly made
room in the window-seat for his transformed and glorified mistress of
the fitnesses. As had happened more than once before, her nearness
intoxicated him; and while he made sure now that the charm was at least
partly physical, its appeal was none the less irresistible.

"Are you dreadfully tired?" she asked; adding quickly: "You mustn't let
us make a martyr of you. It's your privilege to disappear whenever you
feel like it."

"Indeed, I'm not at all tired," he protested. "It is all very comforting
and homelike; so vastly--" he hesitated, seeking thoughtfully for the
word which should convey his meaning without laying him open to the
charge of patronizing superciliousness, and she supplied it promptly.

"So different from what you were expecting; I know. You have been
thinking of us as barbarians--outer barbarians, perhaps--and you find
that we are only harmless provincials. But really, you know, we are
improving. I wish you could have known Wahaska as it used to be."

"Before you took it in hand?" he suggested. "I can imagine it."

"Can you? I don't have to imagine it--I can remember: how we used to sit
around the edges of the room behaving ourselves just as hard as ever we
could, and boring one another to extinction. I'm afraid some of them do
it yet, sometimes; but I won't let them do it here."

Once more Griswold let his gaze go at large through the stately rooms.
He understood now. His prefigurings had not been so wide of the mark,
after all. He had merely reckoned without his hostess.

"It is a miracle," he said, giving her full credit. "I'd like to ask how
you wrought it, only I mustn't keep you from your duties."

She laughed joyously, with a little toss of the shapely head which was
far more expressive than many words.

"I haven't any duties; I have taught them to amuse themselves. And they
are doing it very creditably, don't you think?"

"They are getting along," he admitted. "But tell me: how did you go
about it?"

"It was simple enough. When we came here we found a lot of good people
who had fallen into the bad habit of boring one another, and a few who
hadn't; but the few held themselves aloof. We opened our house to the
many, and tried to show them that a church sewing-circle isn't precisely
the acme of social enjoyment. That is all."

Griswold saw in his mind's eye a sharply etched picture of the rise and
progress of a village magnate cleanly struck out in the two terse
sentences, and his respect for his companion in the wide window-seat
increased in just proportion. Verily, Miss Margery had imagination.

"It is all very grateful and delightful to me," he confessed, at length.
"I have been out of the social running for a long time, but I may as
well admit that I am shamelessly Epicurean by nature, and an ascetic
only when the necessities drive."

"I know," she assented, with quick appreciation. "An author has to be
both, hasn't he?--keen to enjoy, and well hardened to endure."

He turned upon her squarely.

"Where did you ever learn how to say such things as that?" he demanded.

It was an opening for mockery and good-natured raillery, but she did not
make use of it. Instead, she let him look as deeply as he pleased into
the velvety eyes when she said: "It is given to some of us to see and to
understand where others have to learn slowly, letter by letter. Surely,
your own gift has told you that, Mr. Griswold?"

"It has," he acknowledged. "But I have found few who really do
understand."

"Which is to say that you haven't yet found your other self, isn't it?
Perhaps that will come, too, if you'll only be patient--and not expect
too many other gifts of the gods along with the one priceless gift of
perfect sympathy."

"When I find the one priceless gift, I shall confidently expect to find
everything else," he asserted, still held a willing prisoner by the
bewitching eyes.

She laughed softly. "You'll be disappointed. The gift you demand will
preclude some of the others; as the others would certainly preclude it.
How can you be an author and not understand that?"

"I am not an author, I am sorry to say," he objected. "I have written
but the one book, and I have never been able to find a publisher for
it."

"But you are not going to give up?"

"No; I am going to rewrite the book and try again--and yet again, if
needful. It is my message to mankind, and I mean to deliver it."

"Bravo!" she applauded, clapping her hands in a little burst of
enthusiasm which, if it were not real, was at least an excellent
simulation. "It is only the weak ones who say, 'I hope.' For the truly
strong hearts there is only the one battle-cry, 'I will!' When you get
blue and discouraged you must come to me and let me cheer you. Cheering
people is _my_ mission, if I have any."

Griswold's pale face flushed and the blood sang liltingly in his veins.
He wondered if she had been tempted to read the manuscript of the book
while he was fighting his way back to consciousness and life. If they
had been alone together, he would have asked her. The bare possibility
set all the springs of the author's vanity upbubbling within him. There
and then he promised himself that she should hear the rewriting of the
book, chapter by chapter. But what he said was out of a deeper, and
worthier, underthought.

"You have many missions, Miss Margery: some of them you choose, and some
are chosen for you."

"No," she denied; "nobody has ever chosen for me."

"That may be true, without making me a false prophet. Sometimes when we
think we are choosing for ourselves, chance chooses for us; oftener than
not, I believe."

She turned on him quickly, and for a single swiftly passing instant the
velvety eyes were deep wells of soberness with an indefinable underdepth
of sorrow in them. Griswold had a sudden conviction that for the first
time in his knowing of her he was looking into the soul of the real
Margery Grierson.

"What you call 'chance' may possibly have a bigger and better name," she
said, gravely. "Had you ever thought of that?"

"Give it any name you please, so long as you admit that it is something
beyond our control," he conceded.

As had happened more than once before, she seemed to be able to read his
inmost thought.

"You are thinking of the chain of incidents that brought you here? It is
only the details that have 'happened.' You meant to come to Wahaska;
you were carrying out a definite purpose of your own that night in St.
Louis when you took your ticket. And coming here, sooner or later you
would have found your way to this house--to a seat on these cushions. I
could tell you more, but my prophetic soul warns me that Agatha
Severance is protesting to Mr. Wamble that she can't _possibly_ play the
particular song he is asking for without the music. I'm going to
convince her that she can."

Some little time after this, Raymer, who had been one of the men
introduced by Jasper Grierson, turned up again in the invalid's corner.

"Sit down, won't you?" said Griswold, making a move to share the
cushions with the young ironmaster; and it was thus that the door to a
friendship was opened. Farther on, when they had gotten safely beyond
the commonplaces, Raymer suggested the smoking-room and a cigar, and
Griswold went willingly.

"I was wondering if you were like me in that, Mr. Raymer," he said. "I
never feel properly acquainted with a man until I have smoked with him."

"Or with a woman until she has made a cup of tea for you?" laughed the
native. "That is Miss Margery's try-out. She has taught us the
potentialities that lie in a cup of tea well brewed and skilfully
sweetened."

From that on, the path to better acquaintance was the easiest of
short-cuts, even as the mild cigar which Raymer found in his pocket-case
paved the way for a return of the smoker's zest in the convalescent.
Without calling himself a reformer, the young ironmaster proved to be a
practical sociologist. Wherefore, when Griswold presently mounted his
own sociological hobby, he was promptly invited to visit the Raymer
Foundry and Machine Works, to the end that he might have some of his
theories of the universal oppression of wage-earners charitably
modified.

"Of course, I don't deny that we're a long way from the Millennium,
yet," was Raymer's summing up of the conditions in his own plant. "But I
do claim that we are on a present-day, living footing. So far as the men
understand loyalty, they are loyal; partly to my father's memory;
partly, I hope, to me. We have never had a strike or an approach to one,
or a disagreement that could not be adjusted amicably. Whether these
conditions can be maintained after we double our capacity and get in a
lot of new blood, I can't say. But I hope they can."

"You are enlarging?" said Griswold.

Raymer waited until the only other man in the smoking-den had gone back
to the drawing-rooms before he said: "Yes; I caught the fever along with
the rest of them a few weeks ago, and I'm already beginning to wish that
I hadn't."

"You are afraid of the market?"

"N-no; times are good, and the market--our market, at least--is daily
growing stronger. It is rather a matter of finances. I am an engineer,
as my father was before me. When it comes to wrestling with the money
devil, I'm outclassed from the start."

"There are a good many more of us in the same boat," said Griswold,
leaving an opening for further confidences if Raymer chose to make them.
But the young ironmaster was looking at his watch, and the confidences
were postponed.

"I'm keeping you up, when I daresay you ought to be in bed," he
protested; but Griswold held him long enough to ask for a suggestion in
a small matter of his own.

Now that he was able to be about, he was most anxious to relieve Miss
Grierson and her father of the charge and care of one whose obligation
to them was already more than mountain-high: did Raymer happen to know
of some quiet household where the obligated one could find lodging and a
simple table?

Raymer, taking time to think of it, did know. Mrs. Holcomb, the widow of
his father's bookkeeper, owned her own house in Shawnee Street. It was
not a boarding-house. The widow rented rooms to two of Mr. Grierson's
bank clerks, and she was looking for another desirable lodger. Quite
possibly she would be willing to board the extra lodger. Raymer,
himself, would go and see her about it.

"It is an exceedingly kind-hearted community this home town of yours,
Mr. Raymer," was the convalescent's leave-taking, when he shook hands
with the ironmaster at the foot of the stairs; and that was the thought
which he took to bed with him after Raymer had gone to make his adieux
to the small person who, in Griswold's reckoning, owned the kindest of
the kind hearts.




XXI

BROFFIN'S EQUATION


Having Clerk Maurice's telegram to time the overtaking approach, Broffin
found the _Belle Julie_ backing and filling for her berth at the
Vicksburg landing when, after a hasty Vicksburg breakfast, he had
himself driven to the river front.

Going aboard as soon as the swing stage was lowered, he found Maurice,
with whom he had something more than a speaking acquaintance, just
turning out of his bunk in the texas.

"I took it for granted you'd be along," was Maurice's greeting. "What
bank robber are we running away with now?"

Broffin grinned.

"I'm still after the one you took on in the place of John Gavitt."

"Humph!" said the clerk, sleepily; "I thought that one _was_ John
Gavitt."

"No; he merely took Gavitt's place and name. Tell me all you know about
him."

"I don't know anything about him, except that he was fool enough to pull
Buck M'Grath out of the river just after M'Grath had tried to bump him
over the bows."

This was a new little side-light on the characteristics of the man who
was wanted. Broffin pulled gently at the thread of narrative until he
had all the particulars of the humane mutiny and the near-tragedy in
which it had terminated.

"Stuck to him and kept him from drowning till you could pick 'em up, did
he--what?" was his commentary on the story. "Then what happened?"

"Oh, nothing much--or nothing very different. Of course, Mac favored the
fellow all he could, after that; gave him the light end of it when there
was any light end. But he didn't get his chance to even up right until
we got to St. Louis."

Here, apparently, was another overlooked item in the list of things to
be considered, and Broffin grappled for it.

"How was that?" he asked.

"I don't know for a certainty. But I put it up that the fellow took Mac
into his confidence--a little--and told him he wanted to make a run for
it as soon as we hit the levee at St. Louis. He hadn't got his pay; we
always hold the 'rousties'' money back till we're unloaded, if we can;
so Mac advanced it, or claimed that he did."

It was Broffin's business to put two and two together, and at this
conjuncture the process was sufficiently simple. With a hundred thousand
dollars in his possession, the make-believe deck-hand would not be
foolish enough to run even a hypothetical risk for the sake of saving
the bit of wage-money. Broffin's next query seemed wholly irrelevant.

"Do you carry any nippers or handcuffs on the _Belle Julie_, Maurice?"
he asked.

"Yes; I believe Mac has an odd pair or so in his dunnage; in fact, I
know he has. I've seen him use 'em on an obstreperous nigger."

From the handcuffs Broffin went off at another tangent.

"Of course, so far as you know, nobody on the boat suspected that the
fellow who called himself Gavitt was anything but the 'roustie' he was
passing himself off for? You didn't know of his having any talk with any
of the upper-deck people?"

"Only once," said the day-clerk, promptly.

"When was that?"

"It was one day just after the 'man-overboard' incident, a little while
after dusk in the evening. I was up here in the texas, getting ready to
go to supper. Gavitt--we may as well keep on calling him that till
you've found another name for him--Gavitt had been cubbing for the
pilot. I saw him go across the hurricane-deck and down the companion to
the saloon-deck guards; and a minute later I heard him talking to
somebody--a woman--on the guards below."

"You didn't hear what was said?"

"I didn't pay any attention. Passengers, women passengers especially,
often do that--pull up a 'roustie' and pry into him to see what sort of
wheels he has. But I noticed that they talked for quite a little while;
because, when I finished dressing and went below, he was just leaving
her."

Broffin rose up from the bunk on which he had been sitting and laid a
heavy hand on Maurice's shoulder. "You ain't going to tell me that you
didn't find out who the woman was, Clarence--what?" he said anxiously.

"That's just what I've got to tell you, Matt," returned the clerk
reluctantly. "I was due at the second table, and I didn't go as far
forward as the stanchion she was holding on to. All I can tell you is
that she was one of the half-dozen or so younger women we had on board;
I could guess at that much."

Broffin's oath was not of anger; it was a mere upbubbling of
disappointment.

"Maurice, I've got to find that young woman if I have to chase her
half-way round the globe, and it's tough luck to figure out that if you
hadn't been in such a blazing hell of a hurry to get your supper that
night, I might be able to catch up with her in the next forty-eight
hours or so. But what's done is done, and can't be helped. Chase out and
get your passenger list for that trip. We'll take the women as they
come, and when you've helped me cull out the names of the ones you're
sure it wasn't, I'll screw my nut and quit buzzing at you."

The clerk went below and returned almost immediately with the list.
Together they went over it carefully, and by dint of much
memory-wringing Maurice was able to give the detective leave to cancel
ten of the seventeen names in the women's list, the remaining seven
including all the might-have-beens who could possibly be fitted into
the clerk's recollection of the woman he had seen clinging to the
saloon-deck stanchion after her interview with the deck-hand.

To these seven names were appended the addresses given in the steamer's
registry record, though as to these Maurice admitted that the patrons of
the boats were not always careful to comply with the regulation which
required the giving of the home address.

"About as often as not they write down the name of the last place they
stopped at," he asserted; and Broffin swore again.

"Which means that I may have to pound my ear eight or ten thousand miles
on the varnished cars for nothing," he growled. "Well, there ain't any
rest for the wicked, I reckon. Now tell me where I can find this man
Buck M'Grath, and I'll fade away."

M'Grath was on duty, superintending the loading and unloading of the
Vicksburg freight quotas; but when Broffin tapped him on the shoulder
and showed his badge, the second mate was called in and M'Grath stood
aside with his unwelcome interrupter.

There were difficulties from the outset. A man-driver himself, the chief
mate shared with the sheerest outcast in his crew a hearty hatred for
the man-catchers all and singular; and in the present instance his
sympathies were with the fugitive from justice, on general principles
first, and for good and sufficient personal reasons afterward. Then,
too, Broffin was hardly at his best. At the thought of what this man
M'Grath could tell him, and was gruffly refusing to tell him, he lost
his temper.

"You're edgin' up pretty close to the law, yourself, by what you're
keeping back," he told the mate finally. "Sooner or later, I'm going to
run this gentleman-roustie of yours down, anyhow, and it'll be healthier
for you to help than to hinder. Do you know what he's wanted for?"

M'Grath did not know, and his enlargement upon the simple negative was
explosively profane.

"Then I'll tell you. He was the 'strong-arm' man that held up the
president of the Bayou State Security and made his get-away with a
hundred thousand. Now will you come across?"

"No!" rasped the Irishman--and again there were embellishments.

"All right. When I catch up with him, you'll fall in for your share in
the proceeds as an accessory after the fact. My men nabbed him on the
levee at St. Louis, and when he euchred them he carried away a pair of
handcuffs that somebody had to help him get shut of. He came back to the
boat, and you are the man who took the handcuffs off!"

"'Tis a scrimshankin' lie, and ye can't prove ut!" said M'Grath.

"Maybe not; but there's one thing I can prove. This side-partner of
yours didn't get his pay before he went ashore with the spring-line;
_but you drew it for him afterwards!_"

M'Grath was cruelly cornered, but he still had the courage of his
gratitude.

"Well, then, I did be taking the bracelets off av 'm. Now make the most
av ut, and be damned to you! Did I know what he'd been doing? I did not.
Do I know where he wint? I do not. Have I seen the naygur that skipped
with him, from that day to this? I have not; nor would I be knowing 'm
if I did see 'm. Anything else yez'd like to know? If there is, ye'll be
taking ut on the tip av my fisht!" And he went back to his work, oozing
profanity at every pore.

Thrown back upon the one remaining expedient, Broffin went ashore and
became a student of railroad time-tables. Passing the incidents of the
stubborn chase in review after many days, he wondered that it had not
occurred to him to question Captain Mayfield. But that the captain would
know anything at all about any particular bit of human driftwood in the
ever-changing deck crew seemed easily incredible; and there was no good
angel of clairvoyance to tell him that the captain had once been made
the half-confidant of a distressed young woman who was anxious to be
both just and merciful.

It was while he was waiting for the departure of the first northbound
train that he planned the search for the young woman, arranging the
names of the seven might-have-beens in the order of accessibility as
indicated by the addresses given in the _Belle Julie's_ register. In
this arrangement Miss Charlotte Farnham's name stood as Number Three;
the two names outranking hers being assigned respectively to Terre
Haute, Indiana, and Baldwin, Kansas.

In his after-rememberings, Broffin swore softly under the drooping
mustaches when he recalled how, in that morning waiting at Vicksburg, he
had hesitated and changed his mind many times before deciding upon the
first three zigzags of the search. Terre Haute, Baldwin, and Wahaska lay
roughly at the three extremities of a great triangle whose sides,
measured in hours of railroad travel, were nearly equal. Failing at
Terre Haute, the nearest point, he could reach either of the two
remaining vertices of the triangle with fairly equal facility; and it
was surely an ironical fate that led him to decide finally upon the
Kansas town as the second choice.

Some twenty-odd hours after leaving Vicksburg, Broffin the tireless
found himself in Terre Haute. Here failure had at least the comfort of
finality. The Miss Heffelfinger of his list, whom he found and
interviewed within an hour of his arrival, was a teacher of German whose
difficulties with the English language immediately eliminated her from
the diminishing equation. Broffin got away from the voluble little
Berliner as expeditiously as possible and hastened back to the railway
station. Kansas came next in his itinerary, and a westbound train was
due to leave in a few minutes.

It was here again that fate mocked him. Arriving at the station, he
found that the westbound train was an hour late; also, that within the
hour there would be a fast train to the north, with good connections for
Wahaska. Once more he stumbled and fell into the valley of indecision. A
dozen times during the forty-five minutes of grace he was on the point
of changing his route; nay, more; at the last minute, when the caller
had announced the northern train, he took a gambler's chance and spun a
coin--heads for the north and tails for the west. The twirling
half-dollar slipped from his fingers and rolled under one of the
stationary seats in the waiting-room. Broffin got down on his hands and
knees to grope for it, and while he was groping the chance to take the
northbound "Limited" was lost. Moreover, when he finally found the coin
it was standing upright in a crack in the floor.

Having now no alternative to distract him, he held to his original plan
and was soon speeding westward toward the Kansan experiment-station. For
two full days of twenty-four hours each he fought as only a determined
man and a good traveller could fight to cover a distance which should
have been traversed in something less than half of the time. Washouts,
blocked tracks, missed connections, all these got in the way; and it was
not until late in the afternoon of the third day out from Terre Haute
that he was set down at the small station which serves the needs of the
Kansas university town.

Having had himself conveyed quickly to the university, which was given
as the address of the Miss Sanborn whose name stood second in his list,
he learned how shrewd a blow his implacable ill-luck had dealt him in
making him the victim of so many delays. Miss Sanborn, it appeared, had
been fitting herself at the denominational school to go out as a
missionary. And some twelve hours before his arrival she had started on
her long journey to the antipodes, going by way of San Francisco and the
Pacific Mail.

Another man might have taken the more easily reached addresses in the
list, leaving the appalling world-tour for the last. But the doggedness
which had hitherto been Broffin's best bid for genius in his profession
asserted itself as a ruling passion. Twenty minutes after having been
given his body-blow by the dean of the theological school he had
examined some specimens of Miss Sanborn's handwriting, had compared them
with the unsigned letter, and was back at the little railroad station
burning the wires to Kansas City in an attempt to find out the exact
sailing date of the missionary's steamer from San Francisco.

When the answer came he found that his margin of time was something of
the narrowest, but it was still a margin. By taking the first overland
train which could be reached and boarded, he might, barring more of the
ill-luck, arrive at San Francisco in time to overtake the young woman
whose handwriting was so like, and yet in some respects quite strikingly
unlike, that of the writer of the letter to Mr. Galbraith.

Under such conditions the long journey to the Pacific Coast was begun,
continued, and, in due course of time, ended. As if it had exhausted
itself in the middle passage, ill-luck held aloof, and Broffin's
overland train was promptly on time when it rolled into its terminal at
Oakland. An hour later he had crossed the bay and was in communication
with the steamship people. Though it was within a few hours of the China
steamer's sailing date, Miss Sanborn had not yet made her appearance,
and once more, though the subject this time was wholly innocent, Broffin
swore fluently.

Notwithstanding, after all these intermediate buffetings, it was only
the ultimate disappointment which was reserved for the man who had come
two thousand miles out of his way for a five-minute talk with a young
woman. Almost at the last moment he found her, and in the same moment
was made to realize that the similarity in handwriting was only a
similarity. Miss Sanborn had been a passenger on the _Belle Julie_,
boarding the steamboat at New Orleans and debarking at St. Louis. But
she had known nothing of the Bayou State Security robbery until she had
read of it in the newspapers; and one glance into the steadfast blue
eyes that met his without flinching convinced Broffin that once more he
had fired and missed.

Number Two in the list of seven being thus laboriously eliminated,
Broffin, to be utterly consistent, should have boarded the first train
for Minnesota. But inasmuch as three of the remaining five addresses
were west of the Missouri River, he sacrificed consistency to
common-sense, halting at a little town in the Colorado mountains, again
at Pueblo, and a third time at Hastings, Nebraska only to find at each
stopping-place that the ultimate disappointment had preceded and was
waiting for him.

With his list cancelled down to two names, he resumed the eastward
flight from the Nebraska town and was again beset by the devil of
indecision. The two place-names remaining were Wahaska and a small
coal-mining town in southern Iowa. Measuring again by railroad hours, he
found that the Iowa town was the nearer; but, on the other hand, there
were good connections from Omaha to Wahaska, and a rather poor one to
the coal mines. Once more Broffin took the gambler's chance, spinning
the coin in his hat, heads for Iowa and tails for Minnesota. It came
heads; and the following day recorded the sixth in the string of
failures.

Leaving What Cheer in the caboose of a coal train, with only the train's
crew for company, and a hard bench for a bed, the man-hunter was already
thrilling to the exultant view-halloo in the chase. By the light of the
flickering caboose lamp he drew his pencil through the Iowa failure. The
one uncancelled name was now something more than a chance; it was a
certainty.

"I've got you for fair, girlie, this time!" he triumphed, and since he
did it audibly, the coal-train conductor laughed and wanted to be told
the color of her eyes and hair.

"Got 'em pretty bad, ain't you, pardner?" he commented, when Broffin,
loose-tongued in his elation, confessed that he was chasing a woman whom
he had never seen. "I know how it goes: seen a picture of one once on a
bill-board, and I'd 'a' gone plum to Californy after her if I hadn't
been too danged busy to take a lay-off."

Landing in Wahaska the next evening, Broffin's first request at the
hotel counter was for the directory. Running an eager finger down the
"F's" he came to the name. It was the only Farnham in the list, and
after it he read: "Dr. Herbert C., office 8 to 10, 2 to 4, 201 Main St.,
res. 16 Lake Boulevard."

Broffin had a traveller's appetite, and the cafe doors were invitingly
open. Yet he denied himself until the clerk, busy at the moment with
other guests, should be at liberty.

"I see there's a Doctor Farnham here," he said, when his time came. "I
was wondering if he was the man I met up with down in New Orleans last
winter."

The clerk shook his head.

"I guess not. Doctor Bertie hasn't taken a vacation since the oldest
inhabitant can remember."

"H'm; that's funny," mused the detective, as one nonplussed. "The name's
just as familiar as an old song. Is your Doctor Farnham a sort of oldish
man?"

"He's elderly, yes; old enough to have a grown daughter." Then the clerk
laughed. "Perhaps you've got things tangled. Perhaps you 'met up' with
Miss Charlotte. She was down on the Gulf Coast last winter."

"Not me," said Broffin, matching the ice-breaking laugh. And then he
registered for a room and passed on into the cafe, deferring to the
appetite which, for the first time in nearly four tedious weeks, he felt
justified in indulging to the untroubled limit.

Having, by the slow but sure process of elimination, finally reduced his
equation to its lowest terms, Broffin put the past four weeks and their
failures behind him, and prepared to draw the net which he hoped would
entangle the lost identity of the bank robber. After a good night's
sleep in a real bed, he awoke refreshed and alert, breakfasted with an
open mind, and presently went about the net-drawing methodically and
with every contingency carefully provided for.

The first step was to assure himself beyond question that Miss Farnham
was the writer of the unsigned letter. This step he was able, by a piece
of great good fortune, to take almost immediately. A bit of morning
gossip with the obliging clerk of the Winnebago House developed the fact
that Dr. Farnham's daughter had once taught in the free kindergarten
which was one of the charitable out-reachings of the Wahaska Public
Library. Two blocks east and one south: Broffin walked them promptly,
made himself known to the librarian as a visitor interested in
kindergarten work, and was cheerfully shown the records. When he turned
to the pages signed "Charlotte Farnham" the last doubt vanished and
assurance was made sure. The anonymous letter writer was found.

It was just here that Matthew Broffin fell under the limitations of his
trade. Though the detective in real life is as little as may be like the
Inspector Buckets and the Javerts of fiction, certain characteristics
persist. Broffin thought he knew the worth of boldness; where it was a
mere matter of snapping the handcuffs upon some desperate criminal, the
boldness was not wanting. But now, when he found himself face to face
with the straightforward expedient, the craft limitations bound him.
Instantly he thought of a dozen good reasons why he should make haste
slowly; and he recognized in none of them the craftsman's slant toward
indirection--the tradition of the trade which discounts the
straightforward attack and puts a premium upon the methods of the
deer-stalker.

Sooner or later, of course, the attack must be made. But only an
apprentice, he told himself, would be foolish enough to make it without
mapping out all the hazards of the ground over which it must be made. In
a word, he must "place" Miss Farnham precisely; make a careful study of
the young woman and her environment, to the end that every thread of
advantage should be in his hands when he should finally force her to a
confession. For by now the assumption that she knew the mysterious bank
robber was no longer hypothetical in Broffin's mind: it had grown to
the dimensions of a conviction.

Wahaska was not difficult of approach on its gossiping side. Though it
owned a charter and called itself a city, it was still in the
country-town stage which favors a wide distribution of news with the
personal note emphasized. Broffin, conveying the impression that he was
a Louisiana lumberman on a vacation, approved himself as a good
listener, and little more was needed. In a week he had traced the social
outlines of the town as one finds the accent of a painting; in a
fortnight he had grouped the Griersons, the Raymers, the Oswalds, the
Barrs, and the Farnhams in their various interrelations, business and
otherwise.

With the patient curiosity of his tribe he suffered no detail, however
trivial, to escape its jotting down. To familiarize himself with the
goings and comings of one young woman, he made the acquaintance of an
entire town. He knew Jasper Grierson's ambition, and its fruitage in the
practical ownership of Wahaska. He knew that Edward Raymer had borrowed
money from Grierson's bank--and was likely to be unable to pay it when
his notes fell due. He had heard it whispered that there had once been a
love affair between young Raymer and Miss Farnham, and that it had been
broken off by Raymer's infatuation for Margery Grierson. Also, last and
least important of all the gossiping details, as it seemed at the time,
he learned that the bewitching Miss Grierson was a creature of fads;
that within the past month or two she had returned from a Florida trip,
bringing with her a sick man, a total stranger, who had been picked up
on the train, taken to the great house on the lake shore and nursed back
to life as Miss Grierson's latest defiance of the conventions.

It should have been a memorable day for Matthew Broffin when he had this
sick man pointed out to him as Miss Grierson's companion in the high
trap--which was also one of Miss Margery's bids for criticism in a town
where the family carryall was still a feature. But Broffin was
sufficiently human to see only a very beautiful young woman sitting
correctly erect on the slanting driving-seat and holding the reins over
a high-stepping horse which, he was told, had cost Jasper Grierson every
cent of a thousand dollars. To be sure, he saw the man, as one sees a
vanishing figure in a kaleidoscope. But there was nothing in the
clean-shaven face of the gaunt, and as yet rather haggard, convalescent
to evoke the faintest thrill of interest--or of memory.




XXII

IN THE BURGLAR-PROOF


A week and a day after the opening of new vistas at Miss Grierson's
"evening," Griswold--Raymer's intercession with the Widow Holcomb having
paved the way--took a favorable opportunity of announcing his intention
of leaving Mereside. It figured as a grateful disappointment to him--one
of the many she was constantly giving him--that Margery placed no
obstacles in the way of the intention. On the contrary, she approved the
plan.

"I know how you feel," she said, nodding complete comprehension. "You
want to have a place that you can call your own; a place where you can
go and come as you please and settle down to work. You _are_ going to
work, aren't you?--on the book, I mean?"

Griswold replaced in its proper niche the volume he had been reading. It
was Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_, and he had been wondering by what
ironical chance it had found a place in the banker's library.

"Yes; that is what I mean to do," he returned. "But it will have to be
done in such scraps and parings of time as I can save from some
bread-and-butter occupation. One must eat to live, you know."

She was sitting on the arm of one of the big library lounging-chairs and
looking up at him with a smile that was suspiciously innocent and
childlike.

"You mean that you will have to work for your living?" she asked.

"Exactly."

"What were you thinking of doing?"

"I don't know," he confessed. "I have been hoping that Raymer might help
me to find a place; possibly in the machine works as an under
bookkeeper, or something of that sort. Not that I know very much about
any really useful occupation, when it comes to that; but I suppose I can
learn."

Again he surprised the lurking smile in the velvety eyes, but this time
it was half-mischievous.

"We have a college here in Wahaska, and you might get a place on the
faculty," she suggested; adding: "As an instructor in philosophy, for
example."

"Philosophy? that is the one thing in the world that I know least
about."

"In theory, perhaps," she conceded, laughing openly at him now. "But in
practice you are perfect, Mr. Griswold. Hasn't anybody ever told you
that before?"

"No; and you don't mean it. You are merely taking a base advantage of a
sick man and making fun of me. I don't mind: I'm in a heavenly temper
this afternoon."

"Oh, but I do mean it, honestly," she averred. "You are a philosopher,
really and truly, and I can prove it. Do you feel equal to another
little drive down-town?"

"Being a philosopher, I ought to be equal to anything," he postulated;
and he went up-stairs to get a street coat and his hat.

She had disappeared when he came down again, and he went out to sit on
the sun-warmed veranda while he waited. He had already forgotten what
she had said about the object of the drive--the proving of the
philosophic charge against him--and was looking forward with keenly
pleasurable anticipations to another outing with her, the second for
that day. It had come to this, now; to admitting frankly the charm which
he was still calling sensuous, and which, in the moments of insight
recurring, as often as they can be borne, to the imaginative, and
vouchsafed now and then even to the wayfaring, he was still disposed to
characterize as an appeal to that which was least worthy in him.

Latterly, however, he had begun to question himself more acutely as to
the exact justice of this attitude; and while he was sunning himself on
the veranda and listening for the hoof-beats of the big trap horse on
the stable approach, he was doing it again. In those graver analytical
moments he had called Margery a preternaturally clever little barbarian,
setting his own immense obligation to her aside in deference to what he
assumed to be the immutable realities. In the sun-warming excursion came
another of those precious moments of insight; a moment in which he was
given a sobering glimpse of the deathless Philistine within. Who was he
to be setting his machine-made ideals above the living, breathing, human
fact whose very limitations and shortcomings might figure as angelic
virtues when weighed in any balance save that of the Philistinic ego?

To admit the query was to admit a doubtful distrust of all the charted
anchorages; those sure holding-grounds which he had once believed to be
the very bottoming of facts assured and incontestible. From his lounging
seat the trees on the lawn framed a noble vista of lakescape and
crescent-curved beach drive, the latter with its water-facing row of
modest mansions, the homes of Wahaska's well-to-do elect. At the end of
the crescent he could see the chimneys of the Raymer house rising above
a groving of young maples; and nearer at hand the substantial,
two-storied frame house which Miss Grierson had pointed out to him as
the home of the kindly Doctor Bertie. When he found himself drifting,
his thoughts reverted automatically to Charlotte Farnham. There, if
anywhere, lay the touchstone of truth and the verities; there, he told
himself, was at least one life into which the doubtful distrust of the
anchorages had never come.

Passing easily from Miss Farnham the ideal to Miss Farnham the
flesh-and-blood reality, he was moved to wonder mildly why the fate
which had brought him twice into critically intimate relations with her
was now denying him even a chance meeting. For a week or more he had
been going out daily; sometimes with Miss Grierson in the trap, but
oftener afoot and alone. The walking excursions had led him most
frequently up and down the lakeside drive, but the doctor's house stood
well back in its enclosure, and there was much shrubbery. Once he had
heard her voice: she was reading aloud to some one on the vine-screened
porch. And once again in passing, he had caught a glimpse of a shapely
arm with the loose sleeve falling away from it as it was thrust upward
through the porch greenery to pluck a bud from the crimson rambler
adding its graceful mass to the clambering vines. It was rather
disappointing, but he was not impatient. In the fulness of time the
destiny which had twice intervened would intervene again. He was as
certain of it as he was of the day-to-day renewal of his strength and
vitality; and he could afford to wait. For, whatever else might happen
in a mutable world, neither an ideal nor its embodiment may suffer
change.

As if to add the touch of definitiveness to the presumptive conclusion,
a voice broke in upon his revery; the voice of the young woman whose
most alluring charm was her many-sided changefulness.

"What? no trap yet? Thorsen is outliving his usefulness; he is getting
slower and pokier every added day he lives!" the voice was saying, with
a faintly acid quality in it that Griswold had seldom heard. Then, as if
she had marked his preoccupied gaze and divined its object: "You must
have a little more patience, Mr. Griswold. All things come to him who
waits. When you have left Mereside finally, Doctor Bertie will some time
take you home to dinner with him."

For his own peace of mind, Griswold hastily assured himself that it was
only the wildest of chance shots. Since the day when he had admitted
that he knew Miss Farnham's name without knowing Miss Farnham in person,
the doctor's daughter had never been mentioned between them.

"How did you happen to guess that I was thinking of the good doctor?" he
asked, curiously.

"You were not thinking of Doctor Bertie; you were thinking of Doctor
Bertie's 'only'," was the laughing contradiction; and Griswold was glad
that the coming of the man with the trap saved him from the necessity of
falling any farther into what might easily prove to be a dangerous
pitfall. Later on, while he was mechanically lifting his hat in
recognition of the many salutations acknowledged by his companion in
their triumphal progress down Main Street, he was still thankful and
still puzzling over the almost uncanny coincidence. It was not the first
time that Miss Grierson had seemed able to read his inmost thoughts.

The short afternoon drive paused at the curb in front of Jasper
Grierson's bank, and, as on former occasions, Margery lightly scorned
the convalescent's up-stretched arms and sprang unhelped to the
pavement. But now her mood was sweetly indulgent and she softened the
refusal. "By and by, after you are quite well and strong again," she
said; and when a horse-holding boy had been found, she led the way into
the bank.

It was Griswold's first visit to the Farmers' and Merchants', and while
his companion was speaking to the cashier he was absently contrasting
its rather showy interior with the severe plainness of the Bayou State
Security; contrasting, and congratulating himself upon the gift of the
artistic memory which enabled him to recall with vivid accuracy all the
little details of the New Orleans banking house--this notwithstanding
the good excuse the observing eye might have had for wandering.

A moment later he found himself bringing up the rear of a procession of
three, led by a young woman with a bunch of keys at her girdle. The
procession halted for the opening of a massive gate in the steel grille
at the rear of the public lobby; after which, with the gate latching
itself automatically behind him, Griswold found himself in the grated
corridor facing the safety deposit vaults.

"Number three-forty-five-A, please," his companion was saying to the
young woman custodian, and he stood aside and admired the workmanship of
the complicated time-locks while the two entered the electric-lighted
vault and jointly opened one of the multitude of small safes. When Miss
Grierson came out, she was carrying a small, japanned document box under
her arm, and her eyes were shining with a soft light that was new to the
man who was waiting in the corridor. "Come with me to one of the
coupon-rooms," she said; and then to the custodian: "You needn't stay;
I'll ring when we want to be let out."

Griswold followed in mild bewilderment when she turned aside to one of
the little mahogany-lined cells set apart for the use of the
safe-holders, saw her press the button which switched the lights on, and
mechanically obeyed her signal to close the door. When their complete
privacy was assured, she put the japanned box on the tiny table and
motioned him to one of the two chairs.

"Do you know why I have brought you here?" she asked, when he was
sitting within arm's-reach of the small black box.

"How should I?" he said. "You take me where you please, and when you
please, and I ask no questions. I am too well contented to be with you
to care very much about the whys and wherefores."

"Oh, how nicely you say it!" she commended, with the frank little laugh
which he had come to know and to seek to provoke. She was standing
against the opposite cell wall with her shoulders squared and her hands
behind her: the pose, whether intentional or natural, was dramatically
perfect and altogether bewitching. "I was born to be your fairy
godmother, I think," she went on joyously. "Tell me; when you bought
your ticket to Wahaska that night in St. Louis, were you meaning to come
here to find work?--the bread-and-butter work?"

"No," he admitted; "I had money, then."

"What became of it?"

"I don't know. I suppose it was stolen from me on the train. It was in
a package in one of my suit-cases; and Doctor Farnham said----"

"I know; he told you that we had searched your suit-cases when you were
at your worst--thinking we owed it to you and your friends, if you had
any."

"Yes; that is what he told me."

"Also, he told you that we didn't find any money?"

"Yes; he told me that, too. We agreed that somebody must have gone
through the grips on the train."

"And you let it go at that? Why didn't you tell me, so that we might at
least try to find the thief?"

He had quite lost sight of the black box on the table by this time, and
was consumed with curiosity to know why she had brought him to such a
place to reproach him for his lack of confidence.

"How often are we able to tell the exact 'why' of anything?" he answered
evasively. "Perhaps I didn't wish to trouble you--you who had already
troubled yourself so generously in behalf of an unknown castaway."

"So you just let the money go?"

"So I just let it go."

She was laughing again and the bedazzling eyes were dancing with
delight.

"I told you I was going to prove that you are a philosopher!" she
exulted. "Sour old Diogenes himself couldn't have been more superbly
indifferent to the goods the gods provide. Open that box on the table,
please."

He did it half-absently: at the first sight of the brown-paper packet
within, the electric bulb suspended over the table seemed to grow black
and the mahogany walls of the tiny room to spin dizzily. Then, with a
click that he fancied he could hear, the buzzing mental machinery
stopped and reversed itself. A cold sweat, clammy and sickening, started
out on him when he realized that the reversal had made him once again
the crafty, cornered criminal, ready to fight or fly--or to slay, if a
life stood in the way of escape. Without knowing what he did, he closed
the box and got upon his feet, eying her with a growing ferocity that he
could neither banish nor control.

"I see: you were a little beforehand with the doctor," he said, and he
strove to say it naturally; to keep the malignant devil that was
whispering in his ear from dictating the tone as well as the words.

"I was, indeed; several days beforehand," she boasted, still joyously
exultant.

"You--you opened the package?" he went on, once more pushing the
importunate devil aside.

"Naturally. How else would I have known that it was worth locking up?"

Her coolness astounded him. If she knew the whole truth--and the demon
at his ear was assuring him that she must know it--she must also know
that she was confronting a great peril; the peril of one who voluntarily
shuts himself into a trap with the fear-maddened wild thing for which
the trap was baited and set. He was steadying himself with a hand on the
table when he said: "Well, you opened the package; what did you find
out?"

"What did I find out?" He heard her half-hesitant repetition of his
query, and for one flitting instant he made sure that he saw the fear of
death in the wide-open eyes that were lifted to his. But the next
instant the eyes were laughing at him, and she was going on confidently.
"Of course, as soon as I untied the string I saw it was money--a lot of
money; and you can imagine that I tied it up again, quickly, and didn't
lose any more time than I could help in putting it away in the safest
place I could think of. Every day since you began to get well, I've been
expecting you to say something about it; but as long as you wouldn't, I
wouldn't."

Slowly the blood came back into the saner channels, and the whispering
demon at his ear grew less articulate. Was she telling the truth? Could
it be possible that she had not opened the packet far enough to see and
read the damning evidence of the printed bank-slips which, in a very
bravado of carelessness, as he now remembered, he had neglected to
remove and destroy? He was searching the dark eyes for the naked soul
behind them when he ventured again.

"You--you and your father--must have thought it very singular that a
sick man should be knocking about the country with so much money carried
carelessly in a suit-case?"

"My father knows nothing about it; nor does any one else. And it wasn't
my place to gossip or to wonder. I found it, and I took care of it for
you. Are you glad, or sorry?"

He took the necessary forward step and stood before her. And his answer
was no answer at all.

"Miss Grierson--Margery--are you telling me the truth?--all of it?" he
demanded, seeking once again to pinion the soul which lay beyond the
deepest depth of the limpid eyes.

Her laugh was as cheerful as a bird song.

"Telling you the truth? How could you suspect me of such a thing! No, my
good friend; no woman ever tells a man the whole truth when she can help
it. I didn't find your money, and I didn't lock it up in poppa's vault:
I am merely playing a part in a deep and diabolical plot to----"

Griswold forgot that he was her poor beneficiary; forgot that she had
taken him in as her guest; forgot, in the mad joy of the reactionary
moment, everything that he should have remembered--saw nothing, thought
of nothing save the flushed face with its glorious eyes and tempting
lips: the eyes and lips of the daughter of men.

She broke away from him hotly after he had taken the flushed face
between his hands and kissed her; broke away to drop into the chair at
the other side of the table, hiding the flashing eyes and the burning
cheeks and the quivering lips in the crook of a round arm which made
room for itself on the narrow table by pushing the japanned money-box
off the opposite edge.

It was the normal Griswold who picked up the box and put it in the other
chair, gravely and methodically. Then he stood before her again with
his back to the wall, waiting for what every gentle drop of blood in his
veins was telling him he richly deserved. His punishment was long in
coming; so long that when he made sure she was crying, he began to
invite it.

"Say it," he suggested gently, "you needn't spare me at all. The only
excuse I could offer would only make the offence still greater."

She looked up quickly and the dark eyes were swimming. But whether the
tears were of anger or only of outraged generosity, he could not tell.

"Then there was an excuse?" she flashed up at him.

"No," he denied, as one who finds the second thought the worthier;
"there was no excuse."

She had found a filmy bit of lace-bordered linen at her belt and was
furtively wiping her lips with it.

"I thought perhaps you might be able to--to invent one of some sort,"
she said, and her tone was as colorless as the gray skies of an autumn
nightfall. And then, with a childlike appeal in the wonderful eyes: "I
think you will have to help me a little--out of your broader experience,
you know. What ought I to do?"

His reply came hot from the refining-fire of self-abasement.

"You should write me down as one who wasn't worthy of your
loving-kindness and compassion, Miss Grierson. Then you should call the
custodian and turn me out."

"But afterward," she persisted pathetically. "There must be an
afterward?"

"I am leaving Mereside this evening," he reminded her. "It will be for
you to say whether its doors shall ever open to me again."

She took the thin safety-deposit key from her glove and laid it on the
table.

"You have made me wish there hadn't been any money," she lamented, with
a sorrowful little catch in her voice that stabbed him like a knife. "I
haven't so many friends that I can afford to lose them recklessly, Mr.
Griswold."

"Damn the money!" he exploded; and the malediction came out of a full
heart.

"If you would only say you are sorry," she went on sadly, groping only
half-purposefully for the bell-push which would summon the custodian.
"You are sorry, aren't you?"

Unconsciously he had taken her former pose, with his back to the wall
and his hands behind him.

"I ought to be decent enough to lie to you and say that I am," he
returned, hardily. "I know you can't understand; you are too good and
innocent to understand. I'm ashamed; that is, the civilized part of me
is ashamed; but that is all. Knowing that he ought to be in the dust at
your feet, the brutal other-man is unrepentant and riotously jubilant
because, for a brief second or two, he was able to break away and----"

Her fingers had found the bell-push and were pressing it. When the
custodian opened the door, Miss Grierson was her poiseful self again.

"Number three-forty-five-A is Mr. Kenneth Griswold's box, now," she
announced briefly. "Please register it in his name, and then help him to
put it away and lock it up."

Griswold went through the motions with the key-bearing young woman
half-absently. By this time he was fathoms deep in the reactionary
undertow. Must the recovered treasure always transform itself into a
millstone to drag him down into some new and untried depth of
degradation? Thrice he had given it up for lost, and in each instance
its reappearance had been the signal for a relapse into primitive
barbarism, for a plunge into the moral under-depths out of which he had
each time emerged distinctively and definitely the loser. Was it to be
always thus? Could it be even remotely possible that in a candidly
material world there could still be standing-room for the myths and
portents and superstitious traditions?

He was trying to persuade himself that there could not be standing-room
when he rejoined Margery--herself the best imaginable refutation of the
old-wives' tales--at the gate in the great steel grille. Man-like, he
was ready to be forgiven and comforted; and there was at least oblivion
in her charming little shudder as the custodian shot the bolts of the
gate to let them out.

"_Br-r-r!_" she shivered, "I can never stand here and look at the free
people out there without fancying myself in a prison. It must be a
dreadful thing to be shut away behind bolts and bars, forgotten by
everybody, and yet yourself unable to forget. Do you ever have such
foolish thoughts, Mr. Griswold?"

For one poignant second fear leaped alive again and he called himself no
better than a lost man. But the eyes that were lifted to his were the
eyes of a questioning child, so guilelessly innocent that he immediately
suffered another relapse into the pit of self-despisings.

"You have made me your poor prisoner, Miss Grierson," he said, speaking
to his own thought rather than to her question. And when they reached
the sidewalk and the trap: "May I bid you good-by here and go to my own
place?"

"Of course not!" she protested. "Mr. Raymer is coming to dinner to-night
and he will drive you over to Mrs. Holcomb's afterward, if you really
think you must go."

And for the first time in their comings and goings she let him lift her
to the high driving-seat.




XXIII

CONVERGING ROADS


Matthew Broffin had been two weeks and half of a third an unobtrusive
spy upon the collective activities of the Wahaskan social group which
included the Farnhams before he decided that nothing more could be
gained by further delay.

By this time he knew all there was to be known about Miss Farnham; the
houses she visited, the somewhat limited circle of her intimates and the
vastly wider one of her acquaintances, her comings and goings in the
town, her preference for church dissipations over the other sort, and
for croquet over lawn tennis.

Also, he had a more minute knowledge which would have terrified her if
she had suspected that any strange man was keeping an accurately
tabulated note-book record of her waking employments. He knew at what
hour she breakfasted, what time in the forenoons she spent upon her
Chautauqua readings, how much of her day was given to the care of her
invalid aunt, and, most important item of all, how, in the afternoons,
when her father was at his town office and the invalid was taking a nap
in her room, Miss Charlotte was usually alone in the living-rooms of
the two-storied house in Lake Boulevard: practically so for four days
out of the seven; actually so on Wednesdays and Fridays when Hilda
Larsen, the Swedish maid of all work, had her afternoons off.

Having his own private superstition about Friday, Broffin chose a
Wednesday afternoon for his call at the house on the lake front. It was
a resplendent day of the early summer which, in the Minnesota latitudes,
springs, Minerva-like, full-grown from the nodding head of the wintry
Jove of the north. In the doctor's front yard the grass was vividly
green, gladioli and jonquils bordered the path with a bravery of color,
and the buds of the clambering rose on the porch trellis were swelling
to burst their calyxes.

Broffin turned in from the sidewalk and closed the gate noiselessly
behind him. If he saw the bravery of colors in the path borders it was
only with the outward eye. There was a faint stir on the porch, as of
some one parting the leafy screen to look out, but he neither quickened
his pace nor slowed it. While he had been three doors away in the
lake-fronting street, a small pocket binocular had assured him that the
young woman he was going to call upon was sitting in a porch rocker
behind the clambering rose, reading a book.

She had risen to meet him by the time he had mounted the steps, and he
knew that her first glance was appraisive. He had confidently counted
upon being mistaken for a strange patient in search of the doctor, and
he was not disappointed.

"You are looking for Doctor Farnham?" she began. "He is at his
office--201 Main Street."

Broffin was digging in his pocket for a card. It was not often that he
was constrained to introduce himself formally, and for an awkward second
or two the search was unrewarded. When he finally found the bit of
pasteboard he was explaining verbally.

"I know well enough where your father's office is, but you are the one I
wanted to see," he said; and he gave her the round-cornered card with
its blazonment of his name and employment.

He was watching her narrowly when she read the name and its underline,
and the quick indrawing of the breath and the little shudder that went
with it were not thrown away upon him. But the other signs; the pressing
of the even teeth upon the lower lip and the coming and going of three
straight lines between the half-closed eyes were not so favorable.

"Will you come into the house, Mr.----" she had to look at the card
again to get the name--"Mr. Broffin?" she asked.

"Thank you, Miss; it's plenty good enough out here for me if it is for
you," he returned, beginning to fear that the common civilities were
giving her time to get behind her defences.

She made way for him on the porch and pointed to a chair, which he took,
damning himself morosely when he caught his foot in the porch rug and
knocked the book from its resting-place on the railing.

"It is no matter," she said, when he would have gone outside to recover
the book; but he knew from that moment that whatever advantage a fair
beginning may give was gone beyond recall.

"I guess we can take it for granted that you know what I want, Miss
Farnham," he began abruptly, when he had shifted his chair to face her
rocker. "Something like three months ago, or thereabouts, you went into
a bank in New Orleans to get a draft cashed. While you were at the
paying teller's window a robbery was committed, and you saw it done and
saw the man that did it. I've come to get you to tell me the man's
name."

If he had thought to carry the defences by direct assault he was quickly
made to realize that it could not be done. Miss Farnham's
self-possession was quietly convincing when she said:

"I have told it once, in a letter to Mr. Galbraith."

Broffin nodded. "Yes; in a letter that you didn't sign: we'll come to
that a little later. The name you gave was John Wesley Gavitt, and you
knew that wasn't his right name, didn't you?"

She made the sign of assent without thinking that it might imply the
knowing of more.

"It was the name under which he was enrolled in the _Belle Julie's_
crew, and it was sufficient to identify him," she countered; adding: "It
did identify him. The officers found him and arrested him at St. Louis."

"Yes; and he made his get-away in about fifteen minutes after they had
nabbed him, as you probably read in the papers the next morning. He's
loose yet, and most naturally he ain't signing his name 'Gavitt' any
more whatever. I've come all the way from New Orleans, and a whole heap
farther, to get you to tell me his real name, Miss Farnham."

"Why do you think I can tell you?" was the undisturbed query.

"A lot of little things," said the detective, who was slowly coming to
his own in the matter of self-assurance. "In the first place, he spoke
to you in the bank, and you answered him. Isn't that so?"

She nodded, but the firm lips remained closed where the lips of another
woman might have opened to repeat what had been said at the teller's
wicket.

"Then, afterwards, on the boat, before you sent the letter, you talked
with him. It was one evening, just at dusk, on the starboard promenade
of the saloon-deck: he was comin' down from the pilot-house and you
stopped him. That was when he told you what his name was on the
steamboat's books, wasn't it?--what?"

She nodded again. "You know so much, it is surprising that you don't
know it all, Mr. Broffin," she commented, with gentle sarcasm.

"The one thing I don't know is the thing you're goin' to tell me--his
real name," he insisted. "That's what I've come here for."

In spite of her inexperience, which, in Mr. Broffin's field, was no less
than total, Charlotte Farnham had imagination, and with it a womanly
zest for the matching of wits with a man whose chief occupation was the
measuring of his own wit against the subtle cleverness of criminals.
Therefore she accepted the challenge.

"I did my whole duty at the time, Mr. Broffin," she demurred, with a
touch of coldness in her voice. "If you were careless enough to let him
escape you at St. Louis, you shouldn't come to me. I might say very
justly that it was never any affair of mine."

Matthew Broffin's gifts were subtle only in his dealings with other men;
but he was shrewd enough to know that his last and best chance with a
woman lay in an appeal to her fears.

"I don't know what made you write this letter, in the first place," he
said, taking the well-thumbed paper from his coat pocket; "but I know
well enough now why you didn't sign it, and why you didn't put the man's
real name in it. You--you and him--fixed it up between you so that you
could say to yourself afterwards what you've just said to me--that you'd
done your duty. But you haven't finished doin' your duty, yet. The law
says----"

"I know very well what the law says," was her baffling rejoinder; "I
have taken the trouble to find out since I came home. I am not hiding
your criminal."

Broffin was trying to gain a little ease by tilting his chair. But the
house wall was too close behind him.

"People will say that you are helpin' to hide him as long as you won't
tell his real name--what?" he grated.

"You still think I could tell you that, if I chose?" she said, wilfully
misleading him, or at least allowing him to mislead himself.

"I don't think anything about it: I _know_! You'd met him somewhere
before that day in the bank--before you knew he was goin' to turn
gentleman hold-up. That's why you don't want to give up his real name."

She had risen in answer to the distant chatter of an electric bell, and
in self-defence, Broffin had to grope on the floor for his hat and stand
up, too.

"I think my aunt is calling and I shall have to go in," she said, calmly
dismissing him. "You'll excuse me, I am sure, Mr. Broffin."

"In just one second, Miss Farnham. Ain't you goin' to tell me that
fellow's name?"

"No."

"Wait a minute. I'm an officer of the law, and I could arrest you and
take you to New Orleans on what evidence I've got. How about
that?--what?"

There was good fighting blood on the Farnham side, notwithstanding the
kindly Doctor Bertie's peaceful avocation, and the calm gray eyes that
met Broffin's were militantly angry when the retort came.

"If I had a brother, Mr. Broffin, he would be able to answer you better
than I can!" she flamed out. "Let me pass, please!"

It was not often that Broffin lost his head or his temper, but both were
gone when he struck back.

"That'll be all right, too!" he broke out harshly, blocking the way to
force her to listen to him. "You think you've bluffed me, don't
you?--what? Let me tell you: some fine day this duck whose name isn't
Gavitt will turn up here--to see you; then I'll nab him. If you find out
where he is, and write to him not to come, it'll be all the same; he'll
come anyway, and when he does come, I'll get him!"

When Miss Farnham had gone in and there was nothing left for him to do
but to compass his own disappearance, Broffin went away, telling himself
with many embellishments that for once in his professional career he had
made an ass of himself. He had made a sorry botch of a measurably simple
detail, to say nothing of letting his temper push him into the final
foolish boast which might easily defeat him.

None the less, he was able to set some few gains over against the one
critical loss--if one may be said to lose what he has never had. Failing
to learn the true name and place of the Bayou State Security robber, he
told himself that he had established beyond question the correctness of
his hypothesis. The doctor's daughter knew the man; she had known him
before the robbery; she was willing to be his accomplice to the extent
of her ability. There was only one explanation of this attitude. In
Broffin's wording of it, Miss Farnham was "gone on him," if not openly,
at least to such an extent as to make her anxious to shield him.

That being the case, Broffin set it down as a fact as good as
accomplished that the man would sooner or later come to Wahaska. The
detective's knowledge of masculine human nature was as profoundly acute
as the requirements of his calling demanded. With a woman like Miss
Farnham for the lure, he could be morally certain that his man would
some time fling caution, or even a written prohibition, to the winds,
and walk into the trap.

This misfire of Broffin's happened upon a Wednesday, which, in its
calendar placing, chanced to be three weeks to a day after Griswold had
left Mereside to settle himself studiously in two quiet upper rooms in
the Widow Holcomb's house in upper Shawnee Street.

That it was also a day of other coincidences will appear in the casting
up of the items on the page of events.

For one thing, it marked the formal opening of the De Soto Inn for the
summer season; the De Soto being the resort hotel spoken of by the clerk
of the Hotel Chouteau in the little ante-dinner talk which had given
Griswold his first outline sketch of Wahaska. For another, the special
train from the far South arriving at noon and bearing the first
detachment of the Inn's guests, had for one of its Pullman passengers an
elderly gentleman with a strongly marked Scottish face; a gentleman with
the bushy white eyebrows of age, the long upper lip of caution, the
drooping eyelid of irascibility, and the bearing of a man of routine; in
other words, Mr. Andrew Galbraith, faring northward on his customary
summer vacation, which--the fates intervening--he had this time
determined to spend at the Wahaskan resort.

For a third item, it was at three o'clock of this same Wednesday that
Raymer came out of Jasper Grierson's bank with his head down and a cloud
on his brow; the cloud dating back to an interview just closed, a short
and rather brittle conference with the bank's president held in Jasper
Grierson's private room, with the president sitting at ease in his huge
arm-chair and his visitor standing, quite destitute of ease, at the
desk-end.

A little farther along, this third item dovetailed with a fourth and
fifth. Raymer, dropping into a friend's office to use the telephone,
chanced upon a crossed wire. He had called up Mrs. Holcomb, and while he
was waiting for the widow to summon Griswold from his up-stairs den,
there was a confused skirling of bells and Raymer, innocently
eavesdropping, overheard part of a conversation between two well-known
voices; namely, the voices of Miss Charlotte Farnham and her father. The
talk was neither confidential, nor of any special significance. Miss
Farnham was explaining that she had heard the bell, but could not answer
promptly because she had had a caller; and the doctor was telling her
that it was no matter--that he merely wanted to let her know that he was
going to bring a dinner guest, the guest prospective being his late
patient, Mr. Kenneth Griswold.

The mention of Griswold's name reminded Raymer of his own affair, and he
became suddenly anxious to have the connection with the Widow Holcomb's
house renewed. When the crossed wire was plugged out, Griswold was ready
and waiting.

"I was afraid you might be out somewhere, and I want to have a pow-wow
with you," said Raymer, when the reassuring voice came over the wire.
"Can you give me a little time if I drive around?" And when the prompt
assent came: "All right; thank you. I'll be with you in a pair of
minutes."

Raymer's horse was only a short half-square away, hitched in front of
the Winnebago House, and he went to get it. But at the instant of
unhitching, Miss Grierson's trap was driven up and the untying of knots
paused while he stepped from the curb to stand at the wheel of the
modish equipage.

"You are getting to be as bad as all the others," was the greeting he
got from the high driving-seat. "You haven't been at Mereside for an
age--only once since the night you took Mr. Griswold away from us. By
the way, what has become of Mr. Griswold? He doesn't show himself in
public much oftener than you do."

"I think he has been getting to work on his writing," said Raymer,
good-naturedly apologizing for his friend. "He'll come down out of the
clouds after a little." And then, before he could stop it, out came the
bit of unchartered information: "I understand he dines at Doctor
Bertie's to-night."

The young iron-founder was looking up into the eyes of beguiling when he
said this, and, being a mere man, he wondered what made them flash and
then grow suddenly fathomless and brooding.

"When you see him, tell him that we are still on earth over at
Mereside," said the magnate's daughter pertly; and a moment later Raymer
was free to keep his appointment with Griswold.

All in all, the little interruption had consumed no more than five
minutes, but the time interval was sufficient to form another link in
the chain of Wednesday incidents. For, as Raymer was turning out of Main
Street into Shawnee, he narrowly missed running over a heavy-set man
with a dark face and drooping mustaches; a pedestrian whose
preoccupation seemed so great as to make him quite oblivious to street
crossings and passing vehicles until Raymer pulled his horse back into
the shafts and shouted.

When the man looked up, Raymer recognized him as the stranger from the
South who was stopping at the Winnebago House and who gave himself out
as a Louisiana lumberman open to conviction on the subject of Minnesota
pine lands as an investment. But he had no means of knowing that
Broffin's momentary preoccupation was chargeable to a fruitless
interview lately concluded; or that in driving away to the house three
squares up the street he was bridging the narrow gap between a
man-hunter and his quarry--a gap which had suddenly grown into a chasm
for the man-hunter himself.

One more small coincidence will serve to total the items on the
Wednesday page. If Broffin had not stopped to look after the man who had
so nearly run him down, he might not have been crossing Main Street in
front of the Winnebago at the precise instant when Miss Grierson, with
young Dahlgren in the second seat of the trap, came around the square
and pulled up to let her horse drink at the public fountain.

"Who is that Bitter-Creekish-looking man crossing over to the Winnebago
House?" asked Miss Grierson of her seatmate, indicating Broffin with a
wave of the whip, and skilfully making the query sound like the voicing
of the idlest curiosity.

"Fellow named Broffin, from Louisiana," said Dahlgren, who, as assistant
editor of the _Daily Wahaskan_, knew everybody. "Says he's in the lumber
business down there, but, 'I doubt it,' said the carpenter, and shed a
bitter tear."

"Why do you doubt it?" queried Miss Grierson, neatly flicking a fly from
the horse's back with the tip of the whiplash.

"Oh, on general principles, I guess. You wouldn't say he had any of the
ear-marks of a business man."

"What kind of ear-marks has he got?" persisted Miss Grierson--merely to
make talk, as Dahlgren decided.

"I don't know. We were talking about him around at the club the other
night, and Sheffield--he's from Kentucky, you know--thought he
remembered the name as the name of a 'moonshine' raider he'd heard of
down in his home State."

"A moonshine raider? What is that?" By this time Miss Margery's
curiosity was less inert than it had been, or had seemed to be, at
first.

"A deputy marshal, you know; a sort of Government policeman and
detective rolled into one. He looks it, don't you think?"

Miss Grierson did not say what she thought, then, or later, when she set
Dahlgren down at the door of his newspaper office in Sioux Avenue. But
still later, two hours later, in fact, she gave a brief audience in the
Mereside library to a small, barefooted boy whose occupation was
sufficiently indicated by the bundle of evening papers hugged under one
arm.

"Well, Johnnie; what did you find out?" she asked.

"Ain't had time," said the boy. "But he ain't no milyunaire
lumber-shooter, I'll bet a nickel. I sold him a pape' jes' now, down by
Dutchie's lumber yard, and I ast him what kind o' lumber that was in the
pile by the gate. He didn't know, no more'n a goat."

Miss Margery filliped a coin in the air and the newsboy caught it
dexterously.

"That will do nicely for a beginning, Johnnie," she said sweetly. "Come
and see me every once in a while, and perhaps there'll be more little
white cart-wheels for you. Only don't tell; and don't let him catch you.
That's all."




XXIV

THE FORWARD LIGHT


During the days which followed his setting up of the standard of
independence in Mrs. Holcomb's second-floor front, Griswold found
himself entering upon a new world--a world corresponding with gratifying
fidelity to that prefigured future which he had struck out in the waking
hours of his first night on the main-deck of the _Belle Julie_.

Wahaska, as a fortunate field for the post-graduate course in
Experimental Humanity, was all that his fancy had pictured it. It was
neither so small as to scant the variety of subjects, nor so large as to
preclude the possibility of grasping them in their entirety. In strict
accord with the forecast, it promised to afford the writing craftsman's
happy medium in surroundings: it would reproduce, in miniature, perhaps,
but none the less in just proportions, the social problems of the wider
world; and for a writer's seclusion the village quiet of upper Shawnee
Street was all that could be desired.

When he came to go about in the town, as he did daily after the pleasant
occupation of refurnishing his study and bed-room was a pleasure past,
he found that in some mysterious manner his fame had preceded him.
Everybody seemed to know who he was; to be able to place him as a New
Yorker, as an author in search of health, or local color or environment
or some other technical quality not to be found in the crowded cities;
to be able to place him, also, as Miss Margery Grierson's friend and
beneficiary--which last, he surmised, was his best passport to the good
graces of his fellow-townsmen.

Coincidently he discovered that, in the same mysterious manner,
everybody seemed to know that he was, in the Wahaskan phrase,
"well-fixed." Here, again, he guessed that something might be credited
to Margery. Beyond a hint to Raymer, he had told no one of the
comfortable assurance against want lying snugly secure in the small
strong-box in the Farmers' and Merchants' safety vault, and he was
reasonably certain that Raymer could not have passed the hint so fast
and so far as the town-wide limits to which the fact of the "well-fixed"
phrase had spread.

All this was very nourishing, not to say stimulating, to the starved
soul of a proletary. Not in any period of the past had he so fully
understood that an acute appreciation of the wrongs of the race is no
bar to an equally acute hungering and thirsting after the commonplace
flesh-pots, or to a very primitive and soul-satisfying enjoyment of the
same when they were to be had. Nevertheless, the reaction into
self-indulgence proved to be only temporary. God had been good to him,
enabling him to realize in miraculous fulfilment the ideal environment
and opportunity: therefore he would do his part, proclaiming the holy
war and fighting, single-handed if need be, the battle of the weak
against the strong.

So ran the renewed determination, dusted off and re-pedestaled after
many days. As to the manner of conducting the war against inequality and
the crime of plutocracy, the plan of campaign had been sufficiently
indicated in that white-hot moment of high resolves on the cargo-deck of
the _Belle Julie_. For the propaganda, there was his book; for the
demonstration, he would put the sacred fund into some industry where the
weight of it would give him the casting vote in all questions involving
the rights of the workers. It was absurdly simple, and he wondered that
none of the sociological reformers whose books he had read had
anticipated him in the discovery of such an obviously logical point of
attack.

With the re-writing of the book fairly begun, he was already looking
about for the practical opportunity when the growing friendship with
Edward Raymer promised to offer an opening exactly fulfilling the
experimental requirements. Raymer had over-enlarged his plant and was
needing more capital. So much Griswold had gathered from the talk of the
street; and some of Raymer's half-confidences had led him to suspect
that the need was, or was likely to become, imperative. It was only the
finer quality of friendship that had hitherto kept him from offering
help before it was asked, and thus far he had contented himself with
hinting to Raymer that he had money to invest. From every point of view
a partnership with the young iron-founder promised to afford the golden
opportunity. The industry was comparatively small and self-contained;
and Raymer was himself openly committed to the cause of uplifting.
Griswold waited patiently; he was still waiting on the Wednesday
afternoon when Raymer called him over the telephone and made the
appointment for a meeting at the house in Shawnee Street.

"Your 'pair of minutes' must have found something to grow upon," laughed
the patient waiter, when Raymer, finding Mrs. Holcomb's front door open,
had climbed the stair to the newly established literary workshop. "I've
had time to smoke a pipe and write a complete paragraph since you called
up."

Raymer flung himself into a chair at the desk-end and reached for a pipe
in the curiously carved rack which had been one of Griswold's small
extravagances in the refurnishing.

"Yes," he said; "Margery Grierson drove up while I was unhitching, and I
had to stop and talk to her. Which reminds me: she says you're giving
Mereside the go-by since you set up for yourself. Are you?"

"Not intentionally," Griswold denied; and he let it stand at that.

"I shouldn't, if I were you," Raymer advised. "Margery Grierson is any
man's good friend; and pretty soon you'll be meeting people who will
lift their eyebrows when you speak of her. You mustn't make her pay for
that."

"I'm not likely to," was the sober rejoinder. "My debt to Miss Grierson
is a pretty big one, Raymer; bigger than you suspect, I imagine."

"I'm glad to hear you put the debt where it belongs, leaving her father
out of it. You don't owe him anything; not even a cup of cold water.
There's a latter-day buccaneer for you!" he went on, warming to his
subject like a man with a sore into which salt has been freshly rubbed.
"That old timber-wolf wouldn't spare his best friend--allowing that
anybody could be his friend. By Jove! he's making me sweat blood, all
right!"

"How is that?" asked Griswold.

"I've been on the edge of telling you two or three times, but next to a
quitter I do hate the fellow who puts his fingers into a trap and then
squawks when the trap nips him. Grierson has got me down and he is about
to cut my throat, Griswold."

"Tell me about it," said the one who had been patiently waiting to be
told.

"It begins back a piece, but I'll brief it for you. I suppose you've
been told how Grierson came here a few years ago with a wad of money and
a large and healthy ambition to own the town?"

Griswold nodded.

"Well, he has come pretty close to making a go of it. What he doesn't
own or control wouldn't make much of a town by itself. A year ago he
tried to get a finger into my little pie. He wanted to reorganize the
Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and offered to furnish the additional
capital and take fifty-one per cent of the reorganization stock.
Naturally, I couldn't see it. My father had left the plant as an
undivided legacy to my mother, my sister, and myself; and while we
haven't been getting rich out of it, we've managed to hold our own and
to grow a little. Don't let me bore you."

"You couldn't do that if you should try. Go on."

"This spring Wahaska began to feel the boost of the big crop year.
Everything was on the upward slant, and I thought we ought to move along
with other people. Before the snow was off the ground we had hit the
capacity limit in the old plant and the only thing to do was to enlarge.
I borrowed the money at Grierson's bank and did it."

"And you can't make the enlarged plant pay?"

"Oh, yes, it's paying very well, indeed; we're earning dividends, all
right. But in the money matter I simply played the fool and let Grierson
cinch me. As I've told you more than once, I'm an engineer and no
finance shark. My borrow at the bank was one hundred thousand dollars,
and there was a verbal understanding that it was to be repaid out of the
surplus earnings, piecemeal. I told Grierson that I should need a year
or more, and he didn't object."

"This was all in conversation?" said Griswold: "no writing?"

Raymer made a wry face.

"Don't rub it in. I'm admitting that I was all the different kinds of a
fool. There was no definite time limit mentioned. I was to give my
personal notes and put up the family stock as collateral. A day or two
later, when I went around to close the deal, the trap was standing wide
open for me and a baby might have seen it. Grierson said he had proposed
the loan to his directors, and that they had kicked on taking the stock
as collateral. He said they wanted a mortgage on the plant."

Griswold nodded. "Which brought on more talk," he suggested.

"Which brought on a good bit more talk. Really, it didn't make any
intrinsic difference. Stock collateral or property collateral, the bank
would have us by the throat until the debt should be paid. But you know
how women are: my mother would about as soon sign her own death warrant
as to put her name on a mortgage; so there we were--blocked. Grierson
was as smooth as oil; said he wanted to help me out, and was willing to
stretch his authority to do it. Then he sprung the trap."

"Having got you just where he wanted you," put in the listener.

"Yes; having got me down. The new proposition was apparently a mere
modification of the first one. I was an accredited customer of the bank,
like other business men of the town, and as such I could ask for an
extension of credit on accommodation paper, and Grierson, as president,
was at liberty to grant it if he saw fit. He offered to take my paper
without an endorser if I would cover his personal risk with my stock
collateral, assigning it, not to the bank, but to him. I fell for it
like a woolly sheep. The stock transfers were made, and I signed a note
for one hundred thousand dollars, due in sixty days; Grierson explaining
that two months was the bank's usual limit on accommodation paper--which
is true enough--but giving me to understand that a renewal and an
extension of time would be merely a matter of routine."

Griswold was shaking his head sympathetically. "I can guess the rest,"
he said. "Grierson is preparing to swallow you whole."

"He has as good as done it," was the dejected reply. "The note falls due
to-morrow; and, as I happened to be uptown this afternoon, I thought I
would drop in and pay the discount and renew the paper. To tell the
truth, I'd been getting more nervous the more I thought of it; and I
didn't dare let it go to the final moment. Grierson shot me through the
heart. He gave me a cock-and-bull story about some bank examiner's
protest, and told me I must be prepared to take up the paper to-morrow.
He knew perfectly well that he had me by the throat. I had checked out
every dollar of the loan, and a good bit of our own balance in addition,
paying the building and material bills."

"Of course you reminded him of his agreement?"

"Sure; and he sawed me off short: said that any business man borrowing
money on accommodation paper knew that it was likely to be called in on
the expiration date; that an extension is really a new transaction,
which the bank is at liberty to refuse to enter. Oh, he gave it to me
cold and clammy, sitting back in his big chair and staring up at me
through the smoke of a fat black cigar while he did it!"

"And then?" prompted Griswold.

"Then I remembered the mother and sister, Kenneth, and did what I would
have died rather than do for myself--I begged like a dog. But I might as
well have gone outside and butted my head against the brick wall of the
bank."

Griswold forgot his own real, though possibly indirect, obligation to
Jasper Grierson.

"That is where you made a mistake: you should have told him to go to
hell with his money!" was his acrid comment. And then: "How near can you
come to lifting this note to-morrow, Raymer?"

"'Near' isn't the word. Possibly I might sweep the corners and gather up
twelve or fifteen thousand dollars."

"That will do," said the querist, shortly. "Make it ten thousand, and
I'll contribute the remaining ninety."

Raymer sprang out of his chair as if its padded arms had been suddenly
turned into high-voltage electrodes.

"You will?--you'll do that for me, Griswold?" he said, with a queer
stridency in his voice that made the word-craftsman, always on the watch
for apt similes, think of a choked chicken. But Raymer was swallowing
hard and trying to go on. "By Jove--it's the most generous thing I ever
heard of!--but I can't let you do it. I haven't a thing in the world to
offer you but the stock, and that may not be worth the paper it is
printed on if Jasper Grierson has made up his mind to break me."

"Sit down again and let us thresh it out," said Griswold. "How much of a
Socialist are you, Raymer?"

The young ironmaster sat down, gasping a little at the sudden wrenching
aside of the subject.

"Why, I don't know; enough to want every man to have a square deal, I
guess."

"Including the men in your shops?"

"Putting them first," was the prompt correction. "It was my father's
policy, and it has been mine. We have never had any labor troubles."

"You pay fair wages?"

"We do better than that. A year ago, I introduced a modified plan of
profit-sharing."

Griswold's eyes were lighting up with the altruistic fires.

"Once in awhile, Raymer, a thing happens so fortuitously as to fairly
compel a belief in the higher powers that our fathers included in the
word 'Providence'," he said, almost solemnly. "You have described
exactly an industrial situation which seems to me to offer a solution of
the whole vexed question of master and man, and to be a seed-sowing
which is bound to be followed by an abundant and most humanizing
harvest. Ever since I began to study, even in a haphazard way, the
social system under which we sweat and groan, I've wanted in on a job
like yours. I still want in. Will you take me as a silent partner,
Raymer? I'm not making it a condition, mind you: come here any time
after ten o'clock to-morrow, and you'll find the money waiting for you.
But I do hope you won't turn me down."

Raymer was gripping the arms of his chair again, but this time they were
not unpleasantly electrified.

"If I had only myself to consider, I shouldn't keep you waiting a
second," he returned, heartily. "But it may take a little time to
persuade my mother and sister. If they could only know you"--then,
forgetting the crossed wire and his late overhearings--"why can't you
come out to dinner with me to-night?"

"For the only reason that would make me refuse; I have a previous
bidding. But I'll be glad to go some other day. There is no hurry about
this business matter; take all the time you need--after you have made
Mr. Grierson take his claws out of you."

Raymer had filled the borrowed pipe again and was pulling at it
reflectively. "About this partnership; what would be your notion?" he
asked.

"The simplest way is always the best. Increase your capital stock and
let me in for as much as my ninety thousand dollars will buy," said the
easily satisfied investor. "We'll let it go at that until you've had
time to think it over, and talk it over with your mother and sister."

The iron-founder got up and reached for his hat.

"You are certainly the friend in need, Griswold, if ever there was one,"
he said, gripping the hand of leave-taking as if he would crack the
bones in it. "But there is one thing I'm going to ask you, and you
mustn't take offense: this ninety thousand; could you afford to lose
it?--or is it your whole stake in the game?"

Griswold's smile was the ironmaster's assurance that he had not
offended.

"It is practically my entire stake--and I can very well afford to lose
it in the way I have indicated. You may call that a paradox, if you
like, but both halves of it are true."

"Then there is one other thing you ought to know, and I'm going to tell
it now," Raymer went on. "We do a general foundry and machine business,
but a good fifty per cent of our profit comes from the Wahaska &
Pineboro Railroad repair work, which we have had ever since the road was
opened."

Griswold was smiling again. "Why should I know that, particularly?" he
asked.

"Because it is rumored that Jasper Grierson has been quietly absorbing
the stock and bonds of the road, and if he means to remove me from the
map----"

"I see," was the reply. "In that case you'll need a partner even worse
than you do now. You can't scare me off that way. Shall I look for you
at ten to-morrow?"

"At ten to the minute," said the rescued plunger; and he went
down-stairs so full of mingled thankfulness and triumph that he mistook
Doctor Farnham's horse for his own at the hitching-post two doors away,
and was about to get into the doctor's buggy before he discovered his
mistake.




XXV

THE BRIDGE OF JEHENNAM


Doctor Farnham had been about to make his daily call upon old Mrs.
Breda, two doors up the street from the Widow Holcomb's, when he had
climbed the stair of literary aspirations to give the convalescent his
dinner bidding.

Griswold had accepted gratefully on the spur of the moment; and it was
not until after Raymer had come and gone that sober second thought began
to point out the risk he would run in meeting Charlotte Farnham face to
face under conditions which would give her the best conceivable
opportunity to recognize him, if recognition were possible.

The more he thought of it, the more he regretted his haste in consenting
to incur the risk. Reflectively weighing the chances for and against, he
made sure that in characterizing the young woman whose life-thread had
been so strangely tangled with his own he had not overrated her
intelligence. Giving heredity its due, with the keen-witted little
physician for her father she could scarcely fail to measure up to the
standard of those whose gifts are apperceptive. For many days she had
had ample opportunity to familiarize herself with all the little
identifying individualities of the deck-hand: reasoning from cause to
effect, it might be assumed that her crushing responsibility had driven
her to make use of it. Having recognized him once, under conditions far
less favorable than those he was about to hazard, was it not more than
probable that she would be able to do it again?

Griswold took a final look at himself in his dressing-case mirror before
going to keep his evening appointment at the doctor's down-town office.
It was comfortably reassuring. So far as he could determine, there was
little in the clean-shaven, square-shouldered, correctly garmented young
fellow who faced him in the mirror to suggest either the bearded outcast
of New Orleans or the unkempt and toil-soddened roustabout of the _Belle
Julie_. If only she had not made him speak to her: he had a sharp
conviction that the greatest of all the hazards lay in the chance that
she might remember his voice.

He found the cheery little doctor waiting for him when he had walked the
few squares to the Main Street office.

"I was beginning to be afraid you were going to be fashionably late,"
said the potential host; and then, with a humorous glance for the
correct garmenting: "Regalia, heh? Hasn't Miss Grierson told you that
Wahaska is still hopelessly unable to live up to the dress-coat and
standing collar? I'm sure she must have. But never mind; climb into the
buggy and we'll let old Bucephalus take us around to see if the
neighbors have brought in anything good to eat."

The drive was a short one, and it ended at the gate through which
Matthew Broffin had preceded by only a few hours the man whose eventual
appearance at the Farnham home he had so confidently predicted. As at
many another odd moment when there had been nothing better to do,
Broffin was once more shadowing the house in which, first or last, he
expected to trap his amateur MacHeath; and when the buggy was halted at
the carriage step he was near enough to mark and recognize the doctor's
companion.

"Not this time," he muttered, sourly, when the two had passed together
up the gravelled path and the host was fitting his latch-key to the
front door. "It's only the sick man that writes books. I wonder what
sort of a book he thinks he's going to write in this inforgotten,
turkey-trodden, come-along village of the Reuben yaps!"

Griswold, waiting on the porch while Doctor Farnham fitted his key, had
a nerve-tingling shiver of apprehension when the latch yielded with a
click and he found himself under the hall lantern formally shaking hands
with the statuesque young woman of the many imaginings. It gave him a
curious thrill of mingled terror and joy to find her absolutely
unchanged. Having, for his own part, lived through so many experiences
since that final glimpse of her standing on the saloon-deck guards of
the _Belle Julie_ at St. Louis, the distance in time seemed almost
immeasurable.

"You are very welcome to Home Nook, Mr. Griswold; we have been hearing
about you for many weeks," she was saying when he had relinquished the
firm hand and was hanging his coat and hat on the hall-rack. And then,
with a half-embarrassed laugh: "I am afraid we are dreadful gossips; all
Wahaska has been talking about you, you know, and wondering how it came
to acquire you."

"It hasn't acquired anything very valuable," was the guest's modest
disclaimer, its readiness arising out of a grateful easing of strains
now that the actual face-to-face ordeal had safely passed its
introductory stage. "And you mustn't say a word against your charming
little city, Miss Farnham," he went on. "It is the friendliest, most
hospitable----"

The doctor's daughter was interrupting with an enthusiastic show of
applause.

"Come on out to dinner, both of you," she urged; and then to Griswold:
"I want you to say all those nice things to Aunt Fanny, and as many more
as you can think of. She has never admitted for a single moment that
Wahaska can be compared with any one of a dozen New Hampshire villages
she could name."

In the progress to the cozy, home-like dining-room, Griswold found
himself at once in an atmosphere of genuine comfort and refinement; the
refinement which speaks of generations of good breeding chastened and
purified by the limitations of a slender purse; in the present instance
the purse of the good little doctor whose attempted charity in the
matter of his own fee was fresh in the mind of the castaway. Griswold
had the writing craftsman's ingathering eye: he saw that the furnishings
were frugally well-worn, that the sitting-room rug was country-woven,
and that the spotless dining-room napery was soft and pliable with age.
The contrast between the Farnham home and the ornate mansion three
streets away on the lake front was strikingly apparent; as cleanly
marked as that between Margery Grierson and the sweetly serene and
conventional young person who was introducing him to her aunt across the
small oval dining-table.

So far, all was going well. Griswold, with a pleasant word for the frail
little woman opposite and a retort in kind now and then for the doctor's
raillery, still had time to be narrowly observant of the signs and
omens. But a little later, when the Swedish maid was serving the meat
course, he had his first warning shock. Through the bouillon and the
fish the doctor had borne the brunt of the table-talk, joking the guest
on his humiliating descent from Mereside and the luxuries to a country
doctor's table, and laughing at Griswold's half-hearted attempts to
decry the luxuries. What word or phrase or trick of speech it was that
served to stir the sleeping memories, Griswold could not guess; but it
became suddenly apparent that the memories were stirring. In the midst
of a half-uttered direction to the serving-maid, Miss Farnham stopped
abruptly, and Griswold could feel her gaze, wide-eyed and
half-terrified, seemingly fixed upon him.

It was all over in the turning of a leaf: there had been no break in
the doctor's genial raillery, and the breathless little pause at the
other end of the table was only momentary. But Griswold fancied that
there was a subtle change in the daughter's attitude toward him dating
from the moment of interruptions.

Farther along, he decided that the change was in himself, and was merely
the outcropping of the morbid vein which persists, with more or less
continuity, in all the temperamental workings of the human mind. When
the dinner was over and there was an adjournment to the sitting-room,
little Miss Gilman presently found her reading-glasses and a book; and
the doctor, in the act of filling two long-stemmed pipes for his guest
and himself, was called away professionally. Griswold saw himself
confronting the really crucial stage of the ordeal, and prudence was
warning him that it would be safer to make his adieux and to go with his
host. It was partly Miss Farnham's protest, but more his own
determination to prove the bridge of peril to the uttermost, that made
him stay.

Miss Gilman, least obtrusive of chaperones, had been peacefully napping
for a good half-hour in her low rocker under the reading-lamp, and the
pictures in a thick quarto of Gulf Coast views had pleasantly filled the
interval for the two who were awake, when Griswold finally assured
himself that the danger of recognition was a danger past. As a mental
analyst he knew that the opening of each fresh door in the house of
present familiarity was automatically closing other doors opening upon
the past; and it came to him with a little flush of the seer's
exaltation that once again his prefigurings were finding their exact
fulfilment. In a spirit of artistic daring he yielded to a sudden
impulse, as one crossing the flimsiest of bridges may run and leap to
prove that his theory of safety-stresses is a sufficient guarantee of
his own immunity.

"You were speaking of first impressions of places," he said, while they
were still turning the leaves of the picture-book. "Are you a believer
in the absolute correctness of first impressions?"

"I don't know," was the thoughtful reply; but its after-word was more
definite: "As to places, I'm not sure that the first impression always
persists; in a few instances I am quite certain it hasn't. I didn't like
the Gulf Coast at all, at first; it seemed so foreign and different and
unhomelike. As to people, however----"

She paused, and Griswold entered the breach hardily.

"As to people, you are less easily converted from the original
prejudice--or prepossession. So am I. I have learned to place the utmost
confidence in the first impression. In my own case it is invariably
correct, and if for any reason whatever I suffer any later
characterization to take its place, I am always the loser."

She was regarding him curiously over the big book which still lay open
between them.

"Is that a part of the writing gift?" she asked.

"No, not specially; most people have it in some more or less workable
quantity, though for many it expresses itself only in a vague attraction
or repulsion."

"I've had that feeling," she answered quickly.

"I know," he affirmed. "There have been times when, with every
reasonable fibre in you urging you to believe the evil, a still stronger
impulse has made you believe in the good."

"How can you know that?" she asked; and again he saw in the expressive
eyes the flying signals of indeterminate perplexity and apprehension.

Resolutely he pressed the hazardous experiment to its logical
conclusion. Once for all, he must know if this young woman with the
sympathetic voice and the goddess-like pose could, even under
suggestion, be led to link up the past with the present.

"It is my trade to know," he said quietly, closing the book of views and
laying it aside. "There have been moments in your life when you would
have given much to be able to decide a question of duty or expediency
entirely irrespective of your impressions. Isn't that so?"

For one flitting instant he thought he had gone too far. In the hardy
determination to win all or lose all, he had been holding her eyes
steadily, as the sure mirror in which he should be able to read his
sentence, of acquittal or of condemnation. This time there was no
mistaking the sudden widening of the pupils to betray the equally sudden
awakening of womanly terror.

"Don't be afraid," he began, and he had come thus far on the road to
open confession when he saw that she was not looking at him; she was
looking past him toward one of the windows giving upon the porch. "What
is it?" he demanded, turning to look with her.

"It was a man--he was looking in at the window!" she returned in low
tones. "I thought I saw him once before; but this time I am certain!"

Griswold sprang from his chair and a moment later was letting himself
out noiselessly through the hall door. There was nothing stirring on the
porch. The windless night was starlit and crystal clear, and the silence
was profound. As soon as the glare of the house lights was out of his
eyes, Griswold made a quick circuit of the porch. Not satisfied with
this, he widened the circle to take in the front yard, realizing as he
did it that a dozen men might easily play hide-and-seek with a single
searcher in the shrubbery. He was still groping among the bushes, and
Miss Farnham had come to the front door, when the doctor's buggy
appeared under the street lights and was halted at the home
hitching-post.

"Hello, Mr. Griswold; is that you?" called the cheery one, when he saw a
bareheaded man beating the covers in his front yard.

Griswold met his host at the gate and walked up the path with him.

"Miss Charlotte thought she saw some one at one of the front windows,"
he explained; and a moment afterward the daughter was telling it for
herself.

"I saw him twice," she insisted; "once while we were at dinner, and
again just now. The first time I thought I might be mistaken, but this
time----"

Griswold was laughing silently and inwardly deriding his gifts when,
under cover of the doctor's return, he made decent acknowledgments for
benefits bestowed and took his departure. On the pleasant summer-night
walk to upper Shawnee Street he was congratulating himself upon the now
quite complete fulfilment of the wishing prophecy. Miss Farnham was
going to prove to be all that the most critical maker of studies from
life could ask in a model; a supremely perfect original for the
character of _Fidelia_ in the book. Moreover, she would be his
touchstone for the truths and verities; even as Margery Grierson might,
if she were forgiving enough to let by-gones be by-gones, hold the
mirror up to Nature and the pure humanities. Moreover, again, whatever
slight danger there might have been in a possibility of recognition was
a danger outlived. If the first meeting had not stirred the sleeping
memories in Miss Farnham, subsequent ones would serve only to widen the
gulf between forgetfulness and recollection by just such distances as
the Wahaskan Griswold should traverse in leaving behind him the
deck-hand of the _Belle Julie_.

Thus the complacent, musing upper thought in the mind and on the lips of
the proletary as he wended his way through the quiet and well-nigh
deserted streets to the older part of the town. How much it might have
been modified if he had known that the man whose face Miss Farnham had
seen at the window was silently tracking him through the tree-shadowed
streets is a matter for conjecture. Also, it is to be presumed that
much, if not all, of the complacency would have vanished if he could
have been an unseen listener in the Farnham sitting-room, dating from
the time when little Miss Gilman pattered off to bed, leaving the father
and daughter sitting together under the reading-lamp.

At first their talk was entirely of the window apparition; the daughter
insisting upon its reality, and the father trying to push it over into
the limbo of things imagined. Driven finally to give all the reasons for
her belief in the realities, Charlotte related the incident of the
afternoon.

"You may remember that I told you over the 'phone that I had a caller
this afternoon," she began.

The doctor did remember it, and said so.

"You can imagine how frightened I was when I tell you that it was a
man--a detective from New Orleans who has, or at least who says he has,
been travelling thousands of miles to find me."

Doctor Bertie was tickling his bearded chin thoughtfully. "He should
have come to me first," he said, frowning a little at the invasion of
his home. "It was about that bank robbery, I suppose?"

"Yes; he thought I could tell him the man's real name. It seems that
they have no identity clew to work upon. I knew at the time that
'Gavitt' was an assumed name; the man as good as told me so, you
remember. This Mr. Broffin wouldn't believe that I couldn't tell him the
real name, and along toward the last he grew quite angry and
threatening. He insisted upon it that I knew the robber--that I had
known him before the crime was committed; and he intimated pretty
broadly that I am still in communication with him. Of course, it is all
very absurd; but it is also very annoying to think that somebody is
spying upon you all the time. I didn't want to speak of it before Mr.
Griswold; but it was this detective who came twice to look in at our
windows this evening."

By this time the good Doctor Bertie had become the indignant Doctor
Bertie.

"We can't have that at all!" he said incisively. "You did your whole
duty in that bank matter; and it was a good deal more than most young
women would have done. I'm not going to have you persecuted and
harassed--not one minute! Where is this fellow stopping?"

The daughter shook her head. "I don't know. He gave me his card, but it
has the New Orleans address only."

"Give it to me and I'll look him up to-morrow."

The card changed hands, and for a few minutes neither of them spoke.
Then the daughter began again.

"I've had another shock this evening, too," she said, speaking this time
in low tones and with eyes downcast. "This Mr. Griswold: tell me all you
know about him, father."

"I don't know much of anything more than--thanks to Miss Grierson--all
the town knows. They brought him here sick--she and her father--as I
told you. That was some little time before you came home; perhaps while
you were still on the way up the river. They didn't know who he was; and
oddly enough, there wasn't anything in his clothes or luggage to tell
them. I know that to be a fact because, at Miss Margery's request, I
helped her overhaul his belongings. Afterward, in a talk with him, I
learned that he had been robbed on the train; or at least, that was the
supposition. He said there was money in one of the suit-cases, and we
didn't find any."

"He is an author, they say; I don't seem to recall his name in any of my
reading."

The doctor laughed good-naturedly. "Perhaps he is only one of the
would-be's; I don't think it has got much farther than the hankering, as
yet. There was a book manuscript in one of his valises, and I read a
little of it. It was pretty poor stuff, I thought. But what was your
other shock?"

"It was at the dinner-table; when you were joking him about the
come-down from Mereside to us. Something he said--I couldn't remember, a
minute afterward, just what it was--was spoken exactly in the voice, and
with the same little trick of conciseness, as something that was said to
me that never-to-be-forgotten evening on the saloon-deck promenade of
the _Belle Julie_ ... said by the man whose name was _not_ John Wesley
Gavitt."

"Oh, my dear girl!" was the father's instant protest; "that couldn't be,
you know!"

"I know it couldn't," was the fair-minded rejoinder. "And I kept on
telling myself so all the evening. I had to, father; for that once at
the table wasn't the only time. Every few minutes he would say something
to bring back that haunting half-recollection. It is only a coincidence,
of course; it couldn't be anything else. But when he went away I
couldn't help hoping that he would do one of two things; stay away
altogether, or come often enough so that--oh, it's all nonsense, all of
it: what difference can it make, to him or to me!"

"No difference at all." Doctor Bertie's membership was in that large
confraternity of fathers whose blindness on the side of sentiment where
their own daughters are concerned has become proverbial.

It was after he had taken up the latest copy of the _Lancet_ and was
beginning to bury himself in the editorials, that Charlotte reopened the
threshed-out subject with a belated query.

"Did I understand you to say that he had lost all of his money?"

"Yes; practically all of it," said the father, without losing his hold
upon what a certain great London physician was saying through the
columns of the English medical journal.

But afterward, long after Charlotte had gone up to her room, he
remembered, with a curious little start of half-awakened puzzlement,
that some one, no longer ago than the yesterday, had told him that young
Griswold was rich--or if not rich, at least "well-fixed."




XXVI

PITFALLS


What arguments Edward Raymer used to convince his mother and sister that
Griswold as a participating partner was better than Jasper Grierson
figuring as the man in possession, the Wahaskan gossips were unable to
guess. But the fact remained. Within a week from the day when Raymer,
angrily jubilant, had rescued his imperilled stock, it was pretty
generally known that Kenneth Griswold, the writing-man, had become the
fourth member in the close corporation of the Raymer Foundry and Machine
Works, and Wahaska was eagerly earning Broffin's contemptuous
characterization of it by discussing the business affair in all its
possible and probable bearings upon the Raymers, the Griersons, and the
newly elected directory of the Pineboro Railroad.

Of all this buzzing of the gossip bees the person most acutely concerned
heard little or nothing. Griswold's intimation to Raymer that he wished
only to be a silent partner had been made in good faith; and beyond a
few purely perfunctory visits to the plant across the railroad tracks,
made because Raymer had insisted that he go over the books and learn for
himself the exact condition of the business into which he had put his
money, Griswold took no more than an advisory part in the industrial
activities. To Raymer's urgings there was always the same answer: the
writing fit was on him and he had no time.

Taken for what it was worth, the writing excuse was sufficiently valid.
In the fallow period of the slow convalescence the imaginative field had
grown fertile for the plough, and a new book, borrowing nothing from the
old save the sociological background, was already under way. Digging
deeply in the inspirational field, Griswold speedily became oblivious to
most of his encompassments; to all of them, indeed, save those which
bore directly upon the beloved task. Among these, he counted the
frequent afternoon visits to Mereside, and the scarcely less frequent
evenings spent in the Farnham home. Again in harmony with the later
prefigurings, he was using each of the young women as a foil for the
other in the outworking of his plot; and he welcomed it as a sign of
growth that the story in its new form was acquiring verisimilitude and
becoming gratefully, and at times, he persuaded himself, quite vividly,
human.

When he got well into the swing of it and was turning out a chapter
every three or four days, he fell easily into the habit of slipping the
last instalment into his pocket when he went to Mereside. Margery
Grierson was adding generously to his immense obligation to her; hoping
only to find a friendly listener, he found a helpful collaborator. More
than once, when his own imagination was at fault, she was able to open
new vistas in the humanities for him, apparently drawing upon a reserve
of intuitive conclusions compared with which his own hard-bought store
of experimental knowledge was almost puerile.

"I wish you would tell me the secret of your marvellous cleverness!" he
exclaimed, on one of the June afternoons when he had been reading to her
in the cool half-shadows of the Mereside library. "You are only a child
in years: how can you know with such miraculous certainty what other
people would think and do under conditions about which you can't
possibly know anything experimentally? It's beyond me!"

"There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was
her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode
in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode
forgotten--or at least forgiven. "You know men--a little; but when it
comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at
you, your two heroines--with neither of whom you are really in
love--would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually."

"That's true; I can see it clearly enough when you point it out," he
admitted, putting his craftsman pride underfoot, as he was always
obliged to do in these talks with her. "I should be discouraged if you
didn't keep on telling me that the story, as a story, is good."

"It _is_ good; it is a big story," she asserted, with kindling
enthusiasm. "The plot, so far as you have gone with it, is fine; and
that is where you leave me away behind. I don't see how you could ever
think it out. And the character-drawing is fine, too, some of it. Your
_Fleming_ is as far beyond me as your _Fidelia_ seems to be beyond you."

"_Fleming_ is human in every drop of his blood," he boasted.

"I don't doubt it for a moment; all the little ear-marks of humanity are
there, and I know in reason that he must be a type. But I have never met
the man himself; and I am sure I shall be scared silly if I ever do meet
him. Think of being shut up in any little corner of the world with a man
who has convinced himself that he can commit any crime in the calendar
so long as he believes the particular one he chooses isn't a crime!"

"Crime, so-called, is like everything else in this world; a thing to be
defined strictly by the motive and the point of view," said Griswold,
mounting his hobby with joyous alacrity.

"I know; that is what you say"--this with an adorable uptilt of the
pretty chin and a flash of the dark eyes which an instant before had
been slumbrous wells of studious abstraction. "But your _Fleming_ is
going to prove the contrary; it may not be what you want him to do, but
it will be what he will insist upon doing before you get through with
him. You have already indicated it in the story, unconsciously, perhaps.
When _Fidelia_ surprises him, _Fleming_ is almost ready to kill her;
not in defense of the principle he has set up, but to save his own
miserable life."

"That is a part of his humanity," insisted the craftsman stubbornly.
"You don't know _Fleming_ yet. Have you ever met _Fidelia_?"

"Not as you have drawn her--no. She is too unutterably fine. If she had
a single shred of humanity about her, I should suspect you of meaning to
fall in love with her, farther along--to the humiliation and despair of
poor _Joan_, who, as you say, is a mere daughter of men."

"But how about _Joan_?" he fretted. "Is she out of drawing, too?"

"Yes; you are distorting her the other way--making her too inhumanly
worldly and insincere." Then, with an abruptness that was like a slap in
the face: "If you didn't spend so many evenings at Doctor Bertie's, you
would get both _Fidelia_ and _Joan_ in better drawing."

He flushed and drew himself up, with the stabbed _amour propre_
prompting him to make some stinging retort contrasting the wells of
truth with the brackish waters of sheer worldliness. Then he saw how
inadequate it would be; how utterly impossible it was to meet this
charmingly vindictive young person upon any grounds save those of her
own choosing.

"That is the first really unkind thing I have ever heard you say," was
the mild reproach which was all that the reactionary second thought
would sanction.

"Unkind to whom?--to you, or to Miss Farnham?"

"Ask yourself," he countered weakly; and she laughed at him.

"There is another of your failings, Kenneth. You haven't always the
courage of your convictions. What you are thinking is that I am a
spiteful little cat. Why don't you say it out loud, like a man?"

"Because I'm not thinking it," he denied, adding: "But I do think you
are a little inclined to be unfair to Miss Charlotte."

"Am I? Let us see if I am. I accuse her of nothing but a slavish
devotion to custom and the conventions. What did she say when you read
her the chapter before this one: where _Fidelia_ goes down to the
dining-room at midnight and finds _Fleming_ breaking into the
silver-safe where the money is hidden?"

"I'm not reading the story to her," he admitted, and again she laughed.

"But you do talk it over with her; you couldn't help doing that," she
persisted.

"Sometimes," he allowed.

"Well, what did she say when you came to that part where _Fidelia_ makes
_Fleming_ sit down while she tries to convince him that house-breaking
is a crime. You don't dare tell me what she said."

Griswold did it, with a firm convincement that he was thereby breaking a
sacred confidence. But the alluring lips and eyes were irresistible when
he was fairly within their influence.

"I merely suggested the scene as something that might be done," he
explained. "She did not approve of it. Her objection was that the
_Fidelias_ in real life don't do such things."

"They don't," was Miss Margery's flippant agreement. "And your letting
your _Fidelia_ do it is the one redeeming thing you have done in your
drawing of her. Just the same, with all your ingenuity you leave one
with the firm conviction that she will never, under any circumstances,
do such an unconventional thing again; never, never, never! And that is
a false note."

"Why is it?"

"Because it leaves out the common sex-factor; the one that is shared
alike by the _Fidelias_ and the _Joans_ and all the rest of us."

"And that is----"

"Just plain, every-day inconsistency--our dearest heritage from good old
Mother Eve. Being a mere man, you can't understand that, so you neglect
to put it into your women."

"But I can't let that stand," he objected. "You must allow the ideal
some little latitude. _Fidelia_ was not inconsistent, either in striving
with _Fleming_, or in betraying him."

Miss Grierson's perfect shoulders twitched in a little shrug of
impatience.

"Not that time, maybe; with _Fleming_ standing by to tell her that she
must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time--if
she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking
into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and
misquoted a couplet from Riley for him:

    "'There, little boy, don't cry;
    I have broken your doll, I know!'"

"Break some more of them if you can," he urged. "A few more casualties
won't make any difference."

"There is only the boy-doll left; and I don't like to break boy-dolls."

"_Fleming_, you mean? I give you leave. Hammer him until he bleeds
sawdust, if the spirit moves you."

Miss Grierson had been curled up like a comfortable kitten in the depths
of a great lounging chair--her favorite attitude while he was reading to
her. But now she sat up and locked her fingers over one knee.

"I said a little while ago that I'd never met _Fleming_, and I haven't.
But I like him, and I'm sorry to see him putting himself in for such a
savage hereafter. He is a good man, like other good men, with the single
difference that he thinks he isn't bound by the traditions. He believes
he can commit what the traditionary people call a crime without paying
the penalties. He can't: nobody can."

Griswold's smile was the superior smile of the writing craftsman. "That
is merely a matter of invention," he asserted. "He can escape the
penalties if he is smart enough."

"You mistake me," she interposed. "I don't mean the physical penalties;
though as to these the old saying that murder will out must have some
foundation in fact. Let that go: we'll suppose him clever enough to make
his escape and to outwit or outfight his enemies. I don't say he
couldn't do it successfully; but I do say that, with the hazards
confronting him at every turn, he will find the real criminal in him
growing and possessing him, making him think things and do things of the
utter depravity of which he has never had any doubt."

While she was speaking Griswold could feel the change she was describing
stealing over him like a nightmare, and when she stopped he passed his
hand over his eyes as one awaking from a vaguely terrifying dream.

"You mean that there is a real criminal in every man?" he questioned,
and the question seemed to say itself of its own volition.

"In every man and in every woman: how can you be a writer and not know
that? Ask yourself. You admit the existence of the good and the bad, and
ordinarily you choose the good and shudder at the bad: tell me--haven't
there been times when the most horrible crimes were possible to
you?--times when, with the littlest tipping of the balance, you could
have killed somebody? You needn't answer: I know you have looked over
that brink, because I have looked over it myself, more than once. And,
sooner or later, _Fleming_ will find himself looking over it--with all
the horrors of the penalties pushing and shoving at him to tumble him
into the gulf."

Griswold did not reply. He was gathering up the scattered pages of his
manuscript and replacing them in order. When he spoke again it was of a
matter entirely irrelevant.

"I had an odd experience the other evening," he said. "I had been dining
with the Raymers and was walking back to Shawnee Street. A little
newsboy named Johnnie Fergus turned up from somewhere at one of the
street crossings and tried to sell me a paper--at eleven o'clock at
night! I bought one and joked him about being out so late; and from that
on I couldn't get rid of him. He went all the way home with me, talking
a blue streak and acting as if he were afraid of something or somebody.
I remembered afterward that he is the boy who takes care of your boat.
Is there anything wrong with him?"

Miss Grierson had left her chair and had gone to stand at one of the
windows.

"Nothing that I know of," she said. "He is a bright boy--too bright for
his own good, I'm afraid. But I can explain--a little. Johnnie has taken
a violent fancy to you for some reason, and he has fallen into the
boyish habit of weaving all sorts of romances around you. I think he
reads too many exciting stories and tries to make you the hero of them.
He told me the other day that he was sure somebody was 'spotting' you."

Griswold looked up quickly. Miss Grierson was still facing the window,
and he was glad that she had not seen his nervous start.

"'Spotting' me?" he laughed. "Where did he get that idea?"

"How should I know? But he had made himself believe it; he even went so
far as to describe the man. Oh, I can assure you Johnnie has an
imagination; I've tested it in other ways."

"I should think so!" said the man who also had an imagination, and
shortly afterward he took his leave.

An hour later the same afternoon, Broffin, from his post of observation
on the Winnebago porch, saw the writing-man cross the street and enter a
hardware shop. Having nothing better to do, he, too, crossed the street
and, in passing, looked into the open door of Simmons & Kleifurt's. What
he saw brought him back at the end of a reflective stroll around the
public square. When he entered the shop the clerk was putting a
formidable array of weapons back into their show-case niches. Broffin
lounged up and began to handle the pistols.

"If I knew enough about guns to be able to tell 'em apart, I might buy
one," he said half-humorously. And then: "You must've been having a
mighty particular customer--to get so many of 'em out."

"It was Mr. Griswold, Mr. Ed. Raymer's new partner," said the clerk.
"And he _was_ pretty particular; wouldn't have anything but these
new-fashioned automatics. Said he wanted something that would be quick
and sure, and I guess he's got it--I sold him two of 'em."

Broffin played with the stock long enough to convince the clerk that he
was only a counter lounger with no intention of buying. "Took two of
'em, did he?--for fear one might make him sick, I reckon," he said, with
the half-humorous grin still lurking under the drooping mustaches.
"Automatic thirty-twos, eh? Well, _I_ ain't goin' to try to hold your
Mr.--Griscom, did you call him?--up none after this. He might git me."

Whereupon, having found out what he wanted to know, he lounged out again
and went back to the hotel to smoke another of the reflective cigars in
the porch chair which had come to be his by right of frequent and
long-continued occupancy.




XXVII

IN THE SHADOWS


Not counting the vague and rather pointless disturbment which had
culminated in the purchase of a pair of pistols, Griswold had left the
Mereside library considerably shaken, not in his convictions, to be
sure, but in his confidence in his own powers of imaginative analysis.
For this cause it required a longer after-dinner stay at the Farnhams'
than he had been allowing himself, to re-establish the norm of
self-assurance.

This was coming to be the net result of a better acquaintance with
Charlotte Farnham; a growth in the grace of self-containment, and in a
just appreciation of the mighty power that lies in propinquity--the
propinquity of an inspiring ideal. Miss Farnham was never enthusiastic;
that, perhaps, would be asking too much of an ideal; but what she lacked
in warmth was made up in cool sanity, backed by a moral sense that
seemed never to waver. Unerringly she placed her finger upon the human
weaknesses in his book-people, and unfalteringly she bade him reform
them.

For his _Fidelia_, as he described her, she exhibited a gentle
affection, tempered by a compassionate pity for her weaknesses and
waverings; an attitude, he fatuously told himself, forced upon her
because her own standards were so much higher than any he could
delineate or conceive. For _Joan_ there was also compassion, but it was
mildly contemptuous.

"If I did not know that you are incapable of doing such a thing, I might
wonder if you are not drawing your _Joan_ from the life, Mr. Griswold,"
she said, a little coldly, on this same evening of rehabilitations.
"Since such characters are to be found in real life, I suppose they may
have a place in a book. But you must not commit the unpardonable sin of
making your readers condone the evil in her for the sake of the good."

"May we not sometimes condone a little evil for the sake of a great
good?" he pleaded in extenuation.

Her answer was rather disconcerting.

"Life is full of just such temptations; the temptation to bargain with
expediency. We can only pray blindly to be delivered in the hour of
trial."

They were sitting together on the vine-sheltered porch, and the street
electrics with the lamplight from the sitting-room windows served merely
to temper the velvety gloom of the summer night. He would have given
much to be able to see her face, but the darkness came between.

"That opens the door to the larger question which is always asking for
its answer," he said, letting the thought that was uppermost slip into
speech. "At its very best, life is a compromise, not necessarily
between good and evil, but between the thing possible and the thing
impossible. It is not until we are strong enough to break the shacklings
of the traditions that we are free to drive the best obtainable bargain
with destiny."

As at other times, he was once more yielding to the impulse which was
always prompting him to apply the acid test to the pure gold of the
ideal. Heretofore the test had revealed no trace of earthly alloy; but
now the result filled him with vague dismay.

"So you have said many times before," she rejoined, and her voice was as
the voice of one groping in the dark. "I--I have a confession to make,
Mr. Griswold: I have held out against you, knowing all the time that you
were right; that life is full of these bitter compromises which we are
forced to accept. Please forget what I have said about your _Fidelia_
and--and your _Joan_. You are trying to make them human, and that is as
it should be."

Griswold could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses. He told
himself fiercely that he would never believe, without the convincement
of fact, that the ideal could step down from its pedestal.

"You are meaning to be kind to me now, at the expense of your
convictions, Miss Charlotte," he protested warmly.

"No," she denied gravely. "Listen, and you shall judge. Once, only a
short time ago, I was brought face to face with one of these terrible
compromises. In a single instant, and by no fault of my own, the
dreadful shears of fate were thrust into my hands, and conscience--what
I have been taught to call the Christian conscience--told me that with
them I must snip the thread of a man's life. Are you listening?"

His lips were dry and he had to moisten them before he could say: "Yes,
go on; I am listening."

"The man was a criminal and he was a fugitive from justice.
Conscience--_my_ conscience--insisted that it was my plain duty to raise
the hue and cry. For a long time I couldn't do it; and then----"

He waited until the silence had grown unbearable before he prompted her.
"And then?"

"And then chance threw us together. A new world was opened to me in
those few moments. I had thought that there could be no possible
question between simple right and wrong, but almost in his first word
the man convinced me that, whatever I might think or the world might
say, _his_ conscience had fully and freely acquitted him. And he proved
it; proved it so that I can never doubt it as long as I live. He made me
do what _my_ conscience had been telling me I ought to do--just as your
_Fleming_ makes _Fidelia_ do."

"You denounced him?" he said, and he strove desperately to make the
saying completely colorless.

"Yes."

"And he was taken?"

"He was; but he made his escape again, almost at once. He is still a
free man."

Instantly the primitive instinct of self-preservation, the instinct of
the hunted fugitive, sprang alert in the listener.

"How can you be sure of that?" he asked, and in his own ears his voice
sounded like the clang of an alarm bell.

Again a silence fell, surcharged, this one, with all the old frightful
possibilities. Once more the loathsome fever quickened the pulses of the
man at bay, and the curious needle-like prickling of the skin came to
signal the return of the homicidal fear-frenzy. The reaction to the
normal racked him like the passing of a mortal sickness when his
accusing angel said in her most matter-of-fact tone:

"I know he is free; I have it on the best possible authority. The
detectives who are searching for him have been here to see me--or, at
least, one of them has."

The hunted one laid hold of the partial reprieve with a mighty grip and
drew himself out of the reactionary whirlpool.

"To see you? Why should they trouble you?"

"On general man-hunting principles, I suppose," was the calm reply.
"Since I gave the necessary information once, they seem to think I can
give it again. It is very annoying."

"It is an outrage!" declared the listener warmly. And afterward, with
only the proper friendly emphasis: "I hope it is an annoyance past."

His companion leaned forward in her chair and cautiously parted the
leafy vine screen.

"Look across the street--under those trees at the water's edge: do you
see him?"

Griswold looked and was reasonably sure that he could make out the
shadowy figure of a man leaning against one of the trees.

"That is my shadow," she said, lowering her voice; "Mr. Matthew Broffin,
of the Colburne Detective Agency, in New Orleans. He has a foolish idea
that I am in communication with the man he is searching for, and he was
brutal enough to tell me so. What he expects to accomplish by keeping an
absurd watch upon our house and dogging everybody who comes and goes, I
can't imagine."

"You have told your father?" said Griswold, anxious to learn how far
this new alarm fire had spread.

"Certainly; and he has made his protest. But it doesn't do any good; the
man keeps on spying, as you see. But we have wandered a long way from
your book. I've been trying to prove to you that I am not fit to
criticise it."

"No; you mustn't mistake me. I haven't been coming to you for
criticism," was Griswold's rather incoherent reply; and when the talk
threatened to lapse into the commonplaces, he took his leave. Oddly
enough, as he thought, when he was unlatching the gate and had shifted
one of the newly purchased automatic pistols from his hip pocket to an
outside pocket of the light top-coat he was wearing, the shadowy figure
under the lake-shading trees had disappeared.

It was only a few minutes after the lingering dinner guest had gone when
the doctor came out on the porch, bringing his long-stemmed pipe for a
bedtime whiff in the open air.

"You are losing your beauty sleep, little girl," he said, dropping into
the chair lately occupied by the guest. "Did you find out anything more
to-night?"

The daughter did not reply at once, and when she did there was a note of
freshly summoned hardihood in her voice.

"We were both mistaken," she affirmed. "Coincidences are always likely
to be misleading. I am sorry I told you about them. He has certainly
been a present help in time of need to Edward."

"How did you reach your conclusion?" inquired the pipe smoker, upon whom
the coincidences were still actively exerting their influence.

"It came out in the talk this evening. He has been rather ridiculously
putting me upon a pedestal, trying to make me fit an ideal character in
his book, I think. To prove to him that I am only human, I told him the
story of what happened on the _Belle Julie_. And, to cap the climax, I
pointed out our friend Mr. Broffin, who was on guard again--as
usual--and told him who the house watcher was and what he wanted. It
didn't affect him any more than it would any friend of the family. He
was interested in the story as a story, and--and in its bearing upon me
as a--as a life-experience. But that was all."

"You may be right; you probably are right," was the father's comment
after a thoughtful whiff or two had intervened. "Just the same, I've
looked up the dates in my case book: if your Gavitt man, escaping from
the officers in St. Louis, had taken the first train for Wahaska, he
would have reached here at precisely the same moment that the sick Mr.
Griswold did. Also, he would have been careful to remove all the little
tags and telltales from his brand-new clothes--which was what Mr.
Griswold very evidently had done. Also, again, the amount of money which
Mr. Griswold has put into the Raymer capital stock tallies to within ten
thousand dollars of the amount your Gavitt fellow walked away with in
New Orleans. Also, number three, Mr. Griswold acted very much like a man
who had lost all he had in the world when I told him that Miss Grierson
and I had found no money in his suit-cases; and----"

"That is the weak link in your chain, isn't it?" objected the daughter.
"You remember he told me on the boat that he had lost the money?"

Again the father took counsel of the long-stemmed pipe.

"It might be," he said, after a reflective pause. "It would be, if Miss
Grierson could be safely eliminated from the equation. Unhappily, she
can't be."

"I don't care!" came from the depths of the porch rocking-chair. "If
this miserable detective arrests him and appeals to me, I shall simply
refuse to know anything about it! I wish you'd tell this man Broffin so
when you meet him again."

As before, the good little doctor had recourse to his pipe, and it was
not until his daughter got up to go in that he said gently: "One other
word, Charlie, girl: are you altogether sure that the wish isn't father
to the thought--about Griswold?"

"Don't be absurd, papa!" she said scornfully, passing swiftly behind his
chair to reach the door; and with that answer he was obliged to be
content.




XXVIII

BROKEN LINKS


It was on the second day after the pistol-buying incident in Simmons &
Kleifurt's that Broffin, wishful for solitude and a chance to think in
perspective, took to the woods.

In the moment of lost temper, when he had threatened angrily to play an
indefinite waiting game, prolonging it until his man should walk into
the trap, nothing had really been farther from his intentions. As a
matter of fact, there were the best of business reasons why he should
not waste another day in following, or attempting to follow, the cold
trail. Other cases were pressing, and his daily mail from the New
Orleans head-quarters brought urgings impatient and importunate; and on
the third day following the sleeveless interview with the doctor's
daughter he had paid his bill at the Winnebago House and had packed his
grip for the southward flight by the afternoon train.

Twenty minutes before train-time a telegram from the New Orleans office
had reopened the closed and crossed-off account of the Bayou State
Security robbery. It was a bare line in answer to his own wire advising
the office that he was about to return, but its significance was out of
all proportion to its length. "B. S. S. man is in your town. Important
letter to-day's mail," was all it said, but that was sufficient. Broffin
had promptly told the clerk of the Winnebago that he had changed his
mind, and forty-eight hours afterward he had the letter.

Like the telegram, the mail communication was significant but
inconclusive. One Patrick Sheehan, a St. Louis cab driver, dying, had
made confession to his priest. For a bribe of two hundred dollars he had
aided and abetted the escape of a criminal on a day and date
corresponding to the mid-April arrival of the steamer _Belle Julie_ at
St. Louis. Afterward he had driven the man to an up-town hotel (name not
given) and had obtained from the clerk the man's name and destination.
In his letter enclosing the confession the priest went on to say that
the penitent had evidently had a severe struggle with his conscience. A
mistaken sense of gratitude to the man who had bribed him had led him to
tear off and destroy the upper half of the card given him by the up-town
hotel clerk, and with the reminder gone he could not recall the man's
name. But the destination address, "Wahaska, Minnesota," had been
preserved, and the torn portion of the card bearing it was submitted
with the confession.

With this new clue for an incentive, Broffin had immediately put his
nose to the cold trail again. All other things apart, the torn card
conclusively proved the correctness of the obstinately maintained
hypothesis. If the robber had really chosen Wahaska for his
hiding-place, he had done so merely because it was Miss Farnham's home.
The boldness of the thing appealed instantly to a like quality in the
detective, and he was not entirely unprepared for the eye-opening shock
which came when he began to suspect that Griswold, the writing-man, was
the man he was looking for.

The premonitory symptoms of the shock had manifested themselves when he
began to note the regularity of Griswold's visits to the house in Lake
Boulevard. Then came the pistol-buying episode, closely following an
investment of money possible only to a capitalist--or a robber. Broffin
worked quickly after this, tracing Griswold's record back to its
Wahaskan beginnings and shadowing his man so faithfully that at any hour
of the day or night he could have clapped the arresting hand upon his
shoulder. Still he hesitated. Once, in his Secret Service days, he had
arrested the wrong man, and the smart of the prosecution for false
imprisonment would rankle as long as he lived.

This was why he took to the woods on the afternoon of the second day
following Griswold's pistol purchase. He felt himself growing
short-sighted from the very nearness of things. The single necessity now
was for absolute and unshakable identification. To establish this, three
witnesses, and three only, could be called upon. Of the three, two had
failed signally--Miss Farnham because she had her own reasons for
blocking the game, and President Galbraith.... That was another chapter
in the book of failure. Broffin had learned that the president was
stopping at the De Soto Inn, and he had manoeuvred to bring Mr.
Galbraith face to face with Griswold in the Grierson bank on the day
after the pistol-buying. To his astonishment and disgust the president
had shaken his head irritably, adding a rebuke. "Na, na, man; your trade
makes ye over-suspeecious. That's Mr. Griswold, the writer-man and a
friend of the Griersons. Miss Madgie was telling me about him last week.
He's no more like the robber than you are. Haven't I told ye the man was
bearded like a tyke?"

With two of the three eye-witnesses refusing to testify, there remained
only Johnson, the paying teller of the Bayou State Security. Broffin was
considering the advisability of wiring for Johnson when he passed the
last of the houses on the lakeside drive and struck into the country
road which led by cool and shaded forest windings to the resort hotel at
the head of the southern bay. If Johnson should fail--and in view of the
fact that President Galbraith had failed it was a possibility to be
reckoned with--there remained only two doubtful expedients. With Patrick
Sheehan's confession to point the way it might be possible to trace the
transformed deck-hand from his final interview with McGrath on the
_Belle Julie_ step by step to his appearance, sick and delirious, in
Wahaska twenty-four hours later. This was one of the expedients. The
other was to take the long chance by clapping the handcuffs upon
Griswold in some moment of unpreparedness. It was a well-worn trick,
and it did not always succeed in surprising the admission of guilt
necessary to make it hold good. And if it should not hold good, there
might be consequences. As we have noted, Broffin had once clapped the
handcuffs on the wrong man.

Chewing an extinct cigar and ruminating thoughtfully over his problem,
Broffin had followed the windings of the country road well into the
lake-enclosing forest when he heard the rattle of wheels and the
hoof-beats of a horse. Presently the vehicle overtook and passed him. It
was Miss Grierson's trap, drawn by the big English trap-horse, with Miss
Grierson herself holding the reins and Raymer lounging comfortably in
the spare seat.

The sight of the pair moved Broffin to speech apostrophic--when the two
were out of earshot. "You're the little lady I'd like to back into a
corner," he muttered. "What you know about this business--and wouldn't
tell, not if you was gettin' the third degree for it--would tie up all
the broken strings in a hurry. How do I know you didn't help him to get
out of St. Louis? How do I know that the whole blame sick play wasn't a
plant from start to finish?" He stopped and struck viciously at a
roadside weed with the switch he had cut. It was a new idea, an idea
with promise; and when he went on, the reflective excursion had become a
journey with a purpose. Chance had been good to him now and then in his
hard-working career: perhaps it would be good to him again. Having let
one woman put a stumbling-block in his way, perhaps it was going to
even things up by making another woman remove it.

Half an hour later Broffin had followed the huge hoof-prints of the
great English trap-horse to the driveway portal of the De Soto grounds
where they were lost on the pebbled carriage approach. Strolling on
through the grounds into the lake-fronting lobby of the Inn, he was soon
able to account for Raymer. The young iron-founder was evidently on
business bent. He was sitting in the lobby with a man whom Broffin
recognized as the master car builder of the Pineboro Railroad, and the
two were discussing mechanical details over a thick file of blue-prints
spread out on Raymer's knees. The smile under Broffin's drooping
mustaches was a grin of instant comprehension. Miss Grierson, driving
Raymer's way, had picked up the iron-founder and brought him along to
the business appointment. It was a way she had--when the candidate for
the spare seat in the trap happened to be young and good-looking.

Having placed Raymer, Broffin went in search of Miss Grierson. He found
her on the broad veranda, alone, and for the moment unoccupied. How to
make the attack so direct and so overwhelming that it could not be
withstood was the only remaining question; and Broffin had answered it
to his own satisfaction, and was advancing through an open French window
directly behind Miss Grierson's chair to put the answer into effect,
when the opportunity was snatched away. Raymer, with his roll of
blue-prints under his arm and his business with the master car builder
apparently concluded, came down the veranda and took the chair next to
Miss Grierson's.

Broffin dropped back into the writing-room alcove for which the open
French window was the outlet and sat down to bide his time, taking care
that the chair which he noiselessly placed for himself should be out of
sight from the veranda, but not out of earshot. It seemed very unlikely
that the two young people who were enjoying the Minnedaskan view would
say anything worth listening to; but the ex-harrier of moonshine-makers
was of those who discount all chances.

For a time nothing happened. The two on the veranda talked of the view,
of the coming regatta, of the latest lawn social given by the Guild of
St. John's. Broffin surmised that they were waiting for the trap to be
brought around from the hotel stables, though why there should be a
delay was not so evident. But in any event his opportunity was lost
unless he could contrive to isolate the young woman again. It was while
he was groping for the compassing means that Raymer said:

"It's a shame to make you wait this way, Miss Madge. McMurtry said he
had an appointment with Mr. Galbraith for three o'clock, and he had to
go and keep it. But he ought to be down again by this time. Don't wait
for me if you want to go back to town. I can get a lift from somebody."

"That would be nice, wouldn't it?" was the good-natured retort. "To
make you tie up your own horse in town and then to leave you stranded
away out here three miles from nowhere! I think I see myself doing such
a thing! Besides, I haven't a thing to do but to wait."

Broffin shifted the extinct cigar he was chewing from one corner of his
mouth to the other and pulled his soft hat lower over his eyes. He, too,
could wait. There was a little stir on the veranda; a rustling of silk
petticoats and the click of small heels on the hardwood floor. Broffin
could not forbear the peering peep around the sheltering window
draperies. Miss Grierson had left her seat and was pacing a slow march
up and down before Raymer's chair, apparently for Raymer's benefit. The
watcher behind the window draperies drew back quickly when she made the
turn to face his way, arguing sapiently that whatever significance their
further talk might hold would be carefully and thoughtfully neutralized
if Miss Grierson should see him. That she had not seen him became a fact
sufficiently well-assured when she sat down again and began to speak of
Griswold.

"How is the new partnership going, by this time," she asked, after the
manner of one who re-winnows the chaff of the commonplaces in the hope
of finding grain enough for the immediate need.

"So far as Griswold is concerned, you wouldn't notice that there is a
partnership," laughed the iron-founder. "I can't make him galvanize an
atom of interest in his investment. All I can get out of him is, 'Don't
bother me; I'm busy.'"

"Mr. Griswold is in a class by himself, don't you think?" was the
questioning comment.

"He is all kinds of a good fellow; that's all I know, and all I ask to
know," answered Raymer loyally.

"I believe that--now," said his companion, with the faintest possible
emphasis upon the time-word.

Broffin marked the emphasis, and the pause that preceded it, and leaned
forward to miss no word.

"Meaning that there was a time when you didn't believe it?" Raymer
asked.

"Meaning that there was a time when he had me scared half to death,"
confessed the one who seemed always to say the confidential thing as if
it were the most trivial. "Do you remember one day in the library, when
you found me looking over the files of the newspapers for the story of
the robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank in New Orleans?"

Raymer remembered it very well, and admitted it.

"That was the time when the dreadful idea was scaring me stiff," she
went on. "You remember the story, don't you? how the president--our Mr.
Galbraith here--was held up at the point of a pistol and marched to the
paying teller's window, and how the robber escaped on a river steamboat
and was recognized by somebody and was arrested at St. Louis?"

"Yes; I remember it all very clearly. Also I recollect how the second
newspaper notice told how he escaped from the officers at St. Louis.
Wasn't there something about a young woman being mixed up in it some
way?"

"There was: _she_ was the one who recognized the robber disguised as a
deck-hand on the boat."

Raymer seemed to have forgotten his impatience for a renewal of the
interview with the Pineboro Railroad master car builder.

"I don't seem to recall any mention of that in the newspapers," he said
half-doubtfully.

"The newspaper reporters didn't put two and two together, but I did,"
asserted the sharer of confidences. "There was a young woman getting a
draft cashed at the teller's window when the robbery was committed. The
bank people didn't know her, so she must have been travelling. You see
it's simple enough when you put your mind to it."

"But you haven't told me how you were scared," Raymer suggested.

"I'm coming to that. This escape we read about happened on a certain day
in April. It was the very day on which poppa met me on my way back from
Florida, and we took the eleven-thirty train north that night. You
haven't forgotten that Mr. Griswold was a passenger on that same train?"

"But, goodness gracious, Miss Margery! any number of people were
passengers on that train. You surely wouldn't----"

"Hush!" she said, and through the lace window hangings Broffin saw her
lift a warning finger. "What I am telling you, Mr. Raymer, is in the
strictest confidence; we mustn't let a breath of it get out. But that
wasn't all. Mr. Griswold was dreadfully sick, and, of course, he
couldn't tell us anything about himself. But while he was delirious he
was always muttering something about money, money; money that he had
lost and couldn't find, or money that he had found and couldn't lose.
Then when we thought he couldn't possibly get well, Doctor Bertie and I
ransacked his suit-cases for cards or letters or something that would
tell us who he was and where he came from. _There wasn't the littlest
thing!_"

"And that was when you began to suspect?" queried Raymer.

"That was when the suspicion began to torture me. I fought it; oh, you
don't know how hard I fought it! There he was, lying sick and helpless;
utterly unable to do a thing or say a word in his own defence; and yet,
if he were the robber, of course, we should have to give him up. It was
terrible!"

"I should say so," was Raymer's sympathetic comment. "How did you get it
straightened out, at last?"

"It hasn't been altogether straightened out until just lately--within
the past few days," she went on gravely. "After he began to get well, I
made him talk to me--about himself, you know. There didn't seem to be
anything to conceal. At different times he told me all about his home,
and his mother, whom he barely remembers, and the big-hearted,
open-handed father who made money so easily in his profession--he was
_the_ Griswold, the great architect, you know--that he gave it away to
anybody who wanted it--but I suppose he has told you all this?"

"No; at least, not very much of it."

Miss Grierson went on smoothly, falling sympathetically into the
reminiscent vein.

"Kenneth went to college without ever having known what it was to lack
anything in reason that money could buy. A little while after he was
graduated his father died."

"Leaving Kenneth poor, I suppose; he has intimated as much to me, once
or twice," said Raymer.

"Leaving him awfully poor. He wanted to learn to write, and for a long
time he stayed on in New York, living just any old way, and having a
dreadfully hard time of it, I imagine, though he would never say much
about that part of it. He says he was studying the under-dog, and he has
told me some of the most harrowing things he has seen and been through:
one of them had a little child in it--a baby that he found in a tenement
where the father and mother had both died of starvation ... think of it!
And he took the baby away and fed it and kept it...."

Broffin, sitting behind the window draperies, had his elbows on his
knees and his head tightly clamped between his hands. He was striving,
as the dying strive for breath, to remember. Where had he heard this
self-same story of the man who had fought some sort of a studying fight
in the back-water of the New York slums? In every detail it came back to
him like the recurring scenes of a vivid dream; but the key-notes of
time, place, and the man's identity were gone; lost beyond any power of
the groping mentality to recall them.

"That is why he thinks he is a Socialist," Miss Grierson was going on
evenly. "I've been wondering if you knew these things, and I've wanted
to tell you. I've thought it might help you to understand him better if
you knew something of what he has been through. But we were talking
about my dreadful suspicion. It persisted, you know, right along through
everything. At last, I felt that I just _must_ know, at whatever cost.
One day when we were driving, I brought him here and--and introduced him
to Mr. Galbraith. I was so scared that I could taste it--but I did it!"

Raymer laughed. "Of course, nothing came of it?"

"Nothing at all; and the reaction pretty nearly made me faint. They just
made talk, like any two freshly introduced people would, and that was
all there was of it. You'd say that was proof enough, wouldn't you?
Surely Mr. Galbraith would recognize the man who robbed him?"

"Certainly; there couldn't be any doubt of that."

"That's what I said. And then, right out of a clear sky, came another
proof that was even more convincing. Do you happen to know who the young
woman was who discovered the bank robber on the steamboat?"

"I? How should I know?"

"I didn't know but she had told you," was the demure rejoinder. "It was
Charlotte Farnham."

"What!" ejaculated Raymer. But he was not more deeply moved than was the
man behind the window curtains. If Broffin's dead cigar had not been
already reduced to shapeless inutility, Miss Grierson's cool
announcement, carrying with it the assurance that his secret was no
secret, would have settled it.

"It's so," she was adding calmly. "I found out. She and her aunt were
passengers on the _Belle Julie_; that was the boat the robber escaped
on, you remember. Doctor Bertie told me that. And she was the young
woman who was having the draft cashed in the Bayou State Security. How
do I know? Because her father bought the draft at poppa's bank, and in
the course of time it came back with the Bayou State Security's dated
paying stamp on it. See how easy it was!"

Raymer's laugh was not altogether mirthful.

"You are a witch," he said. "Is there anything that you don't know?"

"Not so very many things that I really need to know," was the mildly
boastful retort. "But you see, now, how foolish my suspicions were. Mr.
Galbraith meets Mr. Griswold just as he would any other nice young man;
and Charlotte Farnham, who recognized the robber even when he was
disguised as a deck-hand, sees Mr. Griswold pretty nearly every day."

Raymer nodded. Though he would not have admitted it under torture, the
entire matter figured somewhat as a mountain constructed out of a rather
small mole-hill to a man for whom the subtleties lay in a region
unexplored. He wondered that the clear-minded little "social climber,"
as his sister called her, had ever bothered her nimble brain about such
an abstruse and far-fetched question of identities.

"You said, a few minutes ago, that Griswold calls himself a Socialist.
That isn't quite the word. He is a sociologist."

Miss Grierson ignored the nice distinction in names.

"Socialism goes with being poor, doesn't it?" she remarked. "Since Mr.
Griswold's ship has come in, I suppose he finds it easier, and
pleasanter, to be a theoretical leveller than a practical one."

"That is another thing I have never been quite able to understand," said
the iron-founder. "You say his father left him poor: where did he get
his money?"

"Why, don't you know?" was the innocent query. And then, with a pretty
affectation of embarrassment, real or perfectly simulated: "If he hasn't
told you, I mustn't."

"Of course, I don't want to pry," said Raymer, loyal again.

"I can give you a hint, and that is all. Don't you remember 'My Lady
Jezebel,' the unsigned novel that made such a hit last summer?"

"Why, bless goodness, yes! Did he write that?"

"He has never admitted it in so many words. But I'll divide a little
secret with you. He has been reading bits of his new book to me, and
pshaw! a blind person could tell! I asked him once if he could guess
how much the author of 'My Lady Jezebel' had been paid, and he said,
with the most perfectly transparent carelessness: 'Oh, about a hundred
thousand, I suppose.'"

"Tally!" said Raymer, laughing. "Griswold has put an even ninety
thousand into my little egg-basket out at the plant. But, of course you
knew that, everybody in Wahaska knows it by this time."

"Yes; I knew it."

"I'm glad it's book money," Raymer went on. "If we should happen to go
smash, he won't feel the loss quite so fiercely. I have a friend over in
Wisconsin; he is a laboratory professor in mechanics, and he writes
books on the side. He says a book is a pure gamble. If you win, you have
that much more money to throw to the dicky-birds. If you lose, you've
merely drawn the usual blank."

Miss Grierson did not reply, and for a little while they were both
silent. Then Raymer said:

"I wonder if McMurtry doesn't think I've dropped out on him. I guess I'd
better go and see. Don't wait any longer on my motions, unless you want
to, Miss Margery."

When Raymer had gone, the opportunity which Broffin had so lately craved
was his. Miss Grierson was left alone on the big veranda, and he had
only to step out and confront her. Instead, he got up quietly and went
back through the lobby with his head down and his hands in his pockets,
and the surviving bit of the dead cigar disappeared between his strong
teeth and became a cud of chagrin. There had been a goal in sight, but
Miss Grierson had beat him to it.

And the winner of the small handicap? For the time it took Raymer to
disappear she sat perfectly still, in the attitude of one who stifles
all the other senses that the listening ear may hear and strike the note
of warning or of relief. A group of young people, returning from a
steam-launch circuit of the upper lake, came up the steps to disperse
itself with pleasant human clatterings on the veranda; but in spite of
the distractions the listening ear caught the sound for which it was
straining. With a deep breath-drawing that was almost a sob, Miss
Grierson sprang up, stole a swift confirming glance at the empty chair
behind the window hangings, and crossed the veranda to stand with one
arm around a supporting pillar. And since the battle was fought and won,
and the friendly pillar gave its stay and shelter, the velvety eyes
filled suddenly and the ripe red lips were trembling like the lips of a
frightened child.




XXIX

ALL THAT A MAN HATH


For four entire days after Margery Grierson had driven home the nail of
the elemental verities in her frank criticism of the new book, and
Charlotte Farnham had clinched it, Wahaska's public places saw nothing
of Griswold; and Mrs. Holcomb, motherly soul, was driven to expostulate
scoldingly with her second-floor front who was pushing the pen
feverishly from dawn to the small hours, and evidently--in the kindly
widow's phrase--burning the candle at both ends and in the middle.

Out of this candle-burning frenzy the toiler emerged in the afternoon of
the fifth day, a little pallid and tremulous from the overstrain, but
with a thick packet of fresh manuscript to bulge in his pocket when he
made his way, blinking at the unwonted sunlight of out-of-doors, to the
great house at the lake's edge.

Margery was waiting for him when he rang the bell: he guessed it
gratefully, and she confirmed it.

"Of course," she said, with the bewitching little grimace which could be
made to mean so much or so little. "Isn't this your afternoon? Why
shouldn't I be waiting for you?" Then, with a swiftly sympathetic
glance for the pale face and the tired eyes: "You've been overworking
again. Let's sit out here on the porch where we can have what little air
there is. There must be a storm brewing; it's positively breathless in
the house."

Griswold was glad enough to acquiesce; glad and restfully happy and
mildly intoxicated with her beauty and the loving rudeness with which
she pushed him into the easiest of the great lounging chairs and took
the sheaf of manuscript away from him, declaring that she meant to read
it herself.

"It will wear you out," he objected, fishing for the denial which would
give the precious fillip to the craftsman vanity.

The denial came promptly.

"Foolish!" she said; "as if anything you have written could make anybody
tired!" And then, with the mocking after-touch he had come to know so
well, and to look for: "Is that what you wanted me to say?"

"You are the spice of life and your name should have been Variety," he
countered feebly. "But I warn you beforehand: there is a frightful lot
of it. I have rewritten it from the beginning."

"So much the better," she affirmed. "You've been doling it out to me in
little morsels, and I've been aching to get it all at one bite." And she
began to read.

It was the first time he had had any of his own work read to him, and
the experience was a pure luxury; at once the keenest and the most
sensuous enjoyment he had ever known. Marvelling, as he was always moved
to marvel, at her bright mind and clever wit and clear insight, he was
driven to the superlatives again to find words to describe her reading.
Artistically, and as with the gifted sympathy of a born actress, she
seemed able to breathe the very atmosphere of the story. None of his
subtle nuances were lost; there was never an emphasis misplaced. Better
still, the impersonation was perfect. By turns she became himself,
_Joan_, _Fidelia_, _Fleming_, or one of the subsidiary characters,
speaking the parts, rather than reading them, with such a sure
apprehension of his meaning that he could almost fancy that she was
reading from his mind instead of following the manuscript.

When it was over; and he could not tell whether the interval should be
measured by minutes or hours; the return to the realities--the hot
afternoon, the tree-shaded veranda, the lake dimpling like a sheet of
molten metal under the sun-glare--was almost painful.

"It is wonderful--simply wonderful!" he said, drawing a deep breath; and
then, with a flush of honest confusion to drive away the work pallor:
"Of course, you know I don't mean the story; I meant your reading of it.
Hasn't any one ever told you that you have the making of a great actress
in you, Margery, girl?"

"No," she said shortly; and, dismissing that phase of the subject in the
single word: "Let's talk about the story. You have bettered it
immensely. What made you do it?"

"I don't know; some convincement that it was all wrong and out of
drawing as it stood, I suppose."

"Who gave you the convincement? Miss Farnham?"

His answer was meant to be truthful, but beauty of the intoxicating sort
is the most mordant of solvents for truth in the abstract.

"No; you did."

"But she told you something," she persisted. "Otherwise, you could never
have made _Fidelia_ all over again, as you have in this rewriting."

"Maybe she did," he admitted. "But that doesn't matter. You think I have
bettered the story, and I know I have. And I know where I got the
inspiration to do it."

She was smiling across at him, level-eyed.

"Let me pass it back to you, dear boy," she said. "You have the making
of a great novelist in you. It may take years and years, and--and I'm
afraid you'll always have to be helped; but if you can only get the
right kind of help...." She looked away, out across the lake where a
fitful breeze was turning the molten-metal dimples into laughing
wavelets. Then, with one of her sudden topic-wrenchings: "Speaking of
help, reminds me. Why didn't you tell me you had gone into the foundry
business with Edward Raymer?"

"Because it didn't occur to me that you would care to know, I guess," he
answered unsuspectingly. "As a matter of fact, I had almost forgotten
it myself."

"Was it a good investment?" she asked guilelessly.

"Yes; that is, I presume it was. I didn't think much about that part of
it."

"What did you think about?"

It was just here that he awoke to the realization that he could hardly
afford to give Jasper Grierson's daughter the real reason for the
investment. So he prevaricated, knowing well enough that he had less
than no chance in an evasive duel with her.

"Raymer had been adding to his plant, and he lacked capital," he said
guardedly. "I had the money, and it was lying idle."

"Mr. Raymer didn't ask you for help?"

"No; it was my own offer."

"But he did tell you that he was in trouble?"

"Y-yes," hesitantly.

"What kind of trouble was it, Kenneth? I have the best right in the
world to know."

Griswold straightened himself in his chair and the work-weariness became
a thing of the past. With the fairly evident fact staring him in the
face from day to day, it had never occurred to him that his friend and
business partner might also be his fellow-prisoner in the house of the
witcheries. The sudden convincement stung a little, the all-monopolizing
selfishness of the craftsman carrying easily over into the field of
sentiment. Yet it was clean friendship for Raymer, no less than for the
daughter of desire, that prompted him to say:

"You can't have a right to know anything that will distress you."

"Foolish!" she chided--and this time the epithet had lost its alluring
softness. "You may as well tell me. Mr. Raymer had borrowed money at
poppa's bank. What was the matter? Did he have to pay it back--all at
once?"

There seemed to be no further opening for evasion. "Yes; I think that
was the way of it," he answered.

Arguing wholly from the newly made discovery, or postulated discovery,
of Raymer's state and standing as an object of Miss Grierson's
solicitude, Griswold expected something in the nature of an outburst.
What he got was a transfixing glance of the passionate sort, quick with
open-eyed admiration.

"And you just tossed your money into the breach as if you had millions
of it, and by now you've almost forgotten that you did it!" she
exclaimed. "Kenneth, dear, there are times when you are so heavenly good
that I can hardly believe it. Are there any more men like you over on
your side of the world?"

At another time he might have smiled at the boyish frankness of the
question. But it was a better motive than the analyst's that prompted
his answer.

"Plenty of them, Margery, girl; too many for the good of the race. You
mustn't try to make a hero out of me. Once in a while I get a glimpse of
the real Kenneth Griswold--you are giving me one just now--and it's
sickening. For a moment I was meanly jealous; jealous of Raymer. It was
only the writing part of me, I hope, but----"

He stopped because she had suddenly turned her back on him and was
looking out over the lake again. When she spoke, she went back to the
business affair.

"When you invest money you ought to look after it," she said
magisterially. "You are a Socialist, aren't you? How do you know that
your money isn't being used to oppress somebody?"

"Oh, I do know that much," was the investor's protest. "Raymer is a good
boss--too good for the crowd he is trying to brother, I'm afraid."

"What makes you say that?"

"A word or two that he has dropped, now and then. When he branched out,
he had to increase his force accordingly. Some of the new men seem
inclined to make trouble."

Again she fell silent, and he saw the brooding look come into the dark
eyes. It was evident that something he had said had started a train of
thought--and the thoughts were not altogether pleasant ones. Analyzing
again, he fancied he could picture the inward struggle to break away
from the unpleasantnesses, and he shook hands enthusiastically with his
own gift of insight when she looked up suddenly and said: "See! the
breeze is freshening out on the water. You are fagged and tired and
needing a bracer. Let's go and do a turn on the lake in the _Clytie_."

From where he was sitting Griswold could see the trim little catboat,
resplendent in polished brass and mahogany, riding at its buoy beyond
the lawn landing-stage. He cared little for the water, but the
invitation pointed to a delightful prolongation of the basking process
which had come to be one of the chief luxuries of the Mereside
afternoons.

"I'm not much of a sailor," he began; but she cut him off.

"You'll do to pull and haul. Wait for me; I'll be ready in less time
than it would take another woman--_Fidelia_, for example--to make up her
mind what she wanted to wear."

He waited; and when she came down, a few minutes later, crisply boyish
in the nattiest of yachting costumes, he wondered how she could appear
in so many different characters, fitting each in succession and
contriving always to make the latest transformation, while it lasted,
the one in which she figured as the most enticingly adorable.

"Did you look in the glass before you came down?" he asked, standing up
to get the artistic effect of the shapely little figure backgrounded
against the dull reds of the house wall.

"Naturally," she laughed. "Why, please? Is my face dirty?"

He ignored the flippancy.

"If you did, I don't need to tell you how irresistibly dazzling you
are."

"Why shouldn't you, if you feel like it? Of course, I'd know you didn't
mean it. If you were describing me to somebody else, or in the book,
you'd say, 'Um, yes; rather fetching; pretty enough to--' But we all
like to be sugared a little now and then; and there's one thing you
must always remember: a woman's dressing-glass can't talk. Are you
ready? Open the window screen and drop the manuscript inside. It will be
safe until we come back, and the _Clytie_ might be tempted to throw cold
water on it if we should take it along. She's a wet little boat in a
sea."

This for the outsetting: light-hearted badinage, a fair summer
afternoon, a zephyrish breeze coming in tiny cat's-paws out of the
north-west, and a cloudless sky. At the landing-stage Griswold made
himself useful, paying out the sea-line of the movable mooring buoy and
hauling on the shore-line until the handsome little craft lay at their
feet. Strictly under orders he made sail on the little ship, and when
the captain had taken her place at the tiller he shoved off.

For a little time the breeze was lightly baffling, and Griswold
confessed that if he had been at the helm they would have gone
ingloriously aground. But the small person in the correct yachting
costume was an adept in boat handling, as she seemed to be in everything
else; and when the sandy bottom was fairly yellowing under the
_Clytie's_ counter, there was a quick juggling of the tiller, a deft
haul at the sheet, and the big main-sail filled slowly to the rippling
song of the little seas splitting themselves upon the catboat's sharp
cut-water.

Once clear of the shallow bay, the helmswoman laid the course up the
lake; and Griswold, luxuriously lazy now that the working strain was
off, stretched himself comfortably on the cockpit cushions which he had
rummaged out of the cuddy cabin, and asked permission to light his pipe.
The permission given and the pipe filled and lighted, he pillowed his
head in his clasped hands and a great contentment, flowing into all the
interstices and levelling all the inequalities, lapped him in its
soothing flood. When the pipe had gone out there was joy enough left in
the pure relaxation; in that and in the contemplation through
half-closed eyelids of the pretty picture made by the tiller maiden
braced in the stern-sheets, her shining hair breeze-blown and flying
free under the captivating little yachting hat, and her eyes dancing....

Under such conditions a reflective analyst might conceivably wrench the
switch aside in front of the jogging train of thought to send it down a
shaded street to the lake-fronting house framed in shrubbery; to the
house and to the serene young house-mistress who had voluntarily stepped
from her goddess pedestal to become a flesh-and-blood woman to be loved
and cherished. He knew that Charlotte Farnham's readjustment of their
relations had in no wise modified her opinion of the _Joans_, or of the
men who were weak enough or besotted enough to be taken in the nets of
beguiling.... What would she think of him if she could see him lying at
Margery Grierson's feet, frankly and joyously revelling in the
triumphantly human charm of one of the _Joans_, and wishing with all his
heart--for the time being, at least--that there were no such things in
a world of effort as the higher ideals or any shackling requirement to
live up to them?

He was still playing whimsically with the query when he was made to
realize that the murmuring rush of water under the catboat's forefoot
had changed into a series of resounding thumps; that the wind was
rising, and that the summer afternoon sky had become suddenly overcast.
The pretty tiller maiden was pushing the helm down with her foot and
hauling in briskly on the sheet when he sat up.

"What's this we're coming to?" he asked, thinking less of the changed
weather conditions than of the charming picture she made in action.

"Weather," she said shortly. "Look behind you."

He looked and saw a huge storm cloud rising out of the north-west and
spreading like a great gray dust curtain from horizon to zenith. With
the sun blotted out, a brazen light filled all the upper air, and in the
heart of the cloud fleecy masses of vapor were writhing and twisting
like formless giants in battle.

Quickly he measured the hazards. The _Clytie_ was fairly in mid-lake,
with plenty of sea room to leeward. There was an intervening island to
shut off the down-lake view, but though its forested bluffs and abrupt
headland were uncomfortably close at hand, a bit of skilful
manoeuvring would put it to windward. Beyond the island he could see
the breeze-blown smoke trail of the summer-resort hotel's steam launch
evidently making for its home port at full speed.

"There's a good bunch of wind in that cloud," he said, springing to help
his companion with the slatting main-sail. "Hadn't we better lie up
under the island and let it blow over?"

"No," she snapped. "We'll have to reef, and be quick about it. Help me!"

He helped with the reefing, and the great main-sail had been
successfully reduced to its smallest area and hoisted home again before
the trees on the western shore began to bow and churn in the precursor
blasts of the coming storm.

"It will hit us in less than a minute: how about weathering that
island?" he asked.

"We've _got_ to weather it," was the instant decision; "we can't go
around." Then, the catboat still hanging in the wind's eye: "Help me get
her over."

Together they held the shortened sail off at an angle, and slowly, very
slowly, the boat's bow fell off toward the island. Griswold was enough
of a sailor to know that it was the thing to do, but there was a
perilously narrow margin. The storm squall was already tearing across
from the western shore, blackening the water ahead of it and picking up
a small tidal wave as it came. If it should strike them before they were
ready for it, it meant one of two things: a capsize, or an instant
driving of the catboat upon the hazard of the island head.

The crisis was upon them almost as soon as its threat could be measured.
Of the two, it was the young woman who met it with skilful purpose.
While the man could only scramble, choked and half-blinded, to windward
to throw his weight on the careening gunwale, the helmswoman had pounced
upon the tiller and was standing knee-deep in the water pouring over the
submerged lee rail to pay out and steer and miss the island headland by
a shearing hand's-breadth.

The worst was over in a moment, and under the lee of the small island
there was a brief respite for pumping and bailing. The girl's black eyes
were shining with excitement and fearless daring, and Griswold would
have given much for time and leisure in which to catch and fix the
fleeting inspiration of the instant. But there was little space for the
artistic appreciation.

"Hurry!" she cried; "we'll have to take it again in a minute or two!"
and there was still a bucketing of the shipped sea to thrash about in
the cockpit when the island withdrew its friendly shelter and the
_Clytie_, going free and sailed as Griswold had never seen a catboat
sailed before, wallowed out into the smother.

For a little time there was not much to choose between drowning and
being hammered to death by the leaping plunges and alightings of the
frail cockle-shell which seemed to be blown bodily from crest to crest
of the short, high-pitched seas. The wind, heavily rain-laden, came in
furious gusts, flattening the reefed canvas until the bunt of the sail
dragged in the trough. Griswold climbed high on the weather rail,
leaning far out to help hold the balance between the heaving seas and
the pounding blasts. In the momentary lulls he had flitting glimpses of
the far-away town shore, with the storm-torn waste of waters
intervening. With the wind veering more and more to the west, it was a
fair run to the shelter of the home bay. But Margery was laying the
course far to the right, though to do it she was holding the catboat
cockpit-deep in the smother and taking the chance of a capsize with
every recurring gust. Griswold edged his way aft as far as he dared.

"Hadn't you better let her fall off a little more and run for it?" he
suggested, and he had to shout it into the pink ear nearest to him to
make himself heard above the roaring of the wind and the crashing
plunges of the boat.

She shook her head and made an impatient little gesture with her elbow
toward the storm-lashed raceway over the bows. Griswold winked the spray
out of his eyes and looked. At first he saw nothing but the wild waste
of whitecaps, but at the next attempt he made out the hotel steam
launch, half-way to the entrance of the southern bay and a little to
leeward of the _Clytie's_ course. The small steamer was evidently no
sea-boat, and with more courage than seamanship, its steersman was
driving straight for the Inn bay without regard for the direction of the
wind and the seas.

"That's Ole Halverson!" cried the tiller maiden with scorn in her voice.
"He thinks because he happens to have a steam engine he needn't look to
see which way the wind is blowing."

"She's pitching pretty badly," Griswold called back. "If he only had
sense enough to ease off a little...." Suddenly he became aware of the
finer heroism of his companion. He knew now why she had refused to take
shelter under the lee of the island, and why she was holding the catboat
down to the edge of peril to keep the windward advantage of the laboring
steamer. "Margery, girl, you're a darling!" he shouted. "Take all the
chances you want to and I'm with you, if we go to the bottom!"

She nodded complete intelligence and took in another inch of the
straining main-sheet.

"If Halverson loses his nerve they're going to need help, and need it
before the _Osprey_ can get out to them," she prophesied.

Griswold looked again, this time over the catboat's counter, and saw a
big schooner, close-reefed, hauling out from a little bay on the north
shore. The launch's plight had evidently impressed others with the
necessity of doing something. The need was sufficiently urgent. Once
again the Swedish man of machinery in charge of the craft in peril was
inching his helm up in a vain endeavor to hold the course, and the
little steamer was rolling almost funnel under. Griswold forgot that his
companion was a woman and swore rabidly.

"Look at the fool!" he yelled. "He's trying to come about! If he gets
into the trough----"

The thing was done almost as he spoke. A wilder squall than any of the
preceding ones caught the upper works of the launch and heeled her
spitefully. At the critical instant the steersman lost his head and
spun the wheel, and it was all over. With a heaving plunge and a muffled
explosion the launch was gone.

Once again Griswold was given to see the stuff Margery Grierson was made
of in the finer warp and woof of her.

"That's for us," she said calmly; and then: "Help me get another inch or
two on this sheet. We don't want to let those people on the _Osprey_ do
all of the heroic things."

Together they held the catboat down to its work, sending it ripping
through the crested waves and fighting sturdily for every foot of the
precious windward advantage. None the less, it was the big schooner,
thrashing down the wind with every square yard of its reefed canvas
drawing, which was first at the scene of disaster. Through the rain and
spume they could see the schooner's crew picking up the shipwrecked
passengers, who were clinging to life-belts, broken bulkheads, and
anything that would float. So swiftly was the rescue effected that the
rescuer had luffed and filled and was tearing on its way down the lake
again when the close-hauled _Clytie_ came up with the first of the
floating wreckage. The tiller maiden's dark eyes were shining again, but
this time their brightness was of tears.

"Oh, boy, boy!" she cried, with a little heart-broken catch in her
voice; "some of them must have gone down with her! Can you believe that
the _Osprey_ got them all?" And then, with the sweet lips trembling: "I
did my best, Kenneth; my very best: and--it wasn't--good enough!"

She was putting the catboat up into the wind, and Griswold stumbled
forward to get the broader outlook. Suddenly he called back to her.

"Port!--port your helm hard! there's a man in a life-belt--he's just out
of reach. Hold her there--steady--steady!" He had thrown himself flat,
face down, on the half-deck forward and was clutching at something in
the heaving seas. "I've got him!" he cried, and a moment later he was
working his way aft, holding the man's face out of water.

It asked for their united strength to get the gray-haired, heavy-bodied
victim of the capsize over the _Clytie's_ rail. They had to bring the
life-belt too; the old man's fingers were sunk into it with a dying grip
that could not be broken. At first Griswold was too much preoccupied and
shocked to recognize the drawn face with its hard-lined mouth and long
upper lip. When he did recognize it the gripping fear was at his
heart--the fear that makes a cruel coward of the hunted thing in all
nature.

What might have happened if he had been alone; if Margery, taking her
place at the tiller and busying herself swiftly in getting the catboat
under way again, had not been looking on; he dared not think. And that
other frightful thought he put away, fighting against it madly as a
condemned man might push the cup of hemlock from his lips. Forcibly
breaking the drowned one's hold upon the life-belt, he fell to work
energetically, resorting to the first-aid expedients for the reviving of
the drowned as he had learned them in his boyhood. Once, only, he flung
a word over his shoulder at Margery as he fought for the old man's life.
"Make for the nearest landing where we can get a doctor!" he commanded;
and then, in a passion of gratitude: "O God, I thank thee that I am not
a murderer!--he's coming back! he's breathing again!"

A little later he was able to leave off the first-aid arm-pumpings and
chest-pressings; to straighten the limp and sprawling limbs, and to dive
into the cuddy cabin, under Margery's directions, for blankets and rugs.
When all was done that could be done, and he had propped the
blanket-swathed body with the cushions so that the crash and plunge of
the pitching catboat would be minimized for the sufferer, he went aft to
sit beside the helmswoman, who was getting the final wave-leap of speed
out of the little vessel.

"He is alive?" she asked.

"Yes; and that is about all that can be said. He isn't drowned; but he
is old, and the shock has gone pretty near to snapping the thread."

"Of course, you remember him?" she said, looking away across the leaping
waters.

Griswold, with his heart on fire with generous emotions, felt the cold
hand gripping him again.

"He is the old gentleman you introduced me to at the Inn the other day:
Galbraith; is that the name?"

"Yes," she rejoined, still looking away; "that is the name."

Griswold fell silent for the time; but a little later, when the catboat
was rushing in long plunges through the entrance to the Wahaskan arm of
the lake, he said: "You are going to take him to Mereside?"

"Yes. He is a friend of poppa's. And, anyway, it's the nearest place,
and you said there was no time to lose."

There were anxious watchers on the Mereside landing-stage: the gardener,
the stable-man, Thorsen, and three or four others. When the landing was
safely made, Miss Grierson took command and issued her orders briskly.

"Four of you carry Mr. Galbraith up to the house, and you, Thorsen, put
Baldur into the two-wheeled trap and be ready to go for Doctor Farnham
when I tell you where you can find him. Johnnie Fergus, you come here
and take care of the _Clytie_; you know how to furl down and moor her."

Griswold helped the bearers lift the blanketed figure out of the
_Clytie's_ cockpit, and while he was doing it, the steel-gray eyes of
the rescued one opened slowly to fix a stony gaze upon the face of the
man who was bending over him. What the thin lips were muttering Griswold
heard, and so did one other. "So it's you, is it, ye murdering blue-eyed
deevil?" And then: "Eh, man, man, but I'm sick!"

Griswold walked with Margery at the tail of the little procession as it
wound its way up the path to the great house.

"You heard what he said?" he inquired craftily.

"Yes: he is out of his head, and no wonder," she said soberly. Then:
"You must go home and change at once; you are drenched to the skin.
Don't wait to come in. I'll take care of your manuscript."




XXX

THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES


The cyclonic summer storm had blown itself out, and the clouds were
beginning to break away in the west, when Griswold, obeying Margery's
urging to go home and change his clothes, turned his back upon Mereside
and his face toward a future of thickening doubts and unnerving
possibilities.

Once more he found himself wrestling with the keeper of the gate, the
angel of the flaming sword set to drive him forth among the outcasts.
One by one the confidently imagined safeguards were crumbling. He had
been traced to Wahaska--so much could be read between the lines of
Charlotte Farnham's story; if Margery's newsboy protege was to be
believed, he was watched and followed. And now, after having
successfully passed the ordeal of a face-to-face meeting and
hand-shaking with Andrew Galbraith, chance or destiny or the powers of
darkness had intervened, and a danger met and vanquished had been
suddenly brought to life again, armed and menacing.

Griswold had not deceived himself, nor had he allowed Margery's apparent
convincement to deceive him. The old man's mind had not been wandering
in the eye-opening moment of consciousness regained. On the contrary,
what he had failed to do under ordinary and conventional conditions had
become instantly possible when the plunge into the dark shadow had
brushed away all the artificial becloudings of the memory page. What
action he would take when he should recover was as easy to prefigure as
it was, for the present at least, a matter negligible. The dismaying
thing was that the broad earth seemed too narrow to hide in; that
invention itself became the clumsiest of blunderers when, it was given
the simple task of losing a single individual among the millions of
unrelated human atoms.

Thus the threat of the peril which might be called the physical. But
beyond this there was another, and, for a man of temperament, a still
more ominous foreshadowing of evil to come. Of some subtle, deep-seated
change in himself he had long been conscious. Again and again it had
manifested itself in those moments of craven fear and ruthless,
murderous promptings, when kindliness, gratitude, love, all the
humanizing motives, had turned suddenly to frenzied hatred, and the
primitive savage had leaped up, fiercely raging with the blood-lust.

Here, again, he suffered loss, and was conscious of it. The point of
view was changed, and still changing. Something, a thing indefinable,
but none the less real, had gone out of him. Once, in the heart of a
thick darkness of squalor and misery, he had seen a great light and the
name of it was love for his kind. But now the light was waning, and in
its room a bale-fire was beckoning. There be those, fat, well-nurtured,
and complacent souls faring ever along the main-travelled roads of life,
who need no guiding lamp and will never see the glimmer of the
bale-fires. But the breaker of traditions was of those who, having once
seen the light, must follow where it leads or violate a primal law of
being. Some vague sense of this was stirring the dying embers for the
proletary as he was climbing the hill to the street of quiet entrances;
but he pushed the saving thought aside and chose to call it fanaticism.
He had drawn the line and he would hew to it.

For a long time after he had reached his room, and had had his bath and
change, Griswold sat at his writing-table with his head in his hands,
thinking in monotonous circles. As in those other stressful moments, the
importunate devil was at his ear; now mocking him for not having left
the drowned enemy as he was; now whispering the dreadful hope that age
and the shock and the drowning might still re-erect the barrier of
safety. The eyes of the recusant grew hot and a loathsome fever ran
sluggishly through his veins when he realized the depths to which he had
descended; that he, once the brother-loving, could coldly weigh the
chance of life and death for another and be unable to find in any corner
of his heart the hope that life might prevail.

He was still sitting, miserably reflective, in the dark, when Mrs.
Holcomb came up to call him to dinner. What excuse he made he could not
remember two minutes after she had gone down. But to make a fourth with
the motherly widow and her two bank clerks at the cheerful dinner-table
was a thing beyond him. Somewhat later he heard the two young men come
upstairs, and, still further along, go down again. They were social
souls, his two fellow lodgers; kindly young fellows with boyish faces
and honest eyes: Griswold wondered if they would still look up to him
and defer to him as the older man of broader culture if they could
know....

The tiny chiming clock on his dressing-case in the adjoining bedroom had
tinkled forth its ten tapping hammer strokes when the man sitting in the
dark heard the pounding of hoofs and the rattling of buggy wheels in the
quiet street. He was absently awaking to the fact that the vehicle had
stopped at his own door when he heard voices, the widow's and another,
in the lower hall, and then a man's footsteps on the stair. To a
hard-pressed breaker of the traditions at such a moment an unannounced
visitor, coming up in the dark, could mean but one thing. Griswold
silently opened a drawer in the writing-table and groped for the mate to
the quick-firing pistol which, after the change of wet clothing, he had
put aside to dry.

The visitor came heavily upstairs, and Griswold, swinging his chair to
face the open door, saw the shadowy bulking of the man as he came
through the upper hall. When the bulk filled the doorway it was covered
by the pistol held low, and Griswold's finger was pressing the trigger.

"Asleep, old man?" said the intruder in Raymer's well-known voice.

There was a sound like a gasping sob, and another as of a drawer closing
softly. Then Griswold said: "No; I'm not asleep. Come in. Shall I light
the gas?"

"Not for me," returned the bedtime visitor, entering and groping for the
chair at the desk-end, into which, when he had placed it, he dropped
wearily. "I want to smoke," he went on. "Have you got a cigar--no, not
the pipe; I want something that I can chew on."

A cigar was found, in the drawer which had so lately furnished the
weapon, and by the flare of the match in Raymer's fingers Griswold saw a
face haggard with anxiety. In the kindlier days it had been one of his
redeeming characteristics that he could never dwell long upon his own
harassments when another's troubles were brought to him.

"What is the matter, Edward?" he asked.

"A mix-up with the labor unions. It's been brewing for some little time,
but I didn't want to worry you with it. Unless we announce a flat
increase of twenty per cent in wages to-morrow morning, and declare for
the closed shop, the men will go out on us at noon. I've seen it coming.
It began with the enlarging of the plant and the taking on of the new
men needed. We've always had the open shop, as you know, and it was all
right so long as we were too small for the unions to scrap about. But
now we get the Iron Workers' ultimatum: we can do as we please about
the profit-sharing; but the flat increase must go on the pay-rolls, and
the shop must be run as a closed shop."

If the god of mischance had chosen the moment it could not have been
more opportune for the fire-lighting of malevolence. Griswold's
swing-chair righted itself with a click, and Bainbridge's prophecy that
a hot-hearted proletary was likely to become the hardest of masters
became a prediction fulfilled.

"We'll see them in hell, first, Raymer! Isn't that the way you feel
about it?"

"Partly," allowed the smoker. "But it can hardly be disposed of that
easily, Kenneth. A good third of the men are our old standbys; men who
were in the shops under my father. Some pretty powerful influence has
been brought to bear upon them to swing them against us. I don't know
what it is, but I do know this: every second man we have hired lately
has turned out to be either a loud-mouthed agitator or a silent mixer of
trouble medicine."

"Let the causes go for the present," said Griswold shortly. "We're
talking about the men, now. The ungrateful beggars are merely proving
that it isn't in human nature to meet justice and fairness and generous
liberality half-way. If they want a fight, give it to them. Hit first
and hit hard; that's the way to do. Shut up the plant and make it a
lock-out."

"I was afraid you might say something like that in the first heat of
it," said the young ironmaster. "It's a stout fighting word, and I
guess, under the skin, you're a stout fighting man, Kenneth--which I'm
not. Where are your convictions about the man-to-man obligations? We've
got to take them into the account, haven't we?"

"Damn the convictions!" snapped Griswold viciously. "If I've been giving
you the impression that I'm an impracticable theorist, forget it. These
fellows want a fight: I say give them a fight--all they want of it and a
little more for good measure."

Raymer did not reply at once. This latest Griswold was puzzling him, and
with the puzzlement there went sorrowful regret; the regret that has
been the recanter's portion in all the ages. When he spoke it was out of
the heart of common sense and sanity.

"I know how you feel about it; I had a little attack of the same sort
this afternoon when the grievance committee dropped down on me. But
facts are pretty stubborn things, and they've got us foul. We have
twenty thousand dollars' worth of work for the Pineboro road on the shop
tracks, and the trouble-makers have picked their opportunity. If we
can't turn out this work, we'll lose the Pineboro's business, which, as
I have told you, is a pretty big slice of our business. Under such
conditions I don't dare to pull down a fight which may not only shut us
up for an indefinite time, but might even go far enough to smash us."

Griswold took his turn of silence, rocking gently in the tilting chair.
When the delayed rejoinder came, the harshness had gone out of his
voice, but there was a cynical hardness to take its place.

"It's your affair; not mine," he said. "If you've made up your mind not
to fight, of course, that settles it. Now we can come down to the
causes. You've been stabbed in the back. Do you know who's doing it?"

"The Federated Iron Workers, I suppose."

"Not in a thousand years! They are only the means to an end." The
tilting chair squeaked again, and he went on: "If I'm going to show you
how you can dodge this fight, I'll have to knock down a door or two
first. If I blunder in where I'm not wanted, you can kick me out. There
is one way in which you can cure all this trouble-sickness without
resorting to surgery and blood-letting."

"Name it," said Raymer eagerly.

"I will; but first I'll have to break over into the personalities. Have
you made up your mind that you are going to marry Margery Grierson?"

Raymer laughed silently, leaning his head back on the cushion of the
lazy-chair until his cigar stood upright.

"That's a nice way to biff a man in the dark!" he chuckled. "But if
you're in earnest I'll tell you the straightforward truth: I don't
know."

"Why don't you know?" If there were a scowl to go with the query, Raymer
could not see it.

"I'll be frank with you again, Kenneth. What little sentiment there is
in me leans pretty heavily that way. You have been with her a good bit
and you know her--know how she appeals to any man with a drop of red
blood in him. But I'm twenty-eight years old and well past the time
when the young man's fancy lightly turns--and all that. I can't ignore
the--the--well, the proprieties, you might say, though that isn't
exactly the word."

"You mean that Margery Grierson doesn't measure up to the requirements
of the Wahaskan Four Hundred?" There was satirical scorn in the
observation, but Raymer did not perceive it.

"Oh, I don't know as you would put it quite that baldly," he protested.
"But you see, when it comes to marrying and settling down and raising a
family, you have to look at all sides of the thing. The father, as we
all know, is a cold-blooded old werewolf; the mother nobody knows
anything about save that--happily, in all probability--she isn't living.
And there you are. Yet I won't deny that there are times when I'm
tempted to shut my eyes and take the high dive, anyway--at the risk of
splashing a lot of good people who would doubtless be properly
scandalized."

By this time Griswold was gripping the arms of his chair savagely and
otherwise trying to hold himself down; but this, too, Raymer could not
know.

"You have reason to believe that it rests wholly with you, I suppose?"
came from the tilting chair after a little pause. "Miss Grierson is only
waiting for you to speak?"

"That's a horrible question to ask a man, Kenneth--even in the dark. If
I say yes to it, it can't sound any other way than boastful and--and
caddish. Yet I honestly believe that-- Oh, hang it all! can't you see
how impossible you're making it, old man?"

"Not impossible; only a trifle difficult," was the qualifying rejoinder.
"It is easier from this on. That is the peaceful way out of the shop
trouble for you, Raymer. When you can go to Jasper Grierson and tell him
you are going to marry his daughter, the trouble will be as good as
cured."

For a little time Raymer was speechless. Then he burst out.

"Well, I'll be-- Jove, Griswold, you don't lack much of being as
cold-blooded as the old buccaneer himself! What makes you think he is
stirring up the trouble?"

"It doesn't require any special thought. He wanted to freeze you out a
little while back, and you balked him. Now he has come back at you
another way."

"I wonder!" said the iron-founder musingly; and then: "I more than half
believe you are right. But if you are, do you realize what you are
proposing?"

"I am not proposing anything; I am merely suggesting. But you needn't
put in the factor of doubt. This labor trouble that is threatening to
smash you is Jasper Grierson's reply to the move you made when you let
me in and choked him off. He is reaching for you."

Again Raymer held his peace and the atmosphere of the room grew pungent
with tobacco smoke.

"I'm feeling a good bit like a yellow dog, Kenneth," he said, at length.
"After what I've admitted and what you've said, I'm left in the
position of the poor devil who would be damned if he did and be damned
if he didn't. You have succeeded in fixing it so that I _can't_ ask
Margery Grierson to be my wife, however much I'd like to."

"That isn't the point," insisted Griswold half-savagely. "How you may
feel about it, or what your people may say, is purely secondary. The
thing to be considered is, what will happen to Miss Grierson?"

"Oh, the devil! if you put it that way----"

"I am putting it precisely that way."

"Why, see here, old man; if you were Madge's brother, you couldn't be
putting the screws on any harder! What's got into you to-night?"

Griswold was inexorable.

"Miss Grierson hasn't any brother, and she might as well not have any
father--better, perhaps. As God hears me, Raymer, I'm going to see to it
that she gets a square deal."

"In other words, if she has made up her clever little mind that she
wants to be Mrs. Ed. Raymer----"

"That is it, exactly."

"By George! I believe you are in love with her, yourself!"

"I am," was the cool reply.

"Well, of all the-- Say, Griswold, you're a three-cornered puzzle to me
yet. I don't know what the other three-fourths of the town is saying,
but my fourth of it has it put up that you've everlastingly cooked my
goose at Doctor Bertie's; that you and Charlotte are just about as good
as engaged. Perhaps you'll tell me that it isn't true."

"It isn't--yet."

"But it may be, later on? Now you are getting over into my little
garden-patch, Kenneth. If you think I'm going to stand still and see you
put a wedding ring on Charlotte Farnham's finger when I know you'd like
to be putting it on Madge Grierson's----"

Griswold's low laugh came as an easing of stresses.

"You can't very well marry both of them, yourself, you know," he
suggested mildly. And then: "If you were not so badly torn up over this
shop trouble, you'd see that I'm trying to give you the entire field. I
shall probably leave town to-morrow, and I merely wanted to do you, or
Miss Grierson, or both of you, a small kindness by way of leave-taking."

"Leave town?" echoed the iron-founder. "Where are you going?"

"I don't know yet."

"But you are coming back?"

"No."

Once more Raymer puffed at the shortened cigar until the end of it
glowed like a small distress signal in the dark.

"Tell me," he broke out finally: "has Margery Grierson turned you down?"

"No."

"Then Charlotte has?"

"No."

"Confound it all! can't you say anything but 'No'? Do you mean to tell
me that you are going away, leaving me bucked and gagged by this labor
outfit to live or die as I may? Great Scott, man! if my money's gone,
yours goes with it!"

"You are freely welcome to the money, Edward--if you can manage to hang
on to it; and I have pointed out the easy way to salvage the industrial
ship. Can't you give me your blessing and let me go in peace?"

The blessing was not withheld, but neither was it given.

"I came here with my own back-load of trouble, but it seems that I'm not
the only camel in the caravan," said the young ironmaster, thoughtfully.
"What is it, Kenneth? anything you can unload on me?"

"You wouldn't understand," was the gentle evasion. "I can only give you
my word that neither Miss Margery nor Miss Charlotte are in any way
concerned in it."

"And you don't want to draw your money out of the plant?"

"No. For your sake I wish I had more to put in."

Once again Raymer took refuge in silence. After a time he said: "You've
been a brother to me, Griswold, and I shall never forget that. But if I
needed your help in the money pinch, I'm needing it worse now. I'll do
the right thing by Margery; I think I've been meaning to, all along; if
I haven't, it's only because this whole town has been fixing up a match
between Charlotte and me ever since we were school kids together--you
know how a fellow gets into the way of taking a thing like that for
granted merely because everybody else does?"

"Yes; I know."

"Well, I guess it isn't a heart-breaker on either side. If Charlotte
cares, she doesn't take the trouble to show it. Just the same, on the
other hand, I've got a shred or two of decency left, Kenneth. I'm not
going to marry myself out of this fight with Jasper Grierson--not in a
million years. Stay over and help me see it through; and when we win
out, I promise you I'll do the square thing."

By no means could Edward Raymer know that he had set the whispering
devil at work again at the ear of the man who was rocking gently in the
desk-chair. But the demon was busily suggesting, and the man was
listening. Was there not more than an even chance that Andrew Galbraith
would die, after all? He was old, with the life-reserves spent and the
weight of the years upon him. And if he should not die, there was still
a chance that days might elapse before he would be able to gather
himself sufficiently to remember and to raise the hue and cry. Griswold
put a hot hand across the corner of the table and felt for Raymer's cool
one.

"There's only one other way, Edward; and that is to fight like the
devil," he said, speaking as one who has weighed and measured and
decided. "What do you say?"

"If you will stay," Raymer began, hesitantly.

"I'll stay--as long as I can." Then, with the note of harshness
returning: "We'll make the fight, and we'll give these muckers of yours
all they are looking for. Shut the plant doors to-morrow morning and
make it a lock-out. I'll be over bright and early and we'll place a
bunch of wire orders in the cities for strike-breakers. That will bring
them to time."

Raymer got up slowly and felt in the dark for his hat.

"Strike-breakers!" he groaned. "Griswold, it would make my father turn
over in his coffin if he could know that we've come to that! But I guess
you're right. Everybody says I'm too soft-hearted to be a master of men.
Well, I must be getting home. To-morrow morning, at the plant? All
right; good-night."

And he turned to grope his way to the door and through the dark upper
hall and down the stair.




XXXI

NARROWING WALLS


When Griswold had reached across the corner of his writing-table in the
unlighted study to strike hands with Edward Raymer upon the promise to
stay and help, it is conceivable that he gave the impelling motive its
just due. To step aside was to become a fugitive, leaving a fugitive's
plain trail and half-confession of guilt behind him to direct the
pursuit. To stay and face the crisis coldly was equally out of the
question for a man of temperament. The call to action came as a draught
of fiery wine to the overspent and he accepted in a sudden upsurge of
self-centring that took nothing into the account save the welcome
excitement of a conflict.

It was with rather more than less of the self-centring that he joined
the conference with Raymer and the shop bosses in the offices of the
plant the following morning. Having slept upon the quarrel, Raymer was
on the conciliatory hand, and four of the five department foremen were
with him. In the early hours of the forenoon a compromise was still
possible. The prompt closing of the shops had had its effect, and a
deputation of the older workmen came to plead for arbitration and a
peaceful settlement of the trouble. Raymer, who had evidently been
taking counsel with his womankind, would have consented to this
proposal, but Griswold fought it and finally carried his point. "No
compromise" was the answer sent back to the locked-out workmen, and with
it went the ultimatum, which Griswold himself snapped out at the leader
of the conciliators: "Tell your committee that it is unconditional
surrender, and it must be made before five o'clock this afternoon.
Otherwise, not a man of you can come back on any terms."

At the hurling of this firebrand, three of the five department heads
drew their pay-envelopes and went away. Then Griswold proceeded to make
the breach impassable by calling upon the sheriff for a guard of
deputies. Raymer shook his head gloomily when the thrower of firebrands
sent the 'phone message to the sheriff's office.

"That settles it beyond any hope of a patch-up," he said sorrowfully.
"If we hadn't declared war before, we've done it now. I'm prophesying
that nobody will weaken when it comes to the pay-roll test this
afternoon."

"Because we have taken steps to protect our property?" rasped the
fighting partner.

"Because we have taken the step which serves notice upon them that we
consider them criminals, at least in intention. You'd resent it
yourself, Griswold. If anybody should pull the law on you before you had
done anything to deserve it, I'm much mistaken if you wouldn't----"

"Oh, hell!" was the biting interruption; and Raymer could not know upon
what inward fires he had unwittingly flung a handful of inflammables.

It was during the paying-off interval in the afternoon that Broffin
strolled across the railroad tracks, and, after listening to one or two
of the incendiary speeches at the storm-centre mass meeting in front of
McGuire's, went on past the potteries to the Raymer plant.

Several things had happened since the afternoon when he had sat behind
the sheltering window curtain in the writing-room of the summer-resort
hotel listening to Miss Grierson's story. For one, Teller Johnson, of
the Bayou State Security, had pleaded his inability to leave his post
unless ordered to do so by the president: the cashier was sick and the
bank was short-handed. For another, there had been a peppery protest
entered by the good Doctor Bertie--transformed for the moment into an
exasperated Doctor Bertie. If Broffin did not quit his annoying
espionage upon the house in Lake Boulevard, and upon the visitors
thereto, there was going to be trouble, and he, Doctor Bertie, would be
the trouble-maker. For a third untoward thing, he had found that Wahaska
as a community was beginning to look a little askance at him. The
village consciousness which had made it so easy for him to find out all
he wished to know about everybody was turning against him, and now, as
it seemed, everybody was wishing to know more than he cared to tell
about the past, present, and future concerns of one Matthew Broffin: in
short, he was becoming a suspicious character.

Broffin the pertinacious, again with an unlighted cigar between his
teeth, was ruminating thoughtfully over these things when he came in
sight of the closed gates and smokeless chimneys of the Foundry and
Machine Works. Once more the scent had grown cold. Miss Grierson's story
had seemed to clear Griswold--if anything short of a court acquittal
could clear him; and in the peppery interview Doctor Farnham had told
him plainly that, if Mr. Griswold were the object of his attentions, he
was barking up the wrong tree; that Miss Farnham would, if necessary, go
into court and testify that Mr. Griswold was not the man whom she had
seen in the Bayou State Security. Also, Griswold was doing something for
himself. It was he who had pulled Mr. Galbraith out of the lake little
better than a dead man, and had brought him to life again; and now he
was taking an active part in the foundry fight--about the last thing
that might be expected of a man dodging the police.

In spite of all these buffetings the man from Tennessee was only
bruised; not beaten. It is possible to be convinced without evidence; to
believe without being able to prove. Also, convincement may grow into
certainty as the evidence to support it becomes altogether incertitude.
Broffin was as sure now that Griswold was his man as he was of his own
present inability to prove it. Which is to say that he had discounted
Miss Farnham's refusal to help, and President Galbraith's refusal to
remember; was discounting Miss Grierson's skilfully told story, and
Griswold's breaking of all the criminal precedents by staying on in
Wahaska after he had been warned. For Broffin made no doubt that the
warning had been given, either by Miss Farnham or by Miss Grierson--or
both.

"All the same, he'll make a miss-go, sooner or later," the pertinacious
one was saying to himself as he strolled past the Raymer plant with a
keen eye for the barred gates, the lounging guards in the yard, and the
sober-faced workmen coming and going at the pay-office. "If he can carry
a steady head through what's comin' to him here, he's a better man than
I've been stacking him up to be."

Coming even with the grouping around the office door, Broffin sat down
on a discarded cylinder casting, chewed his dry smoke, whittled a stick,
and kept an open ear for the sidewalk talk. It was angrily vindictive
for the greater part, with the new member of the Raymer company for a
target. Now and then it was threatening. If the company should attempt
to bring in foreign labor there would be blood on the moon.

Later, a big, red-faced man with his hat on the back of his head and a
paste diamond in his shirt bosom, came to join the shifting group on the
office sidewalk. Broffin marked him as one of the inflammatory speakers
he had seen and heard on the dry-goods-box rostrum in front of
McGuire's, and had since been trying to place. The nearer view turned
up the proper page in the mental note-book. The man's name was Clancy;
he was a Chicago ward-worker, sham labor leader, demagogue; a bad man
with a "pull." Broffin remembered the "pull" because it had once got in
his way when he was trying to bag Clancy for a violation of the revenue
laws.

Instantly the detective began to speculate upon the chance that had
brought the Chicago ward bully into a village labor fight, and since it
was his business to put two and two together, he was not long in finding
the answer to his own query. Clancy had come because he had been hired
to come. Assuming this much, the remainder was easy. The town gossips
had supplied all the major facts of the Raymer-Grierson checkmate, and
Broffin saw a great light. It was not labor and capital that were at
odds; it was competition and monopoly. And monopoly, invoking the aid of
the Clancys, stood to win in a canter.

Broffin dropped the stick he had been whittling and got up to move away.
Though some imaginative persons would have it otherwise, a detective may
still be a man of like passions--and generous prepossessions--with other
men. For the time Broffin's Anglo-Saxon heritage, the love of fair play,
made him forget the limitations of his trade. "By grapples, the old
swine!" he was muttering to himself as he made a slow circuit of the
plant enclosure. "Somebody ought to tell them two young ducks what
they're up against. For a picayune, I'd do it, myself. Huh!--and the
little black-eyed girl playin' fast an' loose with both of 'em at once
while the old money-octippus eats 'em alive!"

Thus Broffin, circling the Raymer works by way of the four enclosing
streets; and when his back was turned the man called Clancy pointed him
out to the group of discontents.

"D'ye see that felly doublin' the fence corner? Ye're a fine lot of jays
up here in th' backwoods! Do I know him? Full well I do! An' that shows,
ye what honest workin'men has got to come to, these days. Didn't ye see
him sittin' there on that castin'? Th' bosses put him there to keep
tricks on ye. If ye have the nerve of a bunch of hoboes, ye'll watch yer
chances and step on him like a cockroach. He's a Pinkerton!"




XXXII

THE LION'S SHARE


Wahaska, microcosmic and village-conscious in spite of its city charter,
was duly thrilled and excited when, on the day following the storm and
shipwreck, it found itself the scene of an angry conflict between
capital and labor.

Reports varied as to the origin of the trouble. Among the retired
farmers, who still called Raymer "Eddie" and spoke of him as "John
Raymer's boy," it was the generally expressed opinion that he was both
too young and too easy-going to be a successful industry captain in the
larger field he had lately entered. In the workingmen's quarter, which
lay principally beyond the railroad tracks, public opinion was less
lenient and the young ironmaster, figuring hitherto only as a good boss
with a few unnecessary college ideas, was denounced as a "kid-glove"
reformer who made his profit-sharing fad an excuse for advancing his
favorites, and who was accordingly to be "brought to time" by the strong
hand of the organization.

It was a crude surprise, both to the West Side and to "Pottery Flat," to
find the new book-writing partner not only taking an active part in the
fight, but apparently directing the capitalistic hostilities with a
high hand. Quite early in the forenoon it was known on the street that
Griswold had taken the field with Raymer; that the lock-out was his
reply to the strike notice; and that it was at his suggestion that a
dozen deputies had been sworn in to guard the Raymer plant--the iron
works lying just outside of the corporation lines. A little later came
the news that he had sent a counter ultimatum to the representatives of
the labor forces sitting in permanence in their hall over McGuire's
saloon. From two o'clock until five the offices of the plant would be
open, and all former employees would be paid in full and discharged.
Those who failed to make application between the hours named would not
be taken back on any terms.

From two to five in the afternoon Wahaska, figuratively speaking, held
its breath. At half-past three, young Dahlgren, of the _Daily Wahaskan_,
spoiled a good story for his own paper by spreading the report that most
of the men had sullenly drawn their pay, but as yet not a man of them
had signed on for further employment. At four o'clock the _Daily
Wahaskan's_ windows bore a bulletin to the effect that a mass
indignation meeting was in progress in front of the Pottery Flat saloon;
and at half-past four it was whispered about that war had been declared.
Raymer and Griswold were telegraphing for strike-breakers; and the men
were swearing that the plant would be picketed and that scabs would be
dealt with as traitors and enemies.

It was between half-past four and five that Miss Grierson, driving in
the basket phaeton, made her appearance on the streets, evoking the
usual ripple of comment among the gossipers on the Winnebago porch as
she tooled her clean-limbed little Morgan to a stop in front of the
Farmers' and Merchants' Bank.

Since it was long past the closing hours, the curtains were drawn in the
bank doors and street-facing windows. But there was a side entrance, and
when she tapped on the glass of the door an obsequious janitor made
haste to admit her. "Yo' paw's busy, right now, Miss Mahg'ry," the negro
said; but she ignored the hint and went straight to the door of the
private room, entering without warning.

As the janitor had intimated, her father was not alone. In the chair at
the desk-end sat a man florid of face, hard-eyed and gross-bodied. His
hat was on the back of his head, and clamped between his teeth under the
bristling mustaches he held one of Jasper Grierson's fat black cigars.
The conference paused when the door opened; but when Margery crossed the
room and perched herself on the deep seat of the farthest window, it
went on in guarded tones at a silent signal from the banker to his
visitor.

There was a trade journal lying in the window-seat, and Miss Grierson
took it up to become idly immersed in a study of the advertising
pictures. If she listened to the low-toned talk it was only
mechanically, one would say. Yet there was a quickening of the breath
now and again, and a pressing of the white teeth upon the ripe lower
lip, as she turned the pages of the advertising supplement; these,
though only detached sentences of the talk drifted across to her
window-seat.

"You're fixed to put the entire responsibility for the ruction over onto
the other side of the house?" was one of the overheard sentences: it was
her father's query, and she also heard the answer. "We're goin' to put
'em in bad, don't you forget it. There'll be some broken heads, most
likely, and if they're ours, somebody'll pay for 'em." A little farther
along it was her father who said: "You've got to quit this running to
me. Keep to your own side of the fence. Murray's got his orders, and
he'll pay the bills. If anything breaks loose, I won't know you. Get
that?" "I'm on," said the red-faced man; and shortly afterward he took
his leave.

When the door had closed behind the man who looked like a ward heeler or
a walking delegate, and who had been both, and many other and more
questionable things, by turns, Jasper Grierson swung his huge chair to
face the window.

"Well?" he said, "how's Galbraith coming along?"

"There is no change," was the sober rejoinder. "He is still lying in a
half-stupor, just as he was last night and this morning. Doctor Farnham
shakes his head and won't say anything."

"You mustn't let him die," warned the man in the big chair, half
jocularly. "There's too much money in him."

The smouldering fires in the daughter's eyes leaped up at the
provocation lurking in the grim brutality; but they were dying down
again when she put the trade journal aside and said: "I didn't come here
to tell you about Mr. Galbraith. I came to give you notice that it is
time to quit."

"Time to quit what?"

"You know. When I asked you to put Mr. Raymer under obligations to you,
I said I'd tell you when it was time to stop."

Jasper Grierson sat back in his chair and chuckled.

"Lord love you!" he said, "I'd clean forgot that you had a tea-party
stake in that game, Madgie; I had, for a fact!"

"Well, it is time to remember it," was the cool reply.

"What was I to remember?"

"That you were to turn around and help him out of his trouble when I
gave you the word."

The president of the Farmers' and Merchants' tilted his chair to the
lounging angle and laughed; a slow gurgling laugh that spread from lip
to eye and thence abroad through his great frame until he shook like a
grotesque incarnation of the god of mirth.

"I was to turn around and help him out of the hole, was I? Oh, no; I
guess not," he denied. "It's business now, little girl, and the
tea-fights are barred. I'll give you a check for that span o' blacks you
were looking at, and we'll call it square."

"Does that mean that you intend to go on until you have smashed him?"
she asked, quietly ignoring the putative bribe.

"I'm going to put him out of business--him and that other fool friend of
yours--if that's what you mean."

Again the sudden lightning glowed in Margery Grierson's eyes, but, as
before, the flash was only momentary. There was passion enough in blood
and brain, but there was also a will, and the will was the stronger.

"Please!" she besought him.

"Please what?"

"Please ruin somebody else, and let Mr.----let these two go!"

Grierson's laugh this time was brutally sardonic.

"So you're caught at last, are you, girlie? I was wondering if you
wouldn't come out o' that pool with the hook in your mouth. But you
might as well pull loose, even if it does hurt a little. Raymer and
Griswold have got to come under."

She looked across at him steadily and again there was a struggle, short
and sharp, between the leaping passions and the indomitable will. Yet
she could speak softly.

"That is your last word, is it?"

"You can call it that, if you like: yes."

"What is the reason? Why do you hate these two so desperately?" she
asked.

Jasper Grierson fanned away the nimbus of cigar smoke with which he had
surrounded himself and stared gloomily at her through the rift.

"Who said anything about hating?" he derided. "That's a fool woman's
notion. This is business, and there ain't any such thing as hate in
business. Raymer's iron-shop happens to be in the road of a bigger
thing, and it's got to move out; that's all."

She nodded slowly. "I thought so," she said, half-absently: "and the
'bigger thing' has some more money in it for you. Oh, how I do despise
it all!"

"Oh, no, you don't," he contradicted, falling back into the half-jocular
vein. "You're a pretty good spender, yourself, Madgie. If you didn't
have plenty of money to eat and drink and wear and breathe----"

"I hate it!" she said coldly. Then she dragged the talk back to the
channel it was leaving. "I ought to have broken in sooner; I might have
known what you would do. You are responsible for this labor trouble they
are having over at the iron works. Don't bother to deny it; I know. That
was your 'heeler'--the man you had here when I came. You don't play fair
with many people: don't you think you'd better make an exception of me?"

Grierson was mouthing his cigar again and the smoky nimbus was
thickening to its customary density when he said: "You're nothing but a
spoiled baby, Madge. If you'd cry for the moon, you'd think you ought to
have it. I've said my say, and that's all there is to it. Trot along
home and 'tend to your tea-parties: that's your part of the game. I can
play my hand alone."

She slipped out of the window-seat and crossed the room quickly to stand
before him.

"I'll go, when you have answered one question," she said, the suppressed
passions finding their way into her voice. "I've asked for bread and
you've given me a stone. I've said 'please' to you, and you slapped me
for it. Do you think you can afford to shove me over to the other side?"

"I don't know what you're driving at, now," was the even-toned
rejoinder.

"Don't you? Then I'll tell you. You have been pinching this town for the
lion's share ever since we came here--shaking it down as you used to
shake down the"--she broke off short, and again the indomitable will got
the better of the seething passions. "We'll let the by-gones go, and
come down to the present. What if some of the things you are doing here
and now should get into print?"

"For instance?" he suggested, when she paused.

"This Raymer affair, for one thing. You don't own the _Wahaskan_--yet:
supposing it should come out to-morrow morning with the true story of
this disgraceful piece of buccaneering, telling how you tried first to
squeeze him through the bank loan, and when that failed, how you bribed
his workmen to make trouble?"

"You go to Randolph and try it," said the gray wolf, jeeringly. "In the
first place, he wouldn't believe it--coming from you. He wouldn't forget
that you're my daughter, however much you are trying to forget it. In
the next place he'd want proof--damned good proof--if he was going to
make a fight on me. He'd know that one of two things would happen; if he
failed to get me, I'd get him."

The daughter who had asked for bread and had been given a stone put her
face in her hands and moved toward the door. But at the last moment she
turned again like a spiteful little tiger-cat at bay.

"You think I can't prove it? That is where you fall down. I can convince
Mr. Randolph if I choose to try. And that isn't all: I can tell him how
you have planned to sell Mr. Galbraith a tract of 'virgin' pine that has
been culled over for the best timber at least three times in the past
five years!"

Jasper Grierson started from his chair and made a quick clutch into
smoky space. "Madge--you little devil!" he gritted.

But the grasping hands closed upon nothing, and the sound of the closing
door was his only answer.

       *       *       *       *       *

When she had unhitched the little Morgan and had driven away from the
bank, Miss Grierson did a thing unprecedented in any of her former
grapplings with a crisis--she hesitated. Twice she drove down Sioux
Avenue with the apparent intention of stopping at the _Daily Wahaskan_
building, and twice she went on past with no more than an irresolute
glance for the upper windows beyond which lay the editorial rooms and
the office of Mr. Carter Randolph, the owner of the newspaper. But on
the third circuit of the square, decision had evidently come to its own
again. Turning the mare into Main Street, she drove quickly to the
Winnebago House and drew up at the carriage step. A bell-boy ran out to
hold the horse, but she shook her head and called him to the wheel of
the phaeton to slip a coin into his hand and to give him a brief
message.

Two minutes after the boy's disappearance, Broffin came out and touched
his hat to the trim little person in the basket seat.

"You wanted to see me, Miss Grierson?" he said, shelving his surprise,
if he had any.

"Yes. You are Mr. Matthew Broffin, of the Colburne Detective Agency, are
you not?" she asked, sweetly.

Broffin took the privilege of the accused and lied promptly.

"Not that anybody ever heard of, I reckon," he denied, matching the
smile in the inquiring eyes.

"How curious!" she commented.

Broffin's smile became a grin of triumph. "There's a heap o' curious
things in this little old world," he volunteered. "What?"

"But none quite so singular as this," she averred. Then she laughed
softly. "You see, it resolves itself into a question of
veracity--between you and Mr. Andrew Galbraith. You say you are not, and
he says you are. Which am I to believe?"

Broffin did some pretty swift thinking. There had been times when he
had fancied that Miss Grierson, rather than Miss Farnham, might be the
key to his problem. There was one chance in a thousand that she might
inadvertently put the key into his hands if he should play his cards
skilfully, and he took the chance.

"You can call it a mistake of mine, if you like," he yielded; and she
nodded brightly.

"That is better; now we can go on comfortably. Are you too busy to take
a little commission from me?"

"Maybe not. What is it?" He was looking for a trap, and would not commit
himself too broadly.

"There are two things that I wish to know definitely. Of course, you
have heard about the accident on the lake? Mr. Galbraith is at our
house, and he is very ill--out of his head most of the time. He is
continually trying to tell some one whom he calls 'MacFarland' to be
careful. Do you know any one of that name?"

Broffin put a foot on the phaeton step and a hand on the dash. There
were loungers on the hotel porch and it was not necessary for them to
hear.

"Yes; MacFarland is his confidential man in the bank," he returned.

"Oh; that explains it. But what is it that Mr. Galbraith wants him to be
careful about?"

Again Broffin thought quickly. If he should tell the plain truth....
"Tell me one thing, Miss Grierson," he said bluntly. "Am I doin'
business with you, or with your father?"

"Most emphatically, with me, Mr. Broffin."

"All right; everything goes, then. Mr. Galbraith has been figurin' on
buying some pine lands up north."

"I know that much. Go on."

"And he has sent MacFarland up to verify the boundary records on the
county survey."

"To Duluth?"

Broffin nodded.

"I thought so," she affirmed. And then: "The records are all right, Mr.
Broffin; but the lands which Mr. MacFarland will be shown will not be
the lands which Mr. Galbraith is talking of buying. I want evidence of
this--in black and white. Can you telegraph to some one in Duluth?"

Broffin permitted himself a small sigh of relief. He thought he had seen
the trap; that she was going to try to get him away from Wahaska.

"I can do better than that," he offered. "I can send a man from St.
Paul; a good safe man who will do just what he is told to do--and keep
his mouth shut."

She nodded approvingly.

"Do it; and tell your messenger that time is precious and expense
doesn't count. That is the first half of your commission. Come a little
closer and I'll tell you the second half."

Broffin bent his head and she whispered the remainder of his
instructions. When she had finished he looked up and wagged his head
apprehendingly.

"Yes; I see what you mean--and it's none o' my business what you mean
it for," he answered. "I'll get the evidence, if there is any."

"It must be like the other; in black and white," she stipulated. "And
you needn't say 'if.' Look for a red-faced man with stiff mustaches and
a big make-believe diamond in his shirt-front, and make him tell you."

Broffin wagged his head again. "There ain't goin' to be any grand jury
business about it, is there?" he questioned; adding: "I know your
man--saw him this afternoon over at the plant. He's goin' to be a tough
customer to handle unless I can tell him there ain't goin' to be any
come-back in the courts."

Miss Grierson was opening her purse and she passed a yellow-backed
bank-note to her newest confederate.

"Your retainer," she explained. "And about the red-faced man: we sha'n't
take him into court. But I'd rather you wouldn't buy him, if you can
help it. Can't you get him like this, some way?"--she held up a thumb
and finger tightly pressed together.

Broffin's grin this time was wholly of appreciation.

"You're the right kind--the kind that leads trumps all the while, Miss
Grierson," he told her. Then he did the manly thing. "I'll go into this,
just as you say--what? But it's only fair to warn you that it may turn
up some things that'll feaze you. You know that old sayin' about
sleepin' dogs?"

Miss Grierson was gathering the reins over the little Morgan's back and
her black eyes snapped.

"This is one time when we are going to kick the dogs and make them wake
up," she returned. "Good-by, Mr. Broffin."




XXXIII

GATES OF BRASS


It was an hour beyond the normal quitting time on the day of ultimatums
and counter-threatenings, the small office force had gone home, and the
night squad of deputies had come to relieve the day guard. Griswold
closed the spare desk in the manager's room and twirled his chair to
face Raymer.

"We may as well go and get something to eat," he suggested. "There will
be nothing doing to-night."

Raymer began to put his desk in order.

"No, not to-night. The trouble will begin when we try to start up with a
new force. Call it a weakness if you like, but I dread it, Kenneth."

Griswold's smile was a mere baring of the teeth. "That's all right, Ned;
you do the dreading and I'll do the fighting," he said; adding: "What
we've had to-day has merely whetted my appetite."

The man of peace shook his head dejectedly.

"I can't understand it," he protested. "Up to last night I was calling
you a benevolent Socialist, and my only fear was that you might some
time want to reorganize things and turn the plant into a little section
of Utopia. Now you are out-heroding Herod on the other side."

Griswold got up and crushed his soft hat upon his head.

"Only fools and dead folk are denied the privilege of changing their
minds," he returned. "Let's go up to the Winnebago and feed."

The dinner to which they sat down a little later was a small feast of
silence. Each was busy with his own thoughts, and it was not until after
the coffee had been served that Griswold leaned across the table to call
Raymer's attention to a man who was finishing his meal in a distant
corner of the dining-room, a swarthy-faced man who drank his coffee with
the meat course to the unpleasant detriment of a pair of long drooping
mustaches.

"Wait a minute before you look around, and then tell me who that fellow
is over on the right--the man with the black mustaches," he directed.

Raymer looked and shook his head.

"He's a new-comer--comparatively; somebody at the club said he gave
himself out for a lumberman from Louisiana."

Griswold was nodding slowly. "His name?" he asked.

"I can't remember. It's an odd name; Boffin, or Giffin, or something
like that. They're beginning to say now that he isn't a lumberman at
all--just why, I don't know."

Griswold's right hand stole softly to his hip pocket. The touch was
reassuring. But a little while after, when he was leaving the
dining-room with Raymer, he dropped behind and made a quick transfer of
something from the hip pocket to the side pocket of his coat. His hand
was still in the coat pocket when he parted from the young iron-founder
on the sidewalk.

"You'll be going home, I suppose?" he said.

Raymer made a wry face.

"Yes; and I wish to gracious you were the one who had to face my mother
and sister. They're all for peace, you know--peace at any old price."

Griswold laughed.

"Tell them we're going to have peace if we are obliged to fight for it.
And don't let them swing you. If we back down now we may as well go into
court and ask for a receiver. Good-night."

Though he had not betrayed it, Griswold was fiercely impatient to get
away. One tremendous question had been dominating all others from the
earliest moment of the morning awakening, and all day long it had fed
upon doubtings and uncertainty. Would Andrew Galbraith recover from the
effects of the drowning accident? At first, he thought he would go to
his room and telephone to Margery. But before he had reached the foot of
Shawnee Street he had changed his mind. What he wanted to say could
scarcely be trusted to the wires.

Twice before he reached the gate of the Grierson lawn he fancied he was
followed, and twice he stepped behind the nearest shade-tree and
tightened his grip upon the thing in his right-hand pocket. But both
times the rearward sidewalk showed itself empty. Since false alarms may
have, for the moment, all the shock of the real, he found that his hands
were trembling when he came to unlatch the Grierson gate, and it made
him vindictively self-scornful. Also, it gave him a momentary glimpse
into another and hitherto unmeasured depth in the valley of stumblings.
In the passing of the glimpse he was made to realize that it is the
coward who kills; and kills because he is a coward.

He had traversed the stone-flagged approach and climbed the steps of the
broad veranda to reach for the bell-push when he heard his name called
softly in the voice that he had come to know in all of its many
modulations. The call came from the depths of one of the great wicker
lounging-chairs half-hidden in the veranda shadows. In a moment he had
placed another of the chairs for himself, dropping into it wearily.

"How did you know it was I?" he asked, when he could trust himself to
speak.

"I saw you at the gate," she returned. "Are you just up from the Iron
Works?"

"I have been to dinner since we came up-town--Raymer and I."

A pause, and then: "The men are still holding out?"

"We are holding out. The plant is closed, and it will stay closed until
we can get another force of workmen."

"There will be lots of suffering," she ventured.

"Inevitably. But they have brought it upon themselves."

"Not the ones who will suffer the most--the women and children," she
corrected.

"It's no use," he said, answering her thought. "There is nothing in me
to appeal to."

"There was yesterday, or the day before," she suggested.

"Perhaps. But yesterday was yesterday, and to-day is to-day. As I told
Raymer a little while ago, I've changed my mind."

"About the rights of the down-trodden?"

"About all things under the sun."

"No," she denied, "you only think you have. But you didn't come here to
tell me that?"

"No; I came to ask a single question. How is Mr. Galbraith?"

"He is a very sick man."

Another pause, for which the questioner was responsible.

"You mean that there is a chance that he may not recover?"

"More than a chance, I'm afraid. The first thing Doctor Bertie did
yesterday evening was to wire St. Paul for two trained nurses; and
to-day he telegraphed Chicago for Doctor Holworthy, who charges
twenty-five dollars a minute for mere office consultations."

"Humph!" said Griswold, "money needn't cut any figure." And then, after
a moment of silence: "I did my best; you know I did my best?"

Her answer puzzled him a little.

"I could almost find it in my heart to hate you if you hadn't."

"But you know I did."

"Yes; I know you did."

Silence again, broken only by the whispering of the summer night breeze
rustling the leaves of the lawn oaks and the lapping of tiny waves on
the lake beach. At the end of it, Griswold got up and groped for his
hat.

"I'm going home," he said. "It has been a pretty strenuous day, and
there is another one coming. But before I go I want you to promise me
one thing. Will you let me know immediately, by 'phone or messenger, if
Mr. Galbraith takes a turn for the better?"

"Certainly," she said; and she let him say good-night and get as far as
the steps before she called him back.

"There was another thing," she began, with the sober gravity that he
could never be sure was not one of her many poses, and not the least
alluring one. "Do you believe in God, Kenneth?"

The query took him altogether by surprise, but he made shift to answer
it with becoming seriousness.

"I suppose I do. Why?"

"It is a time to pray to Him," she said softly; "to pray very earnestly
that Mr. Galbraith's life may be spared."

He could not let that stand.

"Why should I concern myself, specially?" he asked; adding: "Of course,
I'm sorry, and all that, but----"

"Never mind," she interposed, and she left her chair to walk beside him
to the steps. "I've had a hard day, too, Kenneth, boy, and I--I guess it
has got on my nerves. But, all the same, you ought to do it, you know."

He stopped and looked down into the eyes whose depths he could never
wholly fathom.

"Why don't you do it?" he demanded.

"I? oh, God doesn't know me; and, besides, I thought--oh, well, it
doesn't matter what I thought. Good-night."

And before he could return the leave-taking word, she was gone.




XXXIV

THE ABYSS


Raymer's prediction that the real trouble would begin when the attempt
should be made to start the plant with imported workmen was amply
fulfilled during the militant week which followed the opening of
hostilities.

The appearance of the first detachment of strike-breakers, a trampish
crew gathered up hastily by the employment agencies in the cities in
response to Griswold's telegrams, was the signal for active resistance.
Promptly the Iron Works plant and the approaches to it were picketed,
and of the twenty-five or thirty men who came in on the first day's
train only a badly frightened and cowed half-dozen won through the
persuading, jeering, threatening picket line to the offices of the
plant.

Other days followed in which the scenes of the first were repeated--with
the difference that each succeeding day saw the inevitable increase of
lawlessness. From taunts and abuse the insurrectionaries passed easily
to violence. Street fights, when the trampish place-takers came in any
considerable numbers, were of daily occurrence, and the tale of the
wounded grew like the returns from a battle. By the middle of the week
Raymer and Griswold were asking for a sheriff's posse to maintain peace
in the neighborhood of the plant; and were getting their first definite
hint that some one higher up was playing the game of politics against
them.

"No, gentlemen; I've done all that the law requires and a little more,"
was the sheriff's response to the plea for better protection. Then came
the hint. "You can take it as a word from a friend that this private
scrap of yours with your men is making everybody pretty tired. First and
last, it's only a question of whether you'll pay out a little more
money, or a little less money, not to a lot of imported hoboes, but to
certain citizens of Red Earth County,"--to which was added
significantly--"citizens with votes."

"In other words, Mr. Bradford, you've got your orders from the men
higher up, have you?" rasped Griswold, who was by this time lost to all
sense of expediency.

"I don't have to reply to any such charge as that," said the chief peace
officer, turning back to his desk; and so the brittle little conference
ended.

"All of which means that we shall lose the plant guard of deputies that
Bradford has been maintaining," commented Raymer, as they were
descending the Court House stairs; and again his prediction came true.
Later in the day the guard was withdrawn; and Griswold, savagely
reluctant, was forced to make a concession repeatedly urged and argued
for by the older men among the strikers, namely, that the guarding of
the company's property be entrusted to a picked squad of the
ex-employees themselves.

During these days of turmoil and rioting the transformed idealist passed
through many stages of the journey down a certain dark and mephitic
valley not of amelioration. With the bitter industrial conflict to feed
it, a slow fire within him ate its way into all the foundations, and as
the fair superstructure of character settled, the moral perpendiculars
and planes of projection became more and more distorted. Fairness was
gone, and in its place stood angry resentment, ready to rend and tear.
Pity and ruth were going: the daily report from Margery told of the
lessening chance of life for Andrew Galbraith, and the stirrings evoked
were neither regretful nor compassionate. On the contrary, he knew very
well that the news of Galbraith's death would be a relief for which, in
his heart of hearts, he was secretly thirsting.

It was at the close of the week of tumult that the dreadful beckoning
came. One of the two trained nurses installed at Mereside had been
called away to the bedside of a sick father. Another had been wired for
immediately, but between the going and the coming a night would
intervene. So much Griswold got from Margery over the Iron Works
telephone late in the afternoon of a day thickly besprinkled with the
sidewalk waylayings and riotings. When he reached his Shawnee Street
lodgings at nine o'clock that night he found Miss Grierson's phaeton
standing at the curb.

"Get in," she said, briefly, making room for him in the basket seat. And
when the mare had been given the word to go: "I hope you are not too
tired to chaperon me. I've got to drive over to the college infirmary.
We simply _must_ have another nurse for to-night."

He denied the weariness--most untruthfully--and after that, she made him
talk all the way across town to the college campus; compelled him, and
found him absently irresponsive. Oh, yes; the fight was still going on:
No, they would never give in to the demands of the strikers: Yes, he had
seen Miss Farnham twice since the trouble began; she was frankly agreed
with Raymer's mother and sister; they all wanted peace, and they were
all against him. She led him on, and meanwhile they encountered one
failure after another in the nurse-hunting. The town clock was striking
the quarter-past ten when Miss Grierson confessed that she had exhausted
the list of possibilities.

"I must go back at once," she declared. "Miss Davidson--the day
nurse--has been on duty constantly since six this morning, and I'm not
going to let her kill herself."

"But you haven't been able to find anybody. Who will relieve her?"

Then came the thunderbolt--and beyond it the beckoning. "You and I
will," she said calmly. And then, as if to forestall the possible
refusal: "It is merely to sit in the next room and to go in and give him
his medicine at half-hour intervals. Either of us can do that much for a
poor old man who is making his last stand in the fight for his life."

Three days earlier, nay, one day earlier, Griswold might have recoiled
in horror from the suggestion that thrust itself into heart and brain.
But now he merely pushed the unspeakable prompting into the background.
Of course, he would go; and, equally of course, he would share the night
watch with her. One question he permitted himself, and it was not asked
until after they had reached the darkened mansion on the lake's edge and
were mounting the stair to the sick-room. Was Mr. Galbraith conscious?
Could he recognize any one?

"No," was the low-voiced response; and presently they had reached the
outer room of shaded lights, and the sleepy day nurse had been released,
and Margery was explaining the medicines to her watch sharer.

It was a simple matter, as she had said; the medicine from the larger
bottle was to be given in tea-spoonful doses on the even hour, and that
in the smaller, ten drops in a little water, on the alternating
half-hours.

"It's his heart chiefly, now," she explained, "and this drop-medicine is
for that. If you should forget to give it--but I know you won't forget.
There are books in the hall case, and you can sit in here and read. When
you are tired, come and tap at the door of my room and I'll take what
you leave."

While she was speaking the softly chiming clock in the lower hall struck
the half-hour. "I'll help you give him the first dose," she went on; and
he stood by and watched her as she dropped the heart-stimulant into a
spoon and diluted it with a little water. "Come," she said; and they
went together into the adjoining room.

Griswold had been hardening himself deliberately to look unmoved upon
what the shaded electric night-light in the farther room should reveal:
it was nothing more terrible than the sight of a drawn face, half-hidden
in the pillows; a face in which life and death still fought for the
mastery as they had fought on that other day when life, unhelped, would
have been the loser.

The small service was quickly rendered. Griswold lifted the sick man,
and his companion, deft and steady-handed, administered the stimulant.

"Ten drops; no more and no less; exactly on the half-hour: those are
Doctor Bertie's orders," she said, when they had withdrawn to the outer
room. And then: "Good-night, for a little while. Don't hesitate to call
me when you've had enough."

For so long as he could distinguish her light step in the corridor,
Griswold stood motionless as she had left him. Then he flung himself
into the nearest chair and covered his face with his hands.

       *       *       *       *       *

The quarter-hour passed, and after the three mellow strokes had died
away the silence grew slowly maddening. When inaction was no longer
bearable, Griswold sprang up and went to stand at the open window. The
summer night was hot and breathless. In the north-west a storm cloud was
creeping up into the sky, and he watched its black shadow climbing like
a terrifying threat of doom out of the illimitable and blotting out the
stars one by one.... "For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth
himself in vain...." Out of a childhood which seemed very far away and
unreal the words of the Psalmist came to ring in his ears like the
muffled tolling of a passing-bell. So it must be soon for all the
living; and whether a little sooner or a little later, what could it
matter? A breath more or less to be drawn; a longer or shorter
fluttering of the feeble heart; that was all.

The clock struck eleven, and mechanically he poured out the dose from
the larger bottle and gave it to the sick man. When it was done he left
the bedside and the inner room quickly and went back to the open window.
The air was thick and stifling, and when he sat down in the deep
window-seat he was gasping for breath. It was going to be harder than he
had thought it would, though now that the time had come he realized that
he had been subconsciously planning for it, preparing for it. And the
means which had been thrust into his hands could scarcely have been
simpler. He had only to sit still and do nothing--and no one would ever
know. He took up the small phial and held it to the light: ten drops, or
forty drops; they would neither be missed, nor counted if they should
remain.

The single chiming stroke of the quarter-past struck while he was
putting the bottle down, and he started as if the mellow cadence had
been a pistol shot. For fifteen minutes longer he could live and
breathe and be as other men are; and after that.... He saw himself
looking back upon the normal world from the new view-point, as he
fancied Cain might have looked back after the mark had been set upon his
brow. Would it really make the hideous, monstrous difference that all
men seemed to think it did? He would know, presently, when the revocable
should have become the irrevocable. He heard the sick man stir feebly,
and then the sound of his slow, labored breathing made itself felt,
rather than heard, in the crushing, stifling silence. How the minutes
dragged! He leaned his head against the window jamb and closed his eyes,
striving fiercely to drive forth the thronging thoughts; to make his
mind a blank. Gradually the effort succeeded. He was conscious of a
dull, throbbing, soothing pulse beating slow measures in his temples,
and a curious roaring as of distant cataracts in his ears; and after
that, nothing.

       *       *       *       *       *

A tempestuous thunder shower was lashing the trees on the lawn when he
awoke with a start and found Margery bending over him to close the
window. With every nerve a needle to prick him alive he dragged out his
watch. It was a quarter-past two. Miserably, wretchedly he pulled
himself together and stood up to face her, putting his hands on her
shoulders to make her look up at him.

"Margery, girl; do you know what I have done?--Oh, my God! I am a
murderer--a murderer at last!"

She turned her face away quickly.

"Oh, no, no, boy!--not meaning to be!" she murmured.

"What is the difference?" he demanded harshly. And then: "God knows--He
knows whether I meant it or not."

She looked up again, and, as once or twice before in his knowing of her,
he saw the dark eyes swimming.

"It was too hard; I shouldn't have asked it of you, Kenneth. I knew what
a cruel strain you've been under all these bad days. And there was no
harm done. I--I have been here a long time--ever since half-past eleven;
and I've been giving Mr. Galbraith his medicine. Now go down-stairs and
stretch out on the hall lounge. I'll run down and send you home as soon
as it stops raining."




XXXV

MARGERY'S ANSWER


"Well, it has come at last," said Raymer, passing a newly opened letter
of the morning delivery over to Griswold. "The railroad people are
taking their work away from us. I've been looking for that in every
mail."

Griswold glanced at the letter and handed it back. The burden of the
night of horrors was still lying heavily upon him, and his only comment
was a questioning, "Well?"

"I've been thinking," was the reply. "I know Atherton, the new president
of the Pineboro, pretty well; suppose I should run over to St. Paul and
see him--make it a personal plea. We have enough of the hoboes now to
run half-gangs; and perhaps, if I could make Atherton believe that we
are going to win----"

"You couldn't," Griswold interrupted, shortly. "And, besides, you have
told me yourself that Atherton is only a figurehead. Grierson's the
man."

At this, Raymer let go again.

"What's the use?" he said dejectedly. "We're down, and everything we do
merely prolongs the agony. Do you know that they tried to burn the plant
last night?"

"No; I hadn't heard."

"They did. It was just before the thunder storm. They had everything
fixed; a pile of kindlings laid in the corner back of the machine-shop
annex and the whole thing saturated with kerosene."

"Well, why didn't they do it?" queried Griswold, half-heartedly. After
the heavens have fallen, no mere terrestrial cataclysm can evoke a
thrill.

"That's a mystery. Something happened; just what, the watchman who had
the machine-shop beat couldn't tell. He says there was a flash of light
bright enough to blind him, and then a scrap of some kind. When he got
out of the shop and around to the place, there was no one there; nothing
but the pile of kindlings."

Griswold took up the letter from the railway people and read it again.
When he faced it down on Raymer's desk, he had closed with the
conclusion which had been thrusting itself upon him since the early
morning hour when he had picked his way among the sidewalk pools from
Mereside to upper Shawnee Street.

"You can still save yourself, Edward," he said, still with the colorless
note in his voice. And he added: "You know the way."

Raymer jerked his head out of his desk and swung around in the
pivot-chair.

"See here, Griswold; the less said about that at this stage of the game,
the better it will be for both of us!" he exploded. "I'm going to do as
I said I should, but not until this fight is settled, one way or the
other!"

Griswold did not retort in kind.

"The condition has already expired by limitation; the fight is as good
as settled now," he said, placably. "We are only making a hopeless
bluff. We can hold our forty or fifty tramp workmen just as long as we
pay their board over in town, and don't ask them to report for work. But
the day the shop whistle is blown, four out of every five will vanish.
We both know that."

"Then there is nothing for it but a receivership," was Raymer's gloomy
decision.

"Not without a miracle," Griswold admitted. "And the day of miracles is
past."

Thus the idealist, out of a depth of wretchedness and self-exprobration
hitherto unplumbed. But if he could have had even a momentary gift of
telepathic vision he might have seen a miracle at that moment in the
preliminary stage of its outworking.

The time was half-past nine; the place a grotto-like summer-house on the
Mereside lawn. The miracle workers were two: Margery Grierson, radiant
in the daintiest of morning house-gowns, and the man who had taken her
retainer. Miss Grierson was curiously examining a photographic print:
the pictured scene was a well-littered foundry yard with buildings
forming an angle in the near background. Against the buildings a pile of
shavings with kindlings showed quite clearly; and, stooping to ignite
the pile, was a man who had evidently looked up at, or just before, the
instant of camera-snapping. There was no mistaking the identity of the
man. He had a round, pig-jowl face; his bristling mustaches stood out
stiffly as if in sudden horror; and his hat was on the back of his head.

"It ain't very good," Broffin apologized. "The sun ain't high enough yet
to make a clear print. But you said 'hurry,' and I reckon it will do."

Miss Grierson nodded. "You caught him in the very act, didn't you?" she
said coolly. "What did he do?"

"Dropped things and jumped for the camera. But the flash had blinded
him, and, besides, the camera had been moved. I let him have a foot to
fall over, and he took it; after which I made a bluff at tryin' to hold
him. Lordy gracious! new ropes wouldn't 'a' held him, then. I'll bet
he's runnin' yet--what?"

"What did he hope to accomplish by setting fire to the works?"

"It was a frame-up to capture public sympathy. There's been a report
circulating 'round that Raymer and Griswold was goin' to put some o' the
ringleaders in jail, if they had to _make_ a case against 'em. Clancy
had it figured out that the fire'd be charged up to the owners,
themselves."

Miss Grierson was still examining the picture. "You made two of these
prints?" she asked.

"Yes; here's the other one--and the film."

"And you have the papers to make them effective?"

Broffin handed her a large envelope, unsealed. "You'll find 'em in
there. That part of it was a cinch. Your governor ought to fire that man
Murray. He was payin' Clancy in checks!"

Again Miss Grierson nodded.

"About the other matter?" she inquired. "Have you heard from your
messenger?"

Broffin produced another envelope. It had been through the mails and
bore the Duluth postmark.

"Affidavits was the best we could do there," he said. "My man worked it
to go with MacFarland as the driver of the rig. They saw some mighty
fine timber, but it happened to be on the wrong side of the St. Louis
County line. He's a tolerably careful man, and he verified the
landmarks."

"Affidavits will do," was the even-toned rejoinder. Then: "These papers
are all in duplicate?"

"Everything in pairs--just as you ordered."

Miss Grierson took an embroidered chamois-skin money-book from her bosom
and began to open it. Broffin raised his hand.

"Not any more," he objected. "You overpaid me that first evening in
front of the Winnebago."

"You needn't hesitate," she urged. "It's my own money."

"I've had a-plenty."

"Enough so that we can call it square?"

"Yes, and more than enough."

"Then I can only thank you," she said, rising.

He knew that he was being dismissed, but the one chance in a thousand
had yet to be tested.

"Just a minute, Miss Grierson," he begged. "I've done you right in this
business, haven't I?"

"You have."

"I said I didn't want any more money, and I don't. But there's one other
thing. Do you know what I'm here in this little jay town of yours for?"

"Yes; I have known it for a long time."

"I thought so. You knew it that day out at the De Soto, when you was
tellin' Mr. Raymer a little story that was partly true and partly made
up--what?"

"And when you were sitting behind the window curtains listening," she
laughed. "Yes; I knew it then. What about it?"

"I've been wonderin' as I set here, if there was anything on the top
side of God's green earth that'd persuade you to tell me how much o'
that story was made up."

She was smiling deliciously when she said: "You are from the South, Mr.
Broffin, and I didn't suppose a Southerner could be so unchivalrous as
to suspect a lady of fibbing."

He shook his head. "I wish you'd tell me, Miss Grierson. I'm in pretty
bad on this thing, and if----"

"I can tell you what to do, if that will help you."

"It might," he allowed.

"Go away and take some other commission. It's a cold trail, Mr.
Broffin."

"But you won't say that Griswold isn't the man?"

"It is not for me to say. But Miss Farnham says he isn't, and Mr.
Galbraith--you tried him, didn't you? What more do you want?"

"I want _you_ to say he isn't; then I'll go away."

"You may put me in jail for contempt of court, if you like," she jested.
"I refuse to testify. But I will tell you what you asked to know--if
that will do any good. Every word of the story about Mr. Griswold--the
story that you overheard, you know--was true; every single word of it.
Do you suppose I should have dared to embroider it the least little
bit--with you sitting right there at my back?"

"But you did think for a while that he might be the man--what?"

"Yes; I did think so--for a while."

Broffin got up and took a half-burned cigar from the ledge of the
summer-house where he had carefully laid it at the beginning of the
interview.

"You've got me down," he confessed, with a good-natured grin. "The man
that plays a winnin' hand against you has got to get up before sun in
the morning and hold _all_ trumps, Miss Grierson--to say nothin' of
being a mighty good bluffer, on the side." Then he switched suddenly.
"How's Mr. Galbraith this morning?"

"He is very low, but he is conscious again. He has asked us to wire for
the cashier of his bank to come up."

Broffin's eyes narrowed.

"The cashier is sick and can't come," he said.

"Well, some one in authority will come, I suppose."

Once more Broffin was thinking in terms of speed. Johnson, the paying
teller, was next in rank to the cashier. If he should be the one to come
to Wahaska....

"If you haven't anything else for me to do, I reckon I'll be going," he
said, hastily, and forthwith made his escape. The telegraph office was a
good ten minutes' walk from the lake front, and in the light of what
Miss Grierson had just told him, the minutes were precious.

Something less than a half-hour after Broffin's hurried departure, Miss
Grierson, coated and gauntleted, came down the Mereside carriage steps
to take the reins of the big trap horse from Thorsen's hands. Contrary
to her usual custom, she avoided Main Street and drove around past the
college grounds to come by quieter thoroughfares to the industrial
district beyond the railroad tracks.

For the first time in a riotous week, Pottery Flat was outwardly
peaceful and its narrow streets were practically empty. Just what this
portended, Margery did not know; but she found out when she turned into
the street upon which the Raymer property fronted. Smoke was pouring
from the tall central stack of the plant, and it had evidently provoked
a sudden and wrathful gathering of the clans. The sidewalks were filled
with angry workmen, and an excited argument was going forward at one of
the barred gates between the locked-out men and a watchman inside of the
yard.

The crowd let the trap pass without hindrance. However coldly Lake
Boulevard and upper Shawnee Street might regard Miss Grierson, there was
no enmity in the glances of the Flat dwellers--and for good reasons. In
want, Miss Margery had poured largesse out of a liberal hand; and in
sickness she had many times proved herself the veritable good angel that
some people called her.

It was one of the strikers who offered to hold the big Englishman when
the magnate's daughter sprang from the trap at the office door, and for
the young fellow who offered she had a smile and a pleasant word. "I
wouldn't trouble you to do that, Malcolm; but if you'll lead him along
to that post and hitch him, I'll be much obliged," she said.

Though it was the first time she had been in the new offices, she seemed
to know where to find what she sought; and when Raymer took his face out
of his desk, she was standing on the threshold of the open door and
smiling across at him.

"May I come in?" she asked; and when he fairly bubbled over in the
effort to make her understand how welcome she was: "No; I mustn't sit
down, because if I do, I shall stay too long--and this is a business
call. Where is Mr. Griswold?"

"He went up-town a little while ago, and I wish to goodness he'd come
back. You'd think, to look out of the windows, that we were due to have
battle and murder and sudden death, wouldn't you? It's all because we
have put a little fire under one battery of boilers. They tried to burn
us out last night, and I'm going to carry steam enough for the fire
pumps, if the heavens fall."

"You have been having a great deal of trouble, haven't you?" she said,
sympathetically. "I'm sorry, and I've come to help you cure it."

Raymer shook his head despondently.

"I'm afraid it has gone past the curing point," he said.

"Oh, no, it hasn't. I have discovered the remedy and I've brought it
with me." She took a sealed envelope from the inside pocket of her
driving-coat and laid it on the desk before him. "I'm going to ask you
to lock that up in your office safe for a little while, just as it is,"
she went on. "If there are no signs of improvement in the sick situation
by three o'clock, you are to open it--you and Mr. Griswold--and read the
contents. Then you will know exactly what to do, and how to go about
it."

Her lip was trembling when she got through, and he saw it.

"What have you done, Margery?" he asked gently. "If it is something that
hurts you----"

"Don't!" she pleaded; "you mu-mustn't break my nerve just at the time
when I'm going to need every shred of it. Do as I say, and please,
_please_ don't ask any questions!"

She was going then, but he got before her and shut the door and put his
back against it.

"I don't know what you have done, but I can guess," he said, lost now to
everything save the intoxicating joy of the barrier-breakers. "You have
a heart of gold, Margery, and I----"

"Please don't," she said, trying to stop him; but he would not listen.

"No; before that envelope is opened, before I can possibly know what it
contains, I'm going to ask you one question in spite of your
prohibition; and I'm going to ask it now because, afterward, I may
not--you may not--that is, perhaps it won't be possible for me to ask,
or for you to listen. I love you, Margery; I----"

She was looking up at him with the faintest shadow of a smile
lurking in the depths of the alluring eyes. And her lips were no
longer tremulous when she said: "Oh, no, you don't; I know just how
you feel; you are excited, and--and impulsive, and there's a sort of
getting-ready-to-be-grateful feeling roaming around in you, and all
that. If I were as mean as some people think I am, I might take
advantage of all this, mightn't I? But I sha'n't. Won't you open the
door and let me go? It's _very_ important."

"Heavens, Margery! don't make a joke of it!" he burst out. "Can't you
see that I mean it? Girl, girl, I want you--I need you!"

This time she laughed outright. Then she grew suddenly grave.

"My dear friend, you don't know what you are saying. The gate that you
are trying to break down opens upon nothing but misery and wretchedness.
If I loved you as a woman ought to love her lover, for your sake and
for my own I should still say no--a thousand times no! Now will you open
the door and let me go?"

He turned and fumbled for the door-knob like a man in a daze.

"Don't you--don't you think you might learn to--to think of me in that
way?--after a while?" he pleaded.

He had opened the door a little way, and she slipped past him. But in
the corridor she turned and laughed at him again.

"I am going to cure you--you, personally, as well as the sick
situation--Mr. Raymer," she said flippantly. Then, mimicking him as a
spoiled child might have done: "I might possibly learn to--think of
you--in that way--after a while. But I could never, never, _never_ learn
to love your mother and your sister."

And with that spiteful thrust she left him.




XXXVI

THE GRAY WOLF


As it chanced, Jasper Grierson was in the act of concluding a long and
apparently satisfactory telephone conversation with his agent in Duluth
at the moment when the door of his private room opened and his daughter
entered.

As on a former occasion, she went to sit in the window until the way to
free speech should be open, and she could not well help hearing the
closing words of the long-distance conference.

"You sit tight in the boat; that's all you've got to do," her father was
saying. "Keep the young fellow with you as long as you can; the other
man is too sick to talk business, right now. When you can't hold the
young one any longer, let me know. We'll play the hand out as it lays.
Get that? I say, we'll play the hand out as it lays."

He had hung the receiver on its hook and was pushing the bracketted
telephone-set aside when Margery crossed the room swiftly and placed an
envelope, the counterpart of the one left with Raymer, on the desk.

"There is your notice to quit," she said calmly. "You threw me down and
gave me the double-cross the other day, and now I've come back at you."

Another man might have hastened to meet the crisis. But the gray wolf
was of a different mettle. He let the envelope lie untouched until after
he had pulled out a drawer in the desk, found his box of cigars, and had
leisurely selected and lighted one of the fat black monstrosities. When
he tore the envelope across, the photographic print fell out, and he
studied it carefully for many seconds before he read the accompanying
documents. For a little time after he had tossed the papers aside there
was a silence that bit. Then he said, slowly:

"So that's your raise, is it? Where does the game stand, right now?"

"You stand to lose."

Again the biting silence; and then: "You don't think I'm fool enough to
give you back your ammunition so that you can use it on me, do you?"

"Those papers and that picture are copies: the originals are in a sealed
envelope in Mr. Raymer's safe. If you haven't taken your hands off of
Mr. Raymer's throat by three o'clock this afternoon, the envelope will
be opened."

Jasper Grierson's teeth met in the marrow of the fat cigar. Equally
without heat and without restraint, he stripped her of all that was
womanly, pouring out upon her a flood of foul epithets and vile names
garnished with bitter, brutal oaths. She shrank from the crude and
savage upbraidings as if the words had been hot irons to touch the bare
flesh, but at the end of it she was still facing him hardily.

"Calling me bad names doesn't change anything," she pointed out, and
her tone reflected something of his own elemental contempt for the
euphemisms. "You have five hours in which to make Mr. Raymer understand
that you have stopped trying to smash him. Wouldn't it be better to
begin on that? You can curse me out any time, you know."

Jasper Grierson's rage fit, or the mud-volcano manifestation of it,
passed as suddenly as it had broken out. Swinging heavily in his chair
he took up the papers again and reread them thoughtfully.

"You had a spotter working this up, I suppose: who is he, and where is
he?" he demanded.

"That is my affair. He was a high-priced man and he did his work well.
You can see that for yourself."

Once more the papers were tossed aside and the big chair swung slowly to
face the situation.

"Let's see what you want: show up your hand."

"I have shown it. Take the prop of your backing from behind this labor
trouble, and let Mr. Raymer settle with his men on a basis of good-will
and fair dealing."

"Is that all?"

"No. You must cancel this pine-land deal. You have broken bread with Mr.
Galbraith as a friend, and I'm not going to let you be worse than an
Arab."

Grierson's shaggy brows met in a reflective frown, and when he spoke the
bestial temper was rising again.

"When this is all over, and you've gone to live with Raymer, I'll kill
him," he said, with an out-thrust of the hard jaw; adding: "You know me,
Madge."

"I thought I did," was the swift retort. "But it was a mistake. And as
for taking it out on Mr. Raymer, you'd better wait until I go 'to live
with him,' as you put it. Besides, this isn't Yellow Dog Gulch. They
hang people here."

"You little she-devil! If you push me into this thing, you'd better get
Raymer, or somebody, to take you in. You'll be out in the street!"

"I have thought of that, too," she said, coolly; "about quitting you.
I'm sick of it all--the getting and the spending and the crookedness.
I'd put the money--yours and mine--in a pile and set fire to it, if some
decent man would give me a calico dress and a chance to cook for two."

"Raymer, for instance?" the father cut in, in heavy mockery.

"Mr. Raymer has asked me to marry him, if you care to know," she struck
back.

"Oho! So that's the milk in the cocoanut, is it? You sold me out to buy
in with him!"

"You may put it that way, if you like; I don't care." She was drawing on
her driving-gloves methodically and working the fingers into place, and
there were sullen fires in the brooding eyes.

"I've been thinking it was the other one--the book-writer," said the
father. Then, without warning: "He's a damned crook."

The daughter went on smoothing the wrinkles out of the fingers of her
gloves. "What makes you think so?" she inquired, with indifference, real
or skilfully assumed.

"He's got too much money to be straight. I've been keeping cases on
him."

"Never mind Mr. Griswold," she interposed. "He is my friend, and I
suppose that is enough to make you hate him. About this other matter:
ten minutes before three o'clock this afternoon I shall go back to Mr.
Raymer. If he tells me that his troubles are straightening themselves
out, I'll get the papers."

"You'll bring 'em here to me?"

"Some day; after I'm sure that you have broken off the deal with Mr.
Galbraith."

Jasper Grierson let his daughter get as far as the door before he
stopped her with a blunt-pointed arrow of contempt.

"I suppose you've fixed it up to marry that college-sharp dub so that
his mother and sister can rub it into you right?" he sneered.

"You can suppose again," she returned, shortly. "If I should marry him,
it would be out of pure spite to those women."

"If?"

"Yes, 'if.' Because, when he asked me, I told him No. You weren't
counting on that, were you?" And having fired this final shot of
contradiction she departed.

After Miss Grierson had driven home from the bank between ten and eleven
in the morning, an admiring public saw her no more until just before
bank-closing hours in the afternoon. Broffin was among those who made
obeisance to her as she passed down Main Street in the basket phaeton
between half-past two and three; and a minute later he abandoned his
chair on the hotel porch to keep the phaeton in view and to mark its
route.

"It's Raymer, all right, and not the other one," he mused when the
little vehicle had gone rocketing over the railroad crossing to take the
turn toward the Iron Works. "The iron-man is the duck she's tryin' to
help out of the labor-rookus. She was over there this morning, and she's
goin' there again, right now."

As the phaeton sped along through the over-crossing suburb there were
signs of an armistice apparent, even before the battle-field was
reached. Pottery Flat was populated again, and the groups of men bunched
on the street corners were arguing peacefully. Miss Grierson pulled up
at one of the corners and beckoned to the young iron-moulder who had
offered to be her horse-holder on the morning visit.

"Anything new, Malcolm?" she asked.

"You bet your sweet life!" said the young moulder, meeting her, as most
men did, on a plane of perfect equality and frankness. "We was hoodooed
to beat the band, and Mr. Raymer's got us, comin' and goin'. There
wasn't no orders from the big Federation, at all; and that crooked guy,
Clancy, was a fake!"

"He has gone?" she said.

"He'd better be. If he shows himself 'round here again, there's goin' to
be a mix-up."

Miss Grierson drove on, and at the Iron Works there were more of the
peaceful indications. The gates were open, and a switching-engine from
the railroad yards was pushing in a car-load of furnace coal. By all the
signs the trouble flood was abating.

Raymer saw her when she drove under his window and calmly made a
hitching-post of the clerk who went out to see what she wanted. A moment
later she came down the corridor to stand in the open doorway of the
manager's room.

"I'm back again," she said, and her manner was that of the dainty
soubrette with whom the audience falls helplessly in love at first
sight.

"No, you're not," Raymer denied; "you won't be until you come in and sit
down."

She entered to take the chair he was placing for her, and the soubrette
manner fell away from her like a garment flung aside.

"You are still alone?" she asked.

"Yes; Griswold hasn't shown up since morning. I don't know what has
become of him."

"And the labor trouble: is that going to be settled?"

He looked away and ran his fingers through his hair as one still puzzled
and bewildered. "Some sort of a miracle has been wrought," he said. "A
little while ago a committee came to talk over terms of surrender. It
seems that the whole thing was the result of a--of a mistake."

"Yes," she returned quietly, "it was just that--a mistake." And then:
"You are going to take them back?"

"Certainly. The plant will start up again in the morning." Then his
curiosity broke bounds. "I can't understand it. How did you work the
miracle?"

"Perhaps I didn't work it."

"I know well enough you did, in some way."

She dismissed the matter with a toss of the pretty head. "What
difference does it make so long as you are out of the deep water and in
a place where you can wade ashore? You _can_ wade ashore now, can't
you?"

He nodded. "This morning I should have said that we couldn't; but now--"
he reached over to his desk and handed her a letter to which was pinned
a telegram less than an hour old.

She read the letter first. It was a curt announcement of the withdrawal
of the Pineboro Railroad's repair work. The telegram was still briefer:
"Disregard my letter of yesterday"; this, and the signature, "Atherton."
The small plotter returned the correspondence with a little sigh of
relief. It had been worse than she had thought, and it was now better
than she had dared hope.

"I must be going," she said, rising. "If you will give me my envelope?"

He crossed to the safe and got it for her. His curiosity was still
keen-edged, but he beat it back manfully.

"I wish you wouldn't hurry," he said hospitably. He was searching the
changeful eyes for the warrant to say more, but he could not find it.

"Yes, I really must," she insisted. "You know we have a sick man at
home, and----"

"Oh, yes; how is Mr. Galbraith getting along? He has been having a
pretty hard time of it, hasn't he?"

"Very hard. It is still doubtful if his life can be saved."

"He is conscious?"

"He has been to-day."

"And he understands his condition?"

"Perfectly. He had us wire for some of his bank people this morning. The
cashier can't come, but he is sending a Mr. Johnson--the paying teller,
I believe he is."

"Poor old man!" said Raymer, and his sympathy was real.

She was moving toward the door, and he went with her.

"I know you are not entertaining now--with Mr. Galbraith to be cared
for; but I'd like to come and see you, if I may?" he said, when he had
gone with her through the outer office and the moment of leave-taking
had arrived.

"Why not?" she asked frankly. "You have always been welcome, and you
always will be."

He hesitated, and a blond man's flush crept up under his honest eyes.
"I've been hoping all day that you didn't really mean what you said this
morning--about my mother and sister, you know," he ventured.

"Yes," she affirmed relentlessly; "I did mean it."

"But some day you will change your mind--when you come to know them
better."

"Shall I?" she said, with a ghost of a smile. "Perhaps you are
right--when I come to know them better."

He was obliged to let it go at that; but when they reached the phaeton,
and the horse-holding clerk had been relieved, he spoke of another
matter.

"I'm a little worried about Kenneth," he told her. "He came down this
morning looking positively wretched, but he wouldn't admit that he was
sick. Have you seen much of him lately?"

"Not very much"--guardedly. "Did you say he had gone home?"

"I don't know where he has gone. He left here about half an hour before
you came, and I haven't seen him since."

"And you are worried because he doesn't look well?"

"Not altogether on that account. I'm afraid he is in deep water of some
kind. I never saw a person change as he has in the past week or so. You
know him pretty well, and what a big heart he has?"

She nodded, half-mechanically.

"Well, there have been times lately when I've been afraid he'd kill
somebody--in this squabble of ours, you know. He has been going
armed--which was excusable enough, under the circumstances--and night
before last, when we were walking up-town together, I had all I could do
to keep him from taking a pot-shot at a fellow who, he thought, was
following us. I don't know but I'm taking all sorts of an unfair
advantage of him, telling you this behind his back, but----"

"No; I'm glad you have told me. Maybe I can help."

He put her into the low basket seat, and tucked the dust-robe around her
carefully. While he was doing it he looked up into her face and said:
"I'd love you awfully hard for what you have done to-day--if you'd let
me."

It was like her to smile straight into his eyes when she answered him.

"When you can say that--in just that way--to the right woman, you'll
find a great happiness lying in wait for you, Edward, dear." And then
she spoke to the Morgan mare and distance came between.

As once before, in the earlier hours of the same day, Miss Grierson took
the roundabout way between the Raymer plant and Mereside, making the
circuit which took her through the college grounds and brought her out
at the head of upper Shawnee Street. The Widow Holcomb was sitting on
her front porch, placidly crocheting, when the phaeton drew up at the
curb.

"Mr. Griswold," said the phaeton's occupant. "May I trouble you to tell
him that I'd like to speak to him a moment?"

Mrs. Holcomb, friend of the Raymers, the Farnhams, and the Oswalds, and
own cousin to the Barrs, was of the perverse minority; and, apart from
this, she had her own opinion of a young woman who would wait at the
door of a young man's boarding-house and take him off for a night drive
to goodness only knew where, and from which he did not return until
goodness only knew when. So there was no stitch missed in the crocheting
when she said, stiffly: "Mr. Griswold isn't in. He hasn't been home
since morning."

Miss Grierson drove on, and the most casual observer might have remarked
the strained tightening of the lips and the two red spots which came and
went in the damask-peach cheeks. But it was not until she had reached
Mereside, and had gained the shelter of the deserted library, that
speech came.

"O pitiful Christ!" she sobbed, dropping into a chair and hiding her
face in the crook of her arm; "he's done it at last!--he's trying to
hide, and that's what they've been waiting for! _And I don't know where
to look!_"

But Matthew Broffin, tilting lazily in his chair on the down-town hotel
porch, knew very well where to look, and he was watching the one outlet
of the hiding-place as an alert, though outwardly disregardful,
house-cat watches a mouse's hole.




XXXVII

THE QUALITY OF MERCY


On no less an authority than that of the great doctor who came again
from Chicago for a second consultation with Doctor Farnham, Andrew
Galbraith owed his life during the two days following his return to
consciousness to the unremitting care and devotion of one person.

Seconding the efforts of the physicians, and skilfully directing those
of the nurses, Margery threw herself into the vicarious struggle with
the generous self-sacrifice which counts neither cost nor loss; and on
the third day she had her reward. Her involuntary guest and charge was
distinctly better, and again, so the two doctors declared, the balance
was inclining slightly toward recovery.

It was in the afternoon of this third day, when she had been reading to
him, at his own request, the sayings of the Man on the Mount, that he
referred for the first time to the details of the accident which had so
nearly blotted him out. Upon his asking, she related the few and simple
facts of the rescue, modestly minimizing her own part in it, and giving
her companion in the catboat full credit.

"The writer-man," he said thoughtfully, when she had finished telling
him how Griswold had worked over him in the boat, and how he would not
give up. "I remember; you fetched him out to the hotel with you one day:
no, you needna fear I'll be forgetting him." Then, with a shrewd look
out of the steel-gray eyes: "How long have you been knowing him, Maggie,
child?"

"Oh, for quite a long time," she hastened to say. "He came here, sick
and helpless, one day last spring, and--well, there isn't any hospital
here in Wahaska, you know, so we took him in and helped him get over the
fever, or whatever it was. This was his room while he stayed with us."

Andrew Galbraith wagged his head on the pillow.

"I know," he said. "And ye're doing it again for a poor auld man whose
siller has never bought him anything like the love you're spending on
him. You're everybody's good angel, I'm thinking, Maggie, lassie."
Though he did not realize it, his sickness was bringing him day by day
nearer to his far-away boyhood in the Inverness-shire hills, and it was
easy to slip into the speech of the mother-tongue. Then, after a long
pause, he went on: "He wasna wearing a beard, a red beard trimmed down
to a spike--this writer-man, when ye found him, was he?"

She shook her head. "No; I have never seen him with a beard."

The sick man turned his face to the wall, and after a time she heard him
repeating softly the words which she had just read to him. "But if ye
forgive not men ... neither will your Father forgive...." And again,
"Judge not that ye be not judged." When he turned back to her there were
new lines of suffering in the gray old face.

"I'm sore beset, child; sore beset," he sighed. "You were telling me
that MacFarland and Johnson will be here to-night?"

"Yes; they should both reach Wahaska this evening."

Another pause, and at the end of it: "That man Broffin: you'll remember
you asked me one day who he was, and I tell 't ye he was a special
officer for the bank. Is he still here?"

"He is; I saw him on the street this morning."

Again Andrew Galbraith turned his face away, and he was quiet for so
long a time that she thought he had fallen asleep. But he had not.

"You're thinking something of the writer-man, lassie? Don't mind the
clavers of an auld man who never had a chick or child of his ain."

Her answer was such as a child might have made. She lifted the
big-jointed hand on the coverlet and pressed it softly to her flushed
cheek, and he understood.

"I thought so; I was afraid so," he said, slowly. "You say you have
known him a long time: it canna have been long enough, bairnie."

"But it is," she insisted, loyally. "I know him better than he knows
himself; oh, very much better."

"Ye know the good in him, maybe; there's good in all men, I'm thinking
now, though there was a time when I didna believe it."

"I know the good and the bad--and the bad is only the good turned upside
down."

Again the sick man wagged his head on the pillow and closed his eyes.

"Ye're a loving lassie, Maggie, and that's a' there is to it," he
commented; and after another interval: "What must be, must be. We spoke
of this man Broffin: I must see him before Johnson comes. Can ye get him
for me, Maggie, child?"

She nodded and went down-stairs to the telephone, returning almost
immediately.

"I was fortunate enough to catch him at the hotel. He will be here in a
few minutes," was the word she brought; and Galbraith thanked her with
his eyes.

"When he comes, ye'll let me see him alone--just for a few minutes," he
begged; and beyond that he said no more.

It was after the click of the gate latch had announced Broffin's arrival
that Margery drew the shades to shut out the glare of the afternoon sun,
lowering the one at the bed's head so that the light no longer fell upon
the instruments of the small house-telephone-set mounted upon the wall
beside the door.

"Mr. Broffin is here, and I'll send him up," she said. "But you mustn't
let him stay long, and you mustn't try to talk too much."

The sick man promised, and as she was going away she turned to repeat
the caution. Andrew Galbraith's eyes were closed in weariness, and he
did not see that she was standing with her back to the wall while she
admonished him, or that, when she had gone to send the visitor up, the
ear-piece of the house-telephone-set had been detached from its hook and
left dangling by its wire cord.

Miss Grierson went on into the library after she had met the detective
at the door and had told him how to find the up stairs room. When the
sound of a cautiously closed door told her that Broffin had entered the
sick-room, she snatched the receiver of the library house 'phone from
its hook and held it to her ear. For a little time keen anxiety wrote
its sign manual in the knitted brows and the tightly pressed lips. Then
she smiled and the dark eyes grew softly radiant. "The dear old saint!"
she whispered; "the dear, _dear_ old saint!" And when Broffin came down
a few minutes later, she went to open the hall door for him, serenely
demure and with honey on her tongue, as befitted the role of
"everybody's good angel."

"Did you find him worse than you feared, or better than you hoped?" she
asked.

"He's mighty near the edge, I should say--what? But you never can tell.
Some of these old fellows can claw back to the top o' the hill after all
the doctors in creation have thrown up their hands. I've seen it. What
does Doc Farnham say?"

"What he always says; 'while there's life, there's hope.'"

Broffin nodded and went his way down the walk, stopping at the gate to
take up the cigar he had hidden on his arrival.

"So Galbraith's out of it, lock, stock and barrel," he muttered, as he
strode thoughtfully townward. "I reckoned it'd be that-a-way, as soon as
I heard the story o' that shipwreck. And now I ain't so blamed sure that
it's Raymer a-holdin' the fort in them pretty black eyes. The old man
talked like a man that had just been honeyfugled and talked over and
primed plum' up to the muzzle. Why the blue blazes can't she take her
iron-moulder fellow and be satisfied? She can't swing to _both_ of 'em.
Ump!--the old man wanted me to skip out on a wild-goose chase to 'Frisco
in that bond business, and take the first train! Sure, I'll go--but not
to-day; oh, no, by grapples; not this day!"

It was possibly an hour beyond Broffin's visit when Margery, having
successfully read the sick man to sleep, tiptoed out of the room and
went below stairs to shut herself into the hall telephone closet. The
number she asked for was that of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works,
and Raymer, himself, answered the call.

"Are you awfully busy?" she asked.

"Up to my chin--yes. But that doesn't count if I can do anything for
you."

"Have you heard anything yet from Mr.--from our friend?"

"Not a word. But I'm not worrying any more now."

"Why aren't you?"

"Because I've been remembering that he is the happy--or
unhappy--possessor of the 'artistic temperament' and that accounts for
anything and everything. I'd forgotten that for a few minutes, you
know."

"Well?" she said, with the faintest possible accent of impatience.

"He has gone off somewhere to plug away on that book of his; I'm sure of
it. And he hasn't gone very far. I'm inclined to believe that Mrs.
Holcomb knows where he is--only she won't tell. And somebody else knows,
too."

"Who is the somebody else?"

Though the wire was in a measure public, Raymer risked a single word.

"Charlotte."

None of the sudden passion that leaped into Margery Grierson's eyes was
suffered to find its way into her voice when she said: "What makes you
think that?"

"Oh, a lot of little things. I was over at the house last night, and
there is some sort of a tea-pot tempest going on; I couldn't make out
just what. But from the way things shaped up, I gathered that our friend
was wanted in Lake Boulevard, and wanted bad--for some reason or other.
I had to promise that I'd try to dig him up, before I got away."

"Well?" went the questioning word over the wires, and this time the
impatient accent was unconcealed.

"I promised; but this morning Doctor Bertie called me up to say that it
was all right; that I needn't trouble myself."

"And I needn't have troubled you," said the voice at the Mereside
transmitter. "Excuse _me_, as Hank Billingsly used to say when he
happened to shoot the wrong man. Come over when you feel like it--and
have time. You mustn't forget that you owe me two calls. Good-by."

After Margery Grierson had let herself out of the stifling little closet
under the hall stair, she went into the darkened library and sat for a
long time staring at the cold hearth. It was a crooked world, and just
now it was a sharply cruel one. There was much to be read between the
lines of the short telephone talk with Edward Raymer. The trap was
sprung and its jaws were closing; and in his extremity Kenneth Griswold
was turning, not to the woman who had condoned and shielded and paid the
costly price, but to the other.

"Dear God!" she said softly, when the prolonged stare had brought the
quick-springing tears to her eyes; "and I--_I_ could have kept him
safe!"




XXXVIII

THE PENDULUM-SWING


To a man seeking only to escape from himself, all roads are equal and
all destinations likely to prove uniformly disappointing. Turning his
back upon the Iron Works in the day of defeat, with no very clear idea
of what he should do or where he should go, Griswold pushed through the
strikers' picket lines, and, avoiding the militant suburb, drifted by
way of sundry outlying residence streets and a country road to the high
ground back of the city.

In deserting Raymer he was actuated by no motive of disloyalty. On the
contrary, so much of the motive as had any bearing upon his relations
with the young iron-founder sprang from a generous impulse to free
Raymer from an incubus. If it were the curse of the Midas-touch to turn
all things to gold, it seemed to be his own peculiar curse to turn the
gold to dross; to leave behind him a train of disaster, defeat, and
tragic depravity. The plunge into the labor conflict had merely served
to afford another striking example of his inability to break the evil
spell, and Raymer could well spare him.

On the long tramp to the hills the events of the past few months
marshalled themselves in accusing review. No human being, save one, of
all those with whom he had come in contact since the day of
dragon-bearding in the New Orleans bank had escaped the contaminating
touch, and each in turn had suffered loss. The man Gavitt had given his
name and identity; the mate of the _Belle Julie_ had sacrificed what
little respect he may have had for law and order by becoming,
potentially, at least, a criminal accessory. The little Irish cab-driver
had sold himself for a price; and the negro deck-hand had earned his
mess of fried fish. The single exception was Charlotte Farnham, and he
told himself that she had escaped only because she had done her duty as
she saw it.

And as the bedeviling thing had begun, so it had continued, losing none
of its potency for evil. In the little world of Wahaska, which was to
have been the theatre of Utopian demonstration, the curse had persisted.
The money, used with the loftiest intentions, had served only as a means
to an end, and the end had proved to be the rearing of an apparently
impassable wall of bitter antagonism between master and men. And the
secret of the money's origin and acquisition, which was to have been so
easily cast aside and ignored, had become a soul-sickness incurable and
even contagious. Griswold was beginning to suspect that it had attacked
Margery Grierson; that it had subconsciously, if not otherwise, thrust
itself into Charlotte Farnham's life; and the night of horror so lately
past had shown him into what depths it could plunge its wretched
guardian and slave.

Now that the plunge had been taken and he had been made to understand
that he must henceforth reckon with a base and cowardly under-self which
would not stop short of the most heinous crime, he told himself that he
must have time to think--to plan.

Caring nothing for its roughness, and scarcely noting the direction in
which it was leading him, he followed the country road in its winding
descent into a valley forest of oaks. After an hour of aimless tramping
he began to have occasional near-hand glimpses of the lake; and a little
farther along he came out upon the main-travelled road leading to the
summer-resort hotel at the head of De Soto Bay.

Still without any definite purpose in mind he pushed on, and upon
reaching the hotel he went in and registered for a room. The luncheon
hour was past, but not even the long tramp had given him an appetite.
Choosing the quietest corner of the lake-facing veranda he tried to
smoke; but the tobacco had lost its flavor, and a longing for completer
solitude drove him to his room. Here he drew the window shades and lay
down, deliberately wishing that he might fall asleep and wake in some
less poignant world; and since the week of strife had been cutting
deeply into the nights, the first half of the wish presently came true.
While the poignancies were still asserting themselves acutely, sleep
stole upon him, and when he awoke it was evening and a cheerful clamor
in the dining-room beneath told him that it was dinner-time.

It is a trite saying that many a gulf, seemingly impassable, has been
safely bridged in sleep. Bathed, refreshed and with the tramping stains
removed, Griswold went down to dinner with the lost appetite regained. A
leisurely hour spent in the restorative atmosphere of the well-filled
dining-room added its uplift, and at the end of it the troublesome
perplexities and paradoxes had withdrawn--at least far enough so that
they could be held in the artistic perspective. Afterward, during the
cigar-smoking on the cool veranda, he struck out his plan. In the
morning he would send in town to Mrs. Holcomb for a few necessaries, and
telephone to Raymer. After which, he would try what a fallow day or two
would do for him; an interval in which he could weigh and measure and
think, and possibly recover the lost sense of proportion.

As the plan was conceived, so it was carried out. Early on the following
day he sent a note to Mrs. Holcomb by one of the Inn employees; but the
copy of the _Daily Wahaskan_ laid beside his breakfast plate made it
unnecessary to telephone Raymer. The paper had a full account of the
sudden ending of the lock-out and the resumption of work in the Raymer
plant, and he read it with a curious stirring of self-compassion. As he
had reasoned it out, there was only one way in which the result could
have been attained so quickly. Had Raymer taken that way, in spite of
his wrathful rejection of the suggestion? Doubtless he had; and on the
heels of that conclusion came a sense of deprivation that was fairly
appalling, and the healthy breakfast appetite vanished. Griswold knew
what it meant, or he thought he did. Margery Grierson was gone out of
his life--gone beyond recall.

After that, there was all the better reason why he should grapple with
himself in the fallow interval; and for two complete days he was lost,
even to the small world of the summer resort, tramping for hours in the
lake shore forests or drifting about in one of the hotel skiffs, and
returning to the Inn only to eat and sleep when hunger or weariness
constrained him. On the whole, the discipline was good. He flattered
himself that the sense of proportion was returning slowly, and with it
some saner impulses. Truly, it had been his misfortune to be obliged to
compromise with evil to some extent, and to involve others, but was not
that rather due to the ineradicable faults of an imperfect social system
than to any basic defect in his own theories? And was not the same
imperfect social system partly responsible for the _quasi_-criminal
attitude which had been forced upon him? He was willing to believe it;
willing, also, to believe that he could rise above the constraining
forces and be the man he wished to be. That he could so rise was proved,
he decided, on the morning of the third day, when he chanced to overhear
the hotel clerk telling the man whose room was across the corridor from
his own that Andrew Galbraith still had a fighting chance for life. In
the pleasant glow of the high resolve the news awakened none of the
murderous promptings, but rather the generous hope that it might be
true.

It was late in the afternoon of this third day, upon his return from a
long pull in the borrowed skiff around the group of islands in the upper
and unfrequented part of the lake, that he found a note awaiting him. It
was from Miss Farnham, and its brevity, no less than its urgency,
stirred him apprehensively, bringing a suggestive return of the furtive
fierceness which he promptly fought down. "I must see you before eight
o'clock this evening. It is of the last importance," was the wording of
the note; and the heavy underscoring of the "last," and a certain
tremulous characteristic in the handwriting, stressed the urgency.

Griswold thrust the note into his pocket and made his preparations to go
to town, still fighting down the furtive malevolence which was unnerving
him; fighting also an unshakable premonition that his hour had come.
Once, before the Inn brake was ready to make its evening trip to Wahaska
and the railway station, the premonition gripped him so benumbingly that
he was sorely tempted. There was another railroad fourteen miles to the
westward; a line running a fast day-train to the north with connections
for Winnipeg. One of the Inn guests was driving over to catch this fast
train at a country crossing, and there was a spare seat in the hired
carry-all. Griswold considered the alternative for the length of time it
took the hotel porter to put the departing guest's luggage into the
waiting vehicle. Then he turned his back and let the chance escape. The
issue was fairly defined. To become a fugitive now was to plead guilty
as charged--to open the door to chaos.

It was still quite early in the evening when the Inn conveyance set him
down at the door of his lodgings in upper Shawnee Street. To the
care-taking widow, who would have prepared a late dinner for him, he
explained that he was going out again almost at once; and taking time
only for a bath and a change, he set forth on the cross-town walk. It
lacked something less than a half-hour of the time limit set in Miss
Farnham's note, but he attached no special importance to that. He knew
that the doctor's dinner-hour was early, and that in any event he could
choose his own time for an evening call.

It nettled him angrily to find that the premonition of coming disaster
was still with him when he crossed the Court House square and came into
the main street a few doors from the Winnebago entrance. Attacking from
a fresh vantage-ground it was warning him that the town hotel was the
stopping-place of the man Broffin, and that he was taking an unnecessary
hazard in passing it. Brushing the warning aside, he went on defiantly,
and just before he came within identifying range of the loungers on the
hotel porch an omnibus backed to the curb to deliver its complement of
passengers from the lately met northbound train.

Griswold walked on until he was stopped by the sidewalk-blocking group
of freshly arrived travellers pausing to identify their luggage as it
was handed down from the top of the omnibus. Alertly watchful, he
quickly recognized Broffin among the porch loungers, and saw him leave
his tilted chair to saunter toward the steps. Then the fateful thing
happened. One of the luggage-sorters, a clean-limbed, handsome young
fellow with boyish eyes and a good-natured grin, wheeled suddenly and
gripped him.

"Why, Griswold, old man!--well, I'll be dogged! Who on the face of the
earth would ever have thought of finding you here? So this is where you
came up, after the long, deep, McGinty dive, is it?" Then to one of his
fellow travellers: "Hold on a minute, Johnson; I want you to shake hands
with an old newspaper pal of mine from New York, Mr. Kenneth Griswold.
Kenneth, this is Mr. Beverly Johnson, of the Bayou State Security Bank,
in New Orleans."

Thus Bainbridge, sometime star reporter for the _Louisianian_, turning
up at the climaxing instant to prove the crowded condition of an
over-narrow world, much as Matthew Broffin had once turned up on the
after-deck of the coastwise steamer _Adelantado_ to prove it to him.

While Griswold, with every nerve on edge, was acknowledging the
introduction which he could by no means avoid, Broffin drew nearer. From
the porch steps he could both see and hear. Bainbridge, cheerfully
loquacious, continued to do most of the talking. He was telling Griswold
of the streak of good luck which had snatched him out of a reporter's
berth in the South to make him night editor of one of the St. Paul
dailies. Johnson was merely an onlooker. Broffin's eyes searched the
teller's face. Thus far it was a blank--a rather bored blank.

"And you are on your way to St. Paul now?" Griswold said to the
newspaper man. Broffin, whose ears were skilfully attuned to all the
tone variations in the voice of evasion, thought he detected a quaver of
anxious impatience in the half-absent query.

"Yes; I was going on through to-night, but Johnson, here, stumped me to
stop over. He said I might be able to get a news story out of his sick
president," Bainbridge rattled on. "Ever meet Mr. Galbraith? He is the
bank president who was held up last spring, you remember; fine old
Scotch gentleman of the Walter-Scott brand."

"When did you leave New Orleans?" Griswold asked; and now Broffin made
sure he distinguished the note of anxiety.

"Two days back: missed a connection on account of high water in the
Ohio. Might have stayed another twelve hours in the good old levee town
if we'd only known, eh, Johnson?" And then again to Griswold: "Remember
that supper we had at Chaudiere's, the night I was leaving for the
banana coast? By George! come to think of it, I believe that was the
last time we forgathered in the--Say, Kenneth, what have you done with
your beard?"

Something clicked in Broffin's brain; then the wheels of the present
slipped into gear with those of the past and the entire train moved on
smoothly. The final doubt was cleared away. Griswold was the man whose
story Bainbridge had told under the after-deck awning of the
outward-bound fruit steamer; and the story in all its essentials was the
same that Miss Grierson had told on the veranda of the De Soto. Broffin
knew now why there had always been a haunting suggestion of familiarity
in Griswold's face for him. He had seen and marked the "bloody-minded
nihilist" of Bainbridge's story when the two were saying good-by on the
banquette in front of Chaudiere's.

Broffin's right hand went swiftly to an inside pocket of his coat and
when it was withdrawn a pair of handcuffs, oiled to noiselessness, came
with it. Deftly the man-catcher worked them open, using only the fingers
of one hand, and never taking his eyes from the trio on the sidewalk.
One last step remained: if he could only manage to get speech with
Johnson first----

During the trying interval Griswold had been fully alive to his peril.
He had seen the swift hand-passing, and he knew what it was that Broffin
was concealing in the hand which had made the quick pocket-dive. He knew
that the crucial moment had come; and, as many times before, the savage
fear-mania was gripping him. In the cold vise-nip of it he had become
once more the cornered wild beast.

After the introduction to Johnson his hand had gone mechanically to his
coat pocket. The demon at his ear was whispering "kill! kill!" and his
fingers sought and found the weapon. While he was listening with the
outward ear to Bainbridge's cheerful reminiscences, the little minutiae
were arranging themselves: he saw where Broffin would step, and was
careful to mark that none of the by-standers would be in range. He would
wait until there could be no possibility of missing; then he would
fire--from the pocket.

It was Johnson who broke the spell. While Bainbridge was insisting that
Griswold should come in and make a social third at the hotel
dinner-table, the teller picked up his hand-bag and mounted the steps.
Griswold's brain fell into halves. With one of them he was making
excuses to the newspaper man; with the other he saw Broffin stop Johnson
and draw him aside.

What the detective was saying was only too plainly evident. Johnson
wheeled short to face the sidewalk group, and Griswold could feel in
every fibre of him the searching scrutiny to which he was being
subjected. When he stole a glance at the pair on the porch, Johnson was
shaking his head slowly; and he did it again after a second thoughtful
stare. Griswold, missing completely now what Bainbridge was saying,
overheard the teller's low-toned rejoinder to the detective's urgings:
"It's no use, Mr. Broffin; I'd have to swear positively to it, you
know, and I couldn't do that.... No, I don't want to hear your
corroborative evidence; it might make me see a resemblance where there
is none. Wait until Mr. Galbraith recovers: he's your man."

Griswold hardly knew how he made shift to get away from Bainbridge
finally; but when it was done, and he was crossing the little triangular
park which filled the angle between the business squares and the
lake-fronting residence streets, he was sweating profusely, and the
departing fear-mania was leaving him weak and tremulous.

Passing the stone-basined fountain in the middle of the park he stopped,
jerked the pistol from his pocket, spilled the cartridges from its
magazine, and stooped to grope for a loose stone in the walk-border.
With the fountain base for an anvil and the loosened border stone for a
hammer he beat the weapon into shapeless inutility and flung it away.

"God knows whom I shall be tempted to kill, next!" he groaned; and the
trembling fit was still unnerving him when he went on to keep the
appointment made by Charlotte Farnham.




XXXIX

DUST AND ASHES


A full moon, blood-red from the smoke of forest fires far to the
eastward, was rising over the Wahaska Hills when Griswold unlatched the
gate of the Farnham enclosure and passed quickly up the walk.

Since the summoning note had stressed the urgencies, he was not
surprised to find the writer of it awaiting his coming on the
vine-shadowed porch. In his welcoming there was a curious mingling of
constraint and impatience, and he was moved to marvel. Miss Farnham's
outlook upon life, the point of view of the ideally well-balanced, was
uniformly poiseful and self-contained, and he was wondering if some
fresh entanglement were threatening when she motioned him to a seat and
placed her own chair so that the light from the sitting-room windows
would leave her in the shadow.

"You had my note?" she began.

"Yes. It came while I was away from the hotel, and the regular trip of
the Inn brake was the first conveyance I could catch. Am I late?"

Her reply was qualified. "That remains to be seen."

There was a hesitant pause, and then she went on: "Do you know why I
sent for you to come."

"No, not definitely."

"I was hoping you would know; it would make it easier for me. You owe me
something, Mr. Griswold."

"I owe you a great deal," he admitted, warmly. "It is hardly putting it
too strong to say that you have made some part of my work possible which
would otherwise have been impossible."

"I didn't mean that," she dissented, with a touch of cool scorn. "I have
no especial ambition to figure as a character, however admirable, in a
book. Your obligation doesn't lie in the literary field; it is real--and
personal. You have done me a great injustice, and it seems to have been
carefully premeditated."

The blow was so sudden and so calmly driven home that Griswold gasped.

"An injustice?--to you?" he protested; but she would not let him go on.

"Yes. At first, I thought it was only a coincidence--your coming to
Wahaska--but now I know better. You came here, in goodness knows what
spirit of reckless bravado, because it was my home; and you made the
decision apparently without any consideration for me; without any
thought of the embarrassments and difficulties in which it might involve
me."

Truly, the heavens had fallen and the solid earth was reeling! Griswold
lay back in the deep lounging-chair and fought manfully to retain some
little hold upon the anchorings. Could this be his ideal; the woman whom
he had set so high above all others in the scale of heroic
faultlessness and sublime devotion to principle? And was she so much a
slave of the conventional as to be able to tell him coldly that she had
recognized him again, and that her chief concern was the embarrassment
it was causing her? Before he could gather the words for any adequate
rejoinder, she was going on pointedly:

"You have done everything you could to make the involvement complete.
You have made friends of my friends, and you came here as a friend of my
father. You have drawn Edward Raymer into the entanglement and helped
him with the stolen money. In every way you have sought to make it more
and more impossible for me to give information against you--and you have
succeeded. I can't do it now, without facing a scandal that would never
die in a small place like this, and without bringing trouble and ruin
upon a family of our nearest friends. And that is why I sent for you
to-day; and why I say you owe me something."

Griswold was sitting up again, and he had recovered some small measure
of self-possession.

"I certainly owe you many apologies, at least," he said, ironically. "I
have really been doing you a great injustice, Miss Farnham--a very grave
injustice, though not exactly of the kind you mention. I think I have
been misapprehending you from the beginning. How long have you known me
as the man who is wanted in New Orleans?"

"A long time; though I tried not to believe it at first. It seemed
incredible that the man I had spoken to on the _Belle Julie_ would come
here and put me in such a false position."

"Good heavens!" he broke out; "is your position all you have been
thinking of? Is that the only reason why you haven't set the dogs on
me?"

"It is the chief reason why I couldn't afford to do anything more than I
have done. Goodness knows, I have tried in every way to warn you, even
to pointing out the man who is shadowing you. To do it, I have had to
deceive my father. I have been hoping that you would understand and go
away."

"Wait a minute," he commanded. "Let me get it straight; you still
believe that the thing I did was a criminal thing?"

"We needn't go into that part of it again," she returned, with a sort of
placid impatience. "Once I thought that there might be some way in which
you had justified yourself to yourself, but now----"

"That isn't the point," he interrupted roughly. "What I want to know is
this: Do you still believe it is a crime?"

"Of course, it is a crime; I know it, you know it, all the world knows
it."

Again he sat back and took time to gather up a few of the scattered
shards and fragments. When he spoke it was to say: "I think the debt is
on the other side, Miss Charlotte; I think you owe me something. You
probably won't understand when I say that you have robbed me of a very
precious thing--my faith in the ultimate goodness of a good woman. You
believe--you have always believed--that I am a criminal; and yet you
have been weak enough to let expediency seal your lips. I am truer to my
code than you are to yours, as you shall see if the day ever comes when
I shall be convinced that I did wrong. But that is neither here nor
there. You sent for me: what is it that you want me to do?"

"I want to give you one more chance to disappoint the Wahaska gossips,"
she replied, entirely unmoved, as it seemed, by his harsh arraignment.
"Do you know why this man Broffin is still waiting?"

"I can guess. He is taking a long chance on the chapter of accidents."

"Not altogether. Three days ago, Mr. Galbraith had Miss Grierson
telegraph to New Orleans for some one of the bank officials. Yesterday I
learned that the man who is coming is the teller who waited on me and
who gave you the money. As soon as I heard that, I began to try to find
you."

Griswold did not tell her that the danger she feared was a danger past.

"Go on," he prompted.

"You are no longer safe in Wahaska," she asserted. "The teller can
identify you, and the detective will give him the opportunity. That is
doubtless what he is waiting for."

"And you would suggest that I make a run for it? Is that why you sent
for me?"

"It is. You are tempting fate by staying; and, notwithstanding what you
have said, I still insist that you owe me something. There is a fast
train west at ten o'clock. If you need ready money----"

Griswold laughed. It had gone beyond the tragic and was fast lapsing
into comedy, farce.

"We are each of us appearing in a new role to-night, Miss Farnham," he
said, with sardonic humor; "I as the hunted criminal, and you as the
equally culpable accessory after the fact. If I run away, what shall be
done with the--the 'swag,' the bulk of which, as you know, is tied up in
Raymer's business?"

"I have thought of that," she returned calmly, "and that is another
reason why you shouldn't let them take you. Right or wrong, you have
incurred a fresh responsibility in your dealings with Mr. Raymer; and
Edward, who is perfectly innocent, must be protected in some way."

It was not in human nature to resist the temptation to strike back.

"I have told Raymer how he can most successfully underwrite his
financial risk," he said, with malice intentional.

"How?"

"By marrying Miss Grierson."

He had touched the springs of anger at last.

"That woman!" she broke out. And then: "If you have said that to Edward
Raymer, I shall never forgive you as long as I live! It is your affair
to secure Edward against loss in the money matter--your own individual
responsibility, Mr. Griswold. He accepted the money in good faith,
and----"

Again Griswold gave place to the caustic humor and finished for her.

"--And, though it is stolen money, it must not be taken away from him.
Once, when I was even more foolish than I am now, I said of you that you
would be a fitting heroine in a story in which the hero should be a man
who might need to borrow a conscience. It's quite the other way around."

"We needn't quarrel," she said, retreating again behind the barrier of
cold reserve. "I suppose I have given you the right to say disagreeable
things to me, if you choose to assert it. But we are wasting time which
may be very precious. Will you go away, as I have suggested?"

He found his hat and got upon his feet rather unsteadily.

"I don't know; possibly I shall. But in any event, you needn't borrow
any more trouble, either on your own account, or on Raymer's. By the
merest chance, I met Johnson, the teller you speak of, a few minutes ago
at the Winnebago House and was introduced to him. He didn't know me,
then, or later, when Broffin was telling him that he ought to know me.
Hence, the matter rests as it did before--between you and Mr.
Galbraith."

"Mr. Galbraith?"

"Yes. That was a danger past, too, a short time ago. I met him,
socially, and he didn't recognize me. Afterward, Broffin pointed me out
to him, and again he failed to identify me. But the other day, after I
had pulled him out of the lake, he remembered. I've been waiting to see
what he will do."

"He will do nothing. You saved his life."

Griswold shook his head.

"I am still man enough to hope that he won't let the bit of personal
service make him compound a felony."

"Why do you call it that?" she demanded.

"Because, from his point of view, and yours, that is precisely what it
is; and it is what you are doing, Miss Farnham. I, the criminal, say
this to you. You should have given me up the moment you recognized me.
That is your creed, and you should have lived up to it. Since you
haven't, you have wronged yourself and have made me the poorer by a
thing that----"

"Stop!" she cried, standing up to face him. "Do you mean to tell me that
you are ungrateful enough to----"

"No; ingratitude isn't quite the word. I'm just sorry; with the sorrow
you have when you look for something that you have a right to expect,
and find that it isn't there; that it has never been there; that it
isn't anywhere. You have hurt me, and you have hurt yourself; but there
is still a chance for you. When I am gone, go to the telephone and call
Broffin at the Winnebago House. You can tell him that he will find me at
my rooms. Good-by."

He was half-way to the foot of Lakeview Avenue, striding along moodily
with his head down and his hands behind him, when he collided violently
with Raymer going in the opposite direction. The shock was so unexpected
that Griswold would have been knocked down if the muscular young
iron-founder had not caught him promptly. At the saving instant came
mutual recognition.

"Hello, there!" said Raymer. "You are the very man I've been looking
for. Charlotte wants to see you."

"Not now she doesn't," was the rather grim contradiction. "I have just
left her."

"Oh."

There was a pause, and then Griswold cut in morosely.

"So you did take my way out of the labor trouble, after all, didn't
you?"

Raymer looked away.

"I don't know just how you'd like to have me answer that, Kenneth. How
much or how little do you know of what happened?"

"Nothing at all"--shortly.

"Well, it was Margery who wrought the miracle, of course. I don't know,
yet, just how she did it; but it was done, and done right."

"And you have asked her to marry you?"

"Suffering Scott! how you do come at a man! Yes, I asked her, if you've
got to know."

"Well?" snapped Griswold.

"She--she turned me down, Kenneth; got up and walked all over me. That's
a horrible thing to make me say, but it's the truth."

"I don't understand it, Raymer. Was it the No that means No?"

"I don't understand it either," returned the iron-founder, with grave
naivete. "And, yes, I guess she meant it. But that reminds me. She knew
I was looking for you and she gave me a note--let me see, I've got it
here somewhere; oh, yes, here it is--gilt monogram and all."

Griswold took the note and pocketed it without comment and without
looking at it.

"Were you going to Doctor Bertie's?" he asked.

"I was. Have you any objection?"

"Not the least in the world. It's a good place for you to go just now,
and I guess you are the right man for the place. Good-night."

At the next corner where there was an electric light, Griswold stopped
and opened the monogrammed envelope. The enclosure was a single sheet of
perfumed note-paper upon which, without date, address or signature was
written the line:

"Mr. Galbraith is better--and he is grateful."




XL

APPLES OF ISTAKHAR


The swinging arc-light suspended above the street-crossing sputtered and
died down to a dull red dot of incandescence as Griswold returned
Margery's note to his pocket and walked on.

There are crises in which the chief contention looms so large as to
leave no room for the ordinary mental processes. Griswold saw no
significance in the broken line of Margery's message. The one tremendous
revelation--the knowledge that the dross-creating curse had finally
fallen upon the woman whose convictions should have saved her--was
blotting out all the subtler perceptive faculties; and for the time the
struggle with the submerging wave of disappointment and disheartenment
was bitter.

He was two squares beyond the crossing of the broken-circuited
arc-light, and was still following the curve of the lakeside boulevard,
when he came to the surface of the submerging wave long enough to
realize that he had entered Jasper Grierson's portion of the water-front
drive. The great house, dark as to its westward gables save for the
lighted upper windows marking the sick-room and its antechamber, loomed
in massive solidity among its sheltering oaks; and the moon, which had
now topped the hills and the crimsoning smoke haze, was bathing
land- and lake-scape in a flood of silver light, whitening the pale yellow
sands of the beach and etching fantastic leaf-traceries on the gravel of
the boulevarded driveway.

There was no enclosing fence on the Mereside border of the boulevard,
and under the nearest of the lawn oaks there were rustic park seats,
Jasper Grierson's single concession to the public when he had fought for
and secured his property right-of-way through to the lake's margin.
Griswold turned aside and sat down on one of the benches. The
disappointment was growing less keen. He was beginning to understand
that he had made no allowance for the eternal feminine in the idealized
_Fidelia_--for the feminine and the straitly human. But the
disheartenment remained. Should he stay and fight it out? Or should he
take pity upon the poor prisoner of the conventions and seek to postpone
the day of reckoning by flight?

He had not fitted the answer to either of these sharp-pointed queries
when a pair of light-fingered hands came from behind to clap themselves
upon his eyes, and a well-known voice said, "Guess."

"Margery!" he said; and she laughed with the joyous unconstraint of a
happy child and came around to sit by him.

"I was doing time out on the veranda, and I saw you down here in the
moonlight, looking as if you had lost something," she explained, adding:
"Have you?"

"I don't know; can you lose that which you've never had?" he returned
musingly. And then: "Yes; perhaps I did lose something. Don't ask me
what it is. I hardly know, myself."

"You have just come from Doctor Bertie's?" she inquired.

"Yes."

"And Charlotte doesn't want to marry you?"

"Heavens and earth!" he exploded. "Who put the idea into your head that
I wanted to marry her?"

"You did"--calmly.

"Then, for pity's sake, let me take it out, quick. If I were the last
man on earth, Miss Farnham wouldn't marry me; and if she were the last
woman, I think I'd go drown myself in the lake!"

The young woman of the many metamorphoses was laughing again, and this
time the laugh was a letter-perfect imitation of a school-girl giggle.

"My!" she said. "How dreadfully hard she must have sat on you!"

"Please don't laugh," he pleaded; "unless you are the heartless kind of
person who would laugh at a funeral. I'm down under the hoofs of the
horses, at last, Margery, girl. Before you came, I was wondering if the
game were at all worth the candle."

Her mood changed in the twinkling of an eye. "The battle is over, and
won," she said, speaking softly. "Didn't you know that?" And then: "Oh,
boy, boy! but it has been a desperate fight! Time and again I have
thought you were gone, in spite of all I could do!"

"You thought--I was gone? Then you know?"

"Of course I know; I have known ever since the first night; the night
when I found the money in your suit-case. What a silly, silly thing it
was for you to do--to leave the Bayou State Security slips on the
packages!"

"But you said----"

"No, I didn't say; I merely let you believe that I didn't see them.
After that, I knew it would be only a question of time until they would
trace you here, and I hurried; oh, I _hurried_! I made up my mind that
before the struggle came, all Wahaska should know you, not as a bank
robber, but as you are, and I made it come out just that way. Then Mr.
Broffin turned up, and the fight was on. He shadowed you, and I shadowed
him--or had Johnnie Fergus do it for me. I knew he'd try Miss Farnham
first, and there was only one hope there--that she might fall in love
with you and so refuse to give you away. She did, didn't she?"

"Most emphatically, she did not," he denied. "You have greatly misjudged
Miss Farnham. The reason--the only reason--why she did not tell Broffin
what he wanted to know was a purely conventional one. She did not want
to be the most-talked-of woman in Wahaska."

His companion's laugh was not pleasant.

"I'd rather be a spiteful little cat, which is what she once called me,
than to be moth-eaten on the inside, like that!" she commented. Then she
went on: "With Miss Farnham out of it--and I knew she must be out of
it, since Broffin didn't strike--there was still Mr. Galbraith. You
didn't know why I was so anxious to have you get acquainted with him,
but you know now. And it worked. When Broffin asked him to identify you,
he couldn't--or wouldn't. Then came that unlucky drowning accident."

Griswold nodded slowly. "Yes, Mr. Galbraith knows me now."

"He doesn't!" she exulted. "He is a dear old saint, and he will never
know you again as the man who held him up. Listen: he sent for Broffin
this afternoon, and gave him a new commission--something about bonds in
California. And he told him he must go on the first train!"

Once more the castaway was running the gamut of the fiercely varying
emotions.

"Let me understand," he said. "You knew I had taken the money, and yet
you did all these things to pull me out and make the hold-up a success.
Where was your moral sense, all this time, little girl?"

She made a charming little mouth at him.

"I am _Joan_, and the _Joans_ don't have any moral senses--to speak
of--do they? That's the way you are writing it down in your book, isn't
it?" Then, with a low laugh that sounded some unfathomed depth of loving
abandonment: "It was a game; and I played it--played it for all I was
worth, and won. You are free; free as the air, Kenneth, boy. If Broffin
should come here this minute and put his hand on your shoulder, you
could look up and laugh in his face. Are you glad--or sorry?"

His answer was the answer of the man who was, for the time being,
neither the moralist nor the criminal. With a swift out-reaching he drew
her to him, crushed her in his arms, covered her face with kisses.

"I am glad--glad that I am your lover," he whispered, passionately.
"God, girl! but you are a woman to die for! No, not yet"--when she would
have slipped out of his arms--"Believe me, Margery; there has never been
any one else--not for a moment. But I thought it was Raymer, and for
your sake and his I could have stepped aside; I did try to step aside.
That is the one decent thing I have done in all this devilish business.
Are you listening?"

She had stopped struggling, and was hiding her face on his shoulder. He
felt her quick little nod and went on.

"Since you know the one decent thing, you must know all the horrible
things, too. A dozen times I have been a murderer in heart, and once ...
you know: I meant to let Galbraith die, that night."

She looked up quickly.

"No, boy, I'll never believe that--never! If you had stayed awake until
the time came, you couldn't have done it. And, besides, I am to blame. I
planned it--planned it purposely: I didn't even hope to find a nurse
when we were supposed to be looking for one. I knew how you felt, and I
wanted to make you show yourself that you didn't really hate him bad
enough to let him die. But I don't care; it doesn't matter--nothing
matters, now."

"Wait," he said. "There was murder in my heart that night, and it was
there again this evening--just a little while ago. Miss Farnham and
Galbraith were not the only ones I had to fear; there was another; the
teller who got here from New Orleans on the seven-forty-five train. You
didn't know about him, did you? He came, and an old newspaper friend of
mine was with him. I stumbled upon them on the sidewalk in front of the
Winnebago House; and Broffin was there, too. We were introduced, the
teller and I, and Broffin was so sure he had me that he got his
handcuffs out and was opening them."

Margery shuddered and hid her face again. "And I--I didn't know!" she
gasped.

"Luck was with me again," he continued. "Johnson didn't remember me;
refused to do so even when Broffin stopped him and tried to tell him who
I was. I had a pistol in my pocket, and it was aimed at Broffin. If he
had made a move to take me, I should certainly have killed him."

She sat up suddenly.

"Give me that pistol, Kenneth--give it to me _now_!"

"I can't," he confessed, shamefacedly. "When it was all over, I smashed
the pistol with a stone and threw it away."

She drew a long breath, "Is that all?" she asked.

"All but one thing; the worst of them all ... that day in the bank
vault----"

The daughter of men buried her face on his shoulder again at that.
"Don't!" she begged. "You couldn't help it, boy; I made you do
it--meaning to. There! and I said that wild horses should never drag it
out of me!"

Again he said, "Wait," and covered the shining head on his shoulder with
a caressing hand. "It wasn't love, then, little girl; that's what it
breaks my heart to tell you: it was just madness. And it wasn't clean;
you've got to know that, too."

She nodded her head violently. "I know," she murmured; "I knew it at the
time, and that was what made me cry. But now it's--it's different, isn't
it, boy? now you--are----"

"You have heard it all, Margery. You know what I thought I was, and what
I have turned out to be. I'm afraid I am just a common crook, after all;
there doesn't seem to be standing-room anywhere else for me. But every
living fibre of me, the good and the bad, loves you--loves you!"

"What do I care for anything else?" she flashed back. "You are you,
Kenneth, dear; that is all I know, and all I care for. If you had stolen
all the money in the world, and had killed a dozen men to make your
get-away, it would be just the same. Only----"

"Only what?" he demanded jealously.

"It would be just the same to me; but--but.... Oh, boy, dear! it will
never, _never_ be the same to you!"

"I--I don't understand," he stammered.

"Some day you will. You call yourself a crook: man, man! there isn't a
crooked drop of blood in you! Don't I know? You persuaded yourself that
you had a right to take this money; perhaps you did have; _I_ don't say
you didn't. When I see anything I want, I reach out and take it, if I
can--and I guess most people would, if they dared. But you are
different; you are _good_. Some day all these dreadful things that have
come tagging along after the fact will rise up and gnash their teeth at
you and tell you that it was a _sin_, a _crime_. And then--oh, boy,
dear! then I shall lose you!"

Very gently he took her in his arms again; and for a time all things
sensible and tangible, the deserted driveway, and the plashing of the
little waves on the sands, the staring moonlight and the stencilled
shadows of the oaks, were forgotten in the great soul-healing silence
that wrapped them about and enveloped them.

"Margery," he began, when the interval of thoughtful heart-searching had
done its illuminative work, "what would you say if I should tell you
that your 'some day' has already come?"

She started as if he had thrust a knife into her. Then she slipped out
of his arms and caught up his hand to press it against her cheek.

"I should say, 'Whatsoever seemeth good in the eyes of my dear lord, so
let it be.'"

"But think a moment, girl; if one has done wrong, there must be
atonement. That is the higher law--the highest law--and no man may
evade it. Do you know what that would mean for me?"

"It is the Price, boy, dear; I don't ask you to pay it. Listen: my
father and I have agreed to disagree, and he has turned over to me a lot
of money that he took from--that was once my mother's brother's share in
the Colorado gold claims. What is mine is yours. We can pay back the
money. Will that do?"

He was shaking his head slowly. "No," he said, "I think it wouldn't do."

"I was afraid it wouldn't," she sighed, "but I had to try. Are they
still gnashing their teeth at you?--the dreadful things, I mean?"

He did not answer in words, but she knew, and held her peace. At the end
of the ends he sprang up suddenly and drew her to her feet.

"I can't do it, Margery, girl! I can't ask you to wait--and afterward to
marry a convict! Think of it--even if Galbraith were willing to
withdraw, the law wouldn't let him, and I'd get the limit; anything from
seven years to fifteen or more. Oh, my God, no! I can't pay the price! I
can't give you up!"

She put her arms around his neck and drew his head down and kissed him
on the lips. "I'll wait ... oh, boy, boy! I'll wait! But I can neither
push you over the edge nor hold you back. Only don't think of me;
please, _please_ don't think of me!--'Whatsoever seemeth good'--that is
what you must think of; that is my last word: 'Whatsoever seemeth
good.'" And she pushed him from her and fled.




XLI

THE DESERT AND THE SOWN


Through streets in which the village quiet of the summer night was
undisturbed save by the spattering tinkle of the lawn sprinklers in the
front yards, and the low voices of the out-door people taking the air
and the moonlight on the porches, Griswold fared homeward, the blood
pounding in his veins and the fine wine of life mounting headily to his
brain.

After all the dubious stumblings he had come to the end of the road, to
find awaiting him the great accusation and the great reward. By the
unanswerable logic of results, in its effect upon others and upon
himself, his deed had proved itself a crime. Right or wrong in the
highest of the ethical fields, the accepted social order had proved
itself strong enough to make its own laws and to prescribe the
far-reaching penalties for their infraction. Under these laws he stood
convicted. Never again, save through the gate of atonement, could he be
reinstated as a soldier in the ranks of the conventionally righteous.
True, the devotion of a loving woman, aided by a train of circumstances
strikingly fortuitous and little short of miraculous, had averted the
final price-paying in penal retribution. But the fact remained. He was
a felon.

Into this gaping wound which might otherwise have slain him had been
poured the wine and oil of a great love; a love so clean and pure in its
own well-springs that it could perceive no wrong in its object; could
measure no act of loyal devotion by any standard save that of its own
greatness. This love asked nothing but what he chose to give. It would
accept him either as he was, or as he ought to be. The place he should
elect to occupy would be its place; his standards its standards.

Just here the reasoning angel opened a door and thrust him out upon the
edge of a precipice and left him to look down into the abyss of the
betrayers--the pit of those whose gift and curse it is to be the
pace-setters. In a flash of revealment it was shown him that with the
great love had come a great responsibility. Where he should lead,
Margery would follow, unshrinkingly, unquestioningly; never asking
whether the path led up or down; asking only that his path might be
hers. Instantly he was face to face with a fanged choice which
threatened to tear his heart out and trample upon it; and again he
recorded his decision, confirming it with an oath. The price was too
great; the upward path too steep; the self-denial it entailed too
sacrificial.

"We have but one life to live, and we'll live it together, Margery,
girl, for better or for worse," was his apostrophic declaration, made
while he was turning into Shawnee Street a few doors from his lodgings;
and a minute later he was opening the Widow Holcomb's gate.

The house was dark and apparently deserted as to its street-fronting
half when he let himself in at the gate and ran quickly up the steps.
The front door was open, and he remembered afterward that he had
wondered how the careful widow had come to leave it so, and why the hall
lamp was not lighted. From the turn at the stair-head he felt his way to
the door of his study. Like the one below, it was wide open; but some
one had drawn the window shades and the interior of the room was as dark
as a cavern.

Once, in the novel-writing, following the lead of many worthy
predecessors, Griswold had made much of the "sixth" sense; the subtle
and indefinable prescience which warns its possessor of invisible
danger. No such warning was vouchsafed him when he leaned across the end
of the writing-table, turned on the gas, and held a lighted match over
the chimney of the working-lamp. It was while he was still bending over
the table, with both hands occupied, that he looked aside. In his own
pivot-chair, covering him with the mate to the weapon he had smashed and
thrown away, sat the man who had opened the two doors and drawn the
window shades and otherwise prepared the trap.

"You bought a couple o' these little playthings, Mr. Griswold," said the
man, quietly. "Keep your hands right where they are, and tell me in
which pocket you've got the other one."

Griswold laughed, and there was a sudden snapping of invisible bonds. He
dismissed instantly the thought that Charlotte Farnham had taken him at
his word; and if she had not, there was nothing to fear.

"I threw the other one away a little while ago," he said. "Reach your
free hand over and feel my pockets."

Broffin acted upon the suggestion promptly.

"You ain't got it on you, anyway," he conceded; and when Griswold had
dropped into the chair at the table's end: "I reckon you know what I'm
here for."

"I know that you are holding that gun of mine at an exceedingly
uncomfortable angle--for me," was the cool rejoinder. "I've always had a
squeamish horror of being shot in the stomach."

The detective's grin was appreciative.

"You've got a good cold nerve, anyway," he commented. "I've been puttin'
it up that when the time came, you'd throw a fit o' some sort--what?
Since you're clothed in your right mind, we'll get down to business.
First, I'll ask you to hand over the key to that safety-deposit box
you've got in Mr. Grierson's bank."

Griswold took his bunch of keys from his pocket, slipped the one that
was asked for from the ring, and gave it to his captor.

"Of course, I'm surrendering it under protest," he said. "You haven't
yet told me who you are, or what you are holding me up for."

Broffin waved the formalities aside with a pistol-pointed gesture. "We
can skip all that. I've got you dead to rights, after so long a time,
and I'm goin' to take you back to New Orleans with me. The only question
is: do you go easy, or hard?"

"I don't go either way until you show your authority."

"I don't need any authority. You're the parlor-anarchist that held up
the president of the Bayou State Security Bank last spring and made a
get-away with a hundred thousand--what?"

"All right; you say so--prove it." Griswold had taken a cigar from the
open box on the writing-table and was calmly lighting it. There was
nothing to be nervous about. "I'm waiting," he went on, placidly, when
the cigar was going. "If you are an officer, you probably have a
warrant, or a requisition, or something of that sort. Show it up."

"I don't need any papers to take you," was the barked-out retort.
Broffin had more than once found himself confronting similar dead walls,
and he knew the worth of a bold play.

"Oh, yes, you do. You accuse me of a crime: did you see me commit the
crime?"

"No."

"Well, somebody did, I suppose. Bring on your witnesses. If anybody can
identify me as the man you are after, I'll go with you--without the
requisition. That's fair, isn't it?"

"I know you're the man, and you know it, too, damned well!" snapped
Broffin, angered into bandying words with his obstinate capture.

"That is neither here nor there; I am not affirming or denying. It is
for you to prove your case, if you can. And, listen, Mr. Broffin:
perhaps it will save your time and mine if I add that I happen to know
that you can't prove your case."

"Why can't I?"

"Just because you can't," Griswold went on, argumentatively. "I know the
facts of this robbery you speak of; a great many people know them. The
newspaper accounts said at the time that there were three persons who
could certainly identify the robber: the president, the paying teller,
and a young woman. It so happens that all three of these people are at
present in Wahaska. At different times you have appealed to each of
them, and in each instance you have been turned down. Isn't that true?"

Broffin glanced up, scowling.

"It's true enough that you--you and the little black-eyed girl between
you--have hoodooed the whole bunch!" he rasped. "But when I get you into
court, you'll find out that there are others."

Griswold smiled good-naturedly. "That is a bold, bad bluff, Mr. Broffin,
and nobody knows it any better than you do," he countered. "You haven't
a leg to stand on. This is America, and you can't arrest me without a
warrant. And if you could, what would you do with me without the support
of at least one of your three witnesses? Nothing--nothing at all."

Broffin laid the pistol on the table, and put the key of the safety-box
beside it. Then he sat in grim silence for a full minute, toying idly
with a pair of handcuffs which he had taken from his pocket.

"By the eternal grapples!" he said, at length, half to himself, "I've a
good mind to do it anyway--and take the chances."

As quick as a flash Griswold thrust out his hands.

"Put them on!" he snapped. "There are a hundred lawyers in New Orleans
who wouldn't ask for anything better than the chance to defend me--at
your expense!"

Broffin dropped the manacles into his pocket and sat back in the
swing-chair. "You win," he said shortly; and the battle was over.

For a little time no word was spoken. Griswold smoked on placidly,
seemingly forgetful of the detective's presence. Yet he was the one who
was the first to break the straitened silence.

"You are a game fighter, Mr. Broffin," he said, "and I'm enough of a
scrapper myself to be sorry for you. Try one of these smokes--you'll
find them fairly good--and excuse me for a few minutes. I want to write
a letter which, if you are going down-town, perhaps you'll be good
enough to mail for me."

He pushed the open box of cigars across to the detective, and dragged
the lounging-chair around to the other side of the table. There was
stationery at hand, and he wrote rapidly for a few minutes, covering
three pages of the manuscript sheets before he stopped. When the letter
was enclosed, addressed, and stamped, he tossed it across to Broffin,
face up. The detective saw the address, "Miss Margery Grierson," and,
putting the letter into his pocket, got up to go.

"Just one minute more, if you please," said Griswold, and, relighting
the cigar which had been suffered to go out, he went into the adjoining
bedroom. When he came back, he had put on a light top-coat and a soft
hat, and was carrying a small hand-bag.

"I'm your man, Mr. Broffin," he said quietly. "I'll go with you--and
plead guilty as charged."

       *       *       *       *       *

Wahaska, the village-conscious, had its nine-days' wonder displayed for
it in inch-type head-lines when the _Daily Wahaskan_, rehearsing the
story of the New Orleans bank robbery, told of the voluntary surrender
of the robber, and of his deportation to the southern city to stand
trial for his offence.

Some few there were who took exceptions to Editor Randolph's editorial
in the same issue, commenting on the surrender, and pleading for a
suspension of judgment on the ground that much might still be hoped for
from a man who had retraced a broad step in the downward path by
voluntarily accepting the penalty. Those who objected to the editorial
were of the perverse minority. The intimation was made that the plea had
been inspired--a hint basing itself upon the fact that Miss Grierson had
been seen visiting the office of the _Wahaskan_ after the departure of
the detective, Matthew Broffin, with his prisoner.

The sensational incident, however, had been forgotten long before a
certain evening, three weeks later, when the Grierson carriage conveyed
the convalescent president of the Bayou State Security from the Grierson
mansion to the southbound train. Andrew Galbraith was not alone in the
carriage, and possibly there were those in the sleeping-car who mistook
the dark-eyed and strikingly beautiful young woman, who took leave of
him only after he was comfortably settled in his section, for his
daughter. But the whispered words of leave-taking were rather those of a
confidante than a kinswoman.

"I'll arrange the Raymer matter as you suggest," she said, "and if I had
even a speaking acquaintance with God, I'd pray for you the longest day
I live, Uncle Andrew. And about the trial: I'm going to leave it all
with you; I've g-got to leave it with you! Just remember that I shall
bleed little drops of blood for every day the judge gives him, and that
the only way he can be helped is by a short sentence. He wouldn't take a
pardon: he--he wants to pay, you know. Good-night, and good-by!" And she
put her strong young arms around Andrew Galbraith's neck and kissed him,
thereby convincing the family party in Lower Seven that she was not only
the old man's daughter, but a very affectionate one, at that.

       *       *       *       *       *

The little-changing seasons of central Louisiana had measured two
complete rounds on the yearly dial of Time's unremitting and unhasting
clock when the best hired carriage that Baton Rouge could afford drew
up before the entrance to the State's Prison and waited. Precisely on
the stroke of twelve, a man for whom the prison rules had lately been
relaxed sufficiently to allow his hair to grow, came out, looked about
him as one dazed, and assaulted the closed door of the carriage as if he
meant to tear it from its hinges.

"Oh, boy, boy!" came from the one who had waited; and then the carriage
door yielded, opened, closed with a crash, and the negro driver clucked
to his horses.

They were half-way to the railroad station, and she was trying to
persuade him that there would be months and years in which to make up
for the loveless blank, before sane speech found its opportunity. And
even then there were interruptions.

"I knew you'd be here; no, they didn't tell me, but I knew it--I would
have staked my life on it, Margery, girl," he said, in the first lucid
interval.

"And you--you've paid the Price, haven't you, Kenneth? but, oh, boy,
dear! I've paid it, too! Don't you believe me?"

There was another interruption, and because the carriage windows were
open, the negro driver grinned and confided a remark to his horses. Then
the transgressor began again.

"Where are you taking me, Margery?--not that it makes any manner of
difference."

"We are going by train to New Orleans, and this--this--very--evening we
are to be married, in Mr. Galbraith's house. And Uncle Andrew is going
to give the bride away. It's all arranged."

"And after?"

"Afterward, we are going away--I don't know where. I just told dear old
Saint Andrew to buy the tickets to anywhere he thought would be nice,
and we'd go. I don't care where it is--do you? And when we get there,
I'll buy you a pen and some ink and paper, and you'll go on writing the
book, just as if nothing had happened. Say you will, boy, dear; _please_
say you will! And then I'll know that--the price--wasn't--too great."

He was looking out of the carriage window when he answered her, across
to the levee and beyond it to the farther shore of the great river, and
his eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen of the travail of his soul
and is satisfied.

"I shall never write that book, little girl. That story, and all the
mistakes that were going to the making of it, lie on the other side
of--the Price. But one day, please God, there shall be another and a
worthier one."

"Yes--please God," she said; and the dark eyes were shining softly.


THE END


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HIS HOUR. By Elinor Glyn. Illustrated.

A beautiful blonde Englishwoman visits Russia, and is violently made
love to by a young Russian aristocrat. A most unique situation
complicates the romance.


THE GAMBLERS. By Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow. Illustrated by C. E.
Chambers.

A big, vital treatment of a present day situation wherein men play for
big financial stakes and women flourish on the profits--or repudiate the
methods.


CHEERFUL AMERICANS. By Charles Battell Loomis. Illustrated by Florence
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A good, wholesome, laughable presentation of some Americans at home and
abroad, on their vacations, and during their hours of relaxation.


THE WOMAN OF THE WORLD. By Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Clever, original presentations of present day social problems and the
best solutions of them. A book every girl and woman should possess.


THE LIGHT THAT LURES. By Percy Brebner. Illustrated. Handsomely colored
wrapper.

A young Southerner who loved Lafayette, goes to France to aid him during
the days of terror, and is lured in a certain direction by the lovely
eyes of a Frenchwoman.


THE RAMRODDERS. By Holman Day. Frontispiece by Harold Matthews Brett.

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=The Master's Violin=

By MYRTLE REED

[Illustration]

A Love Story with a musical atmosphere. A picturesque, old German
virtuoso is the reverent possessor of a genuine Cremona. He consents to
take as his pupil a handsome youth who proves to have an aptitude for
technique, but not the soul of the artist. The youth has led the happy,
careless life of a modern, well-to-do young American, and he cannot,
with his meagre past, express the love, the longing, the passion and the
tragedies of life and its happy phases as can the master who has lived
life in all its fulness. But a girl comes into his existence, a
beautiful bit of human driftwood that his aunt had taken into her heart
and home; and through his passionate love for her, he learns the lessons
that life has to give--and his soul awakens.

Founded on a fact well known among artists, but not often recognized or
discussed.

       *       *       *       *       *

If you have not read "LAVENDER AND OLD LACE" by the same author, you
have a double pleasure in store--for these two books show Myrtle Reed in
her most delightful, fascinating vein--indeed they may be considered as
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=The Prodigal Judge=

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By VAUGHAN KESTER

This great novel--probably the most popular book in this country
to-day--is as human as a story from the pen of that great master of
"immortal laughter and immortal tears," Charles Dickens.

The Prodigal Judge is a shabby outcast, a tavern hanger-on, a genial
wayfarer who tarries longest where the inn is most hospitable, yet with
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peculiar to the American man. He has his own code of morals--very
exalted ones--but honors them in the breach rather than in the
observance.

Clinging to the Judge closer than a brother, is Solomon
Mahaffy--fallible and failing like the rest of us, but with a sublime
capacity for friendship; and closer still, perhaps, clings little
Hannibal, a boy about whose parentage nothing is known until the end of
the story. Hannibal is charmed into tolerance of the Judge's picturesque
vices, while Miss Betty, lovely and capricious, is charmed into placing
all her affairs, both material and sentimental, in the hands of this
delightful old vagabond.

The Judge will be a fixed star in the firmament of fictional characters
as surely as David Harum or Col. Sellers. He is a source of infinite
delight, while this story of Mr. Kester's is one of the finest examples
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THE SIEGE OF THE SEVEN SUITORS. By Meredith Nicholson. Illustrated by C.
Coles Phillips and Reginald Birch.

Seven suitors vie with each other for the love of a beautiful girl, and
she subjects them to a test that is full of mystery, magic and sheer
amusement.


THE MAGNET. By Henry C. Rowland. Illustrated by Clarence F. Underwood.

The story of a remarkable courtship involving three pretty girls on a
yacht, a poet-lover in pursuit, and a mix-up in the names of the girls.


THE TURN OF THE ROAD. By Eugenia Brooks Frothingham.

A beautiful young opera singer chooses professional success instead of
love, but comes to a place in life where the call of the heart is
stronger than worldly success.


SCOTTIE AND HIS LADY. By Margaret Morse. Illustrated by Harold M. Brett.

A young girl whose affections have been blighted is presented with a
Scotch Collie to divert her mind, and the roving adventures of her pet
lead the young mistress into another romance.


SHEILA VEDDER. By Amelia E. Barr. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher.

A very beautiful romance of the Shetland Islands, with a handsome,
strong willed hero and a lovely girl of Gaelic blood as heroine. A
sequel to "Jan Vedder's Wife."


JOHN WARD, PREACHER. By Margaret Deland.

The first big success of this much loved American novelist. It is a
powerful portrayal of a young clergyman's attempt to win his beautiful
wife to his own narrow creed.


THE TRAIL OF NINETY-EIGHT. By Robert W. Service Illustrated by Maynard
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One of the best stories of "Vagabondia" ever written, and one of the
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THE SECOND WIFE. By Thompson Buchanan. Illustrated by W. W. Fawcett.
Harrison Fisher wrapper printed in four colors and gold.

An intensely interesting story of a marital complication in a wealthy
New York family involving the happiness of a beautiful young girl.


TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY. By Grace Miller White Illustrated by Howard
Chandler Christy.

An amazingly vivid picture of low class life in a New York college town,
with a heroine beautiful and noble, who makes a great sacrifice for
love.


FROM THE VALLEY OF THE MISSING. By Grace Miller White.

Frontispiece and wrapper in colors by Penrhyn Stanlaws.

Another story of "the storm country." Two beautiful children are
kidnapped from a wealthy home and appear many years after showing the
effects of a deep, malicious scheme behind their disappearance.


THE LIGHTED MATCH. By Charles Neville Buck. Illustrated by R. F.
Schabelitz.

A lovely princess travels incognito through the States and falls in love
with an American man. There are ties that bind her to someone in her own
home, and the great plot revolves round her efforts to work her way out.


MAUD BAXTER. By C. C. Hotchkiss. Illustrated by Will Grefe.

A romance both daring and delightful, involving an American girl and a
young man who had been impressed into English service during the
Revolution.


THE HIGHWAYMAN. By Guy Rawlence. Illustrated by Will Grefe.

A French beauty of mysterious antecedents wins the love of an Englishman
of title. Developments of a startling character and a clever untangling
of affairs hold the reader's interest.


THE PURPLE STOCKINGS. By Edward Salisbury Field Illustrated in colors;
marginal illustrations.

A young New York business man, his pretty sweetheart, his sentimental
stenographer, and his fashionable sister are all mixed up in a
misunderstanding that surpasses anything in the way of comedy in years.
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THE SILENT CALL. By Edwin Milton Royle. Illustrated with scenes from the
play.

The hero of this story is the Squaw Man's son. He has been taken to
England, but spurns conventional life for the sake of the untamed West
and a girl's pretty face.


JOHN MARCH, SOUTHERNER. By George W. Cable.

A story of the pretty women and spirited men of the South. As fragrant
in sentiment as a sprig of magnolia, and as full of mystery and racial
troubles as any romance of "after the war" days.


MR. JUSTICE RAFFLES. By E. W. Hornung.

This engaging rascal is found helping a young cricket player out of the
toils of a money shark. Novel in plot, thrilling and amusing.


FORTY MINUTES LATE. By F. Hopkinson Smith. Illustrated by S. M. Chase.

Delightfully human stories of every day happenings; of a lecturer's
laughable experience because he's late, a young woman's excursion into
the stock market, etc.


OLD LADY NUMBER 31. By Louise Forsslund.

A heart-warming story of American rural life, telling of the adventures
of an old couple in an old folk's home, their sunny philosophical
acceptance of misfortune and ultimate prosperity.


THE HUSBAND'S STORY. By David Graham Phillips.

A story that has given all Europe as well as all America much food for
thought. A young couple begin life in humble circumstances and rise in
worldly matters until the husband is enormously rich--the wife in the
most aristocratic European society--but at the price of their happiness.


THE TRAIL OF NINETY-EIGHT. By Robert W. Service Illustrated by Maynard
Dixon.

One of the best stories of "Vagabondia" ever written, and one of the
most accurate and picturesque descriptions of the stampede of gold
seekers to the Yukon. The love story embedded in the narrative is
strikingly original.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction_

------------------------------------------------------------------------

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK

------------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------------------------------------------------

A FEW OF
GROSSET & DUNLAP'S
Great Books at Little Prices

------------------------------------------------------------------------


WHEN A MAN MARRIES. By Mary Roberts Rinehart. Illustrated by Harrison
Fisher and Mayo Bunker.

A young artist, whose wife had recently divorced him, finds that a visit
is due from his Aunt Selina, an elderly lady having ideas about things
quite apart from the Bohemian set in which her nephew is a shining
light. The way in which matters are temporarily adjusted forms the motif
of the story.

A farcical extravaganza, dramatized under the title of "Seven Days".


THE FASHIONABLE ADVENTURES OF JOSHUA CRAIG. By David Graham Phillips.
Illustrated.

A young westerner, uncouth and unconventional, appears in political and
social life in Washington. He attains power in politics, and a young
woman of the exclusive set becomes his wife, undertaking his education
in social amenities.


"DOC." GORDON. By Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman. Illustrated by Frank T.
Merrill.

Against the familiar background of American town life, the author
portrays a group of people strangely involved in a mystery. "Doc."
Gordon, the one physician of the place, Dr. Elliot, his assistant, a
beautiful woman and her altogether charming daughter are all involved in
the plot. A novel of great interest.


HOLY ORDERS. By Marie Corelli.

A dramatic story, in which is pictured a clergyman in touch with society
people, stage favorites, simple village folk, powerful financiers and
others, each presenting vital problems to this man "in holy
orders"--problems that we are now struggling with in America.


KATRINE. By Elinor Macartney Lane. With frontispiece.

Katrine, the heroine of this story, is a lovely Irish girl, of lowly
birth, but gifted with a beautiful voice.

The narrative is based on the facts of an actual singer's career, and
the viewpoint throughout is a most exalted one.


THE FORTUNES OF FIFI. By Molly Elliot Seawell. Illustrated by T. de
Thulstrup.

A story of life in France at the time of the first Napoleon. Fifi, a
glad, mad little actress of eighteen, is the star performer in a third
rate Parisian theatre. A story as dainty as a Watteau painting.


SHE THAT HESITATES. By Harris Dickson. Illustrated by C. W. Relyea.

The scene of this dashing romance shifts from Dresden to St. Petersburg
in the reign of Peter the Great, and then to New Orleans.

The hero is a French Soldier of Fortune, and the princess, who
hesitates--but you must read the story to know how she that hesitates
may be lost and yet saved.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK

------------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------------------------------------------------

=B. M. Bower's Novels=

Thrilling Western Romances

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Large 12 mos. Handsomely bound in cloth. Illustrated

------------------------------------------------------------------------


CHIP, OF THE FLYING U

A breezy wholesome tale, wherein the love affairs of Chip and Della
Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip's jealousy of Dr. Cecil
Grantham, who turns out to be a big, blue eyed young woman is very
amusing. A clever, realistic story of the American Cow-puncher.


THE HAPPY FAMILY

A lively and amusing story, dealing with the adventures of eighteen
jovial, big hearted Montana cowboys. Foremost amongst them, we find
Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative powers cause many lively
and exciting adventures.


HER PRAIRIE KNIGHT

A realistic story of the plains, describing a gay party of Easterners
who exchange a cottage at Newport for the rough homeliness of a Montana
ranch-house. The merry-hearted cowboys, the fascinating Beatrice, and
the effusive Sir Redmond, become living, breathing personalities.


THE RANGE DWELLERS

Here are everyday, genuine cowboys, just as they really exist. Spirited
action, a range feud between two families, and a Romeo and Juliet
courtship make this a bright, jolly, entertaining story, without a dull
page.


THE LURE OF DIM TRAILS

A vivid portrayal of the experience of an Eastern author, among the
cowboys of the West, in search of "local color" for a new novel. "Bud"
Thurston learns many a lesson while following "the lure of the dim
trails" but the hardest, and probably the most welcome, is that of love.


THE LONESOME TRAIL

"Weary" Davidson leaves the ranch for Portland, where conventional city
life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, pungent with the
atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of a pair of large brown
eyes soon compel his return. A wholesome love story.


THE LONG SHADOW

A vigorous Western story, sparkling with the free, outdoor, life of a
mountain ranch. Its scenes shift rapidly and its actors play the game of
life fearlessly and like men. It is a fine love story from start to
finish.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction.

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK

------------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE NOVELS OF
=WINSTON CHURCHILL=

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Skillful in plot, dramatic in episode, powerful and original in climax.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


MR. CREWE'S CAREER. Illus. by A. I. Keller and Kinneys.

A New England state is under the political domination of a railway and
Mr. Crewe, a millionaire, seizes the moment when the cause of the people
against corporation greed is being espoused by an ardent young attorney,
to further his own interest in a political way, by taking up this cause.

The daughter of the railway president, with the sunny humor and shrewd
common sense of the New England girl, plays no small part in the
situation as well as in the life of the young attorney who stands so
unflinchingly for clean politics.


THE CROSSING. Illus. by S. Adamson and L. Baylis.

Describing the battle of Fort Moultrie and the British fleet in the
harbor of Charleston, the blazing of the Kentucky wilderness, the
expedition of Clark and his handful of dauntless followers in Illinois,
the beginning of civilization along the Ohio and Mississippi, and the
treasonable schemes builded against Washington and the Federal
Government.


CONISTON. Illustrated by Florence Scovel Shinn.

A deft blending of love and politics distinguishes this book. The author
has taken for his hero a New Englander, a crude man of the tannery, who
rose to political prominence by his own powers, and then surrendered all
for the love of a woman.

It is a sermon on civic righteousness, and a love story of a deep
motive.


THE CELEBRITY. An Episode.

An inimitable bit of comedy describing an interchange of personalities
between a celebrated author and a bicycle salesman of the most blatant
type. The story is adorned with some character sketches more living than
pen work. It is the purest, keenest fun--no such piece of humor has
appeared for years: it is American to the core.


THE CRISIS. Illus. by Howard Chandler Christy.

A book that presents the great crisis in our national life with splendid
power and with a sympathy, a sincerity, and a patriotism that are
inspiring. The several scenes in the book in which Abraham Lincoln
figures must be read in their entirety for they give a picture of that
great, magnetic, lovable man, which has been drawn with evident
affection and exceptional success.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK

------------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE NOVELS OF
=GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON=

------------------------------------------------------------------------


GRAUSTARK.

A story of love behind a throne, telling how a young American met a
lovely girl and followed her to a new and strange country. A thrilling,
dashing narrative.


BEVERLY OF GRAUSTARK.

Beverly is a bewitching American girl who has gone to that stirring
little principality--Graustark--to visit her friend the princess, and
there has a romantic affair of her own.


BREWSTER'S MILLIONS.

A young man is required to spend _one_ million dollars in one year in
order to inherit _seven_. How he does it forms the basis of a lively
story.


CASTLE CRANEYCROW.

The story revolves round the abduction of a young American woman, her
imprisonment in an old castle and the adventures created through her
rescue.


COWARDICE COURT.

An amusing social feud in the Adirondacks in which an English girl is
tempted into being a traitor by a romantic young American, forms the
plot.


THE DAUGHTER OF ANDERSON CROW.

The story centers about the adopted daughter of the town marshal in a
western village. Her parentage is shrouded in mystery, and the story
concerns the secret that deviously works to the surface.


THE MAN FROM BRODNEY'S.

The hero meets a princess in a far-away island among fanatically hostile
Musselmen. Romantic love making amid amusing situations and exciting
adventures.


NEDRA.

A young couple elope from Chicago to go to London traveling as brother
and sister. They are shipwrecked and a strange mix-up occurs on account
of it.


THE SHERRODS.

The scene is the Middle West and centers around a man who leads a double
life. A most enthralling novel.


TRUXTON KING.

A handsome good natured young fellow ranges on the earth looking for
romantic adventures and is finally enmeshed in most complicated
intrigues in Graustark.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK

------------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------------------------------------------------

=LOUIS TRACY'S=

CAPTIVATING AND EXHILARATING ROMANCES

------------------------------------------------------------------------

=May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list.=

------------------------------------------------------------------------


CYNTHIA'S CHAUFFEUR. Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy.

A pretty American girl in London is touring in a car with a chauffeur
whose identity puzzles her. An amusing mystery.


THE STOWAWAY GIRL. Illustrated by Nesbitt Benson.

A shipwreck, a lovely girl stowaway, a rascally captain, a fascinating
officer, and thrilling adventures in South Seas.


THE CAPTAIN OF THE KANSAS.

Love and the salt sea, a helpless ship whirled into the hands of
cannibals, desperate fighting and a tender romance.


THE MESSAGE. Illustrated by Joseph Cummings Chase.

A bit of parchment found in the figurehead of an old vessel tells of a
buried treasure. A thrilling mystery develops.


THE PILLAR OF LIGHT.

The pillar thus designated was a lighthouse, and the author tells with
exciting detail the terrible dilemma of its cut-off inhabitants.


THE WHEEL O'FORTUNE. With illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg.

The story deals with the finding of a papyrus containing the particulars
of some of the treasures of the Queen of Sheba.


A SON OF THE IMMORTALS. Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy.

A young American is proclaimed king of a little Balkan Kingdom, and a
pretty Parisian art student is the power behind the throne.


THE WINGS OF THE MORNING.

A sort of Robinson Crusoe _redivivus_ with modern settings and a very
pretty love story added. The hero and heroine, are the only survivors of
a wreck, and have many thrilling adventures on their desert island.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction_

------------------------------------------------------------------------

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK

------------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE NOVELS OF
=STEWART EDWARD WHITE=

------------------------------------------------------------------------


THE RULES OF THE GAME. Illustrated by Lajaren A. Hiller

The romance of the son of "The Riverman." The young college hero goes
into the lumber camp, is antagonized by "graft" and comes into the
romance of his life.


ARIZONA NIGHTS. Illus. and cover inlay by N. C. Wyeth.

A series of spirited tales emphasizing some phases of the life of the
ranch, plains and desert. A masterpiece.


THE BLAZED TRAIL. With illustrations by Thomas Fogarty.

A wholesome story with gleams of humor, telling of a young man who
blazed his way to fortune through the heart of the Michigan pines.


THE CLAIM JUMPERS. A Romance.

The tenderfoot manager of a mine in a lonesome gulch of the Black Hills
has a hard time of it, but "wins out" in more ways than one.


CONJUROR'S HOUSE. Illustrated Theatrical Edition. Dramatized under the
title of "The Call of the North."

"Conjuror's House" is a Hudson Bay trading post where the head factor is
the absolute lord. A young fellow risked his life and won a bride on
this forbidden land.


THE MAGIC FOREST. A Modern Fairy Tale. Illustrated.

The sympathetic way in which the children of the wild and their life is
treated could only belong to one who is in love with the forest and open
air. Based on fact.


THE RIVERMAN. Illus. by N. C. Wyeth and C. Underwood

The story of a man's fight against a river and of a struggle between
honesty and grit on the one side, and dishonesty and shrewdness on the
other.


THE SILENT PLACES. Illustrations by Philip R. Goodwin.

The wonders of the northern forests, the heights of feminine devotion,
and masculine power, the intelligence of the Caucasian and the instinct
of the Indian, are all finely drawn in this story.


THE WESTERNERS.

A story of the Black Hills that is justly placed among the best American
novels. It portrays the life of the new West as no other book has done
in recent years.


THE MYSTERY. In collaboration with Samuel Hopkins Adams With
illustrations by Will Crawford.

The disappearance of three successive crews from the stout ship
"Laughing Lass" in mid-Pacific, is a mystery weird and inscrutable. In
the solution, there is a story of the most exciting voyage that man ever
undertook.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK

------------------------------------------------------------------------


Transcriber's notes:

Page 337: missing closing quote fixed ("... or a silent mixer of trouble
medicine."")

Page 434: opening quote moved to before long dash at start of paragraph
(""--And, though it is stolen money ...")

To reflect the character of this book all other instances of
hyphenation and spelling have been retained.





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