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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Play the Game!, by Ruth Comfort Mitchell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Play the Game!
+
+Author: Ruth Comfort Mitchell
+
+Release Date: May 27, 2007 [EBook #21625]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PLAY THE GAME! ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PLAY THE GAME!
+
+BY
+
+RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL
+
+
+[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
+
+
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+NEW YORK :: LONDON :: 1924
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
+
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+
+Copyright, 1920, by The Crowell Publishing Company
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TO MY BROTHERS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Books by
+
+RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CORDUROY
+
+NARRATIVES IN VERSE
+
+JANE JOURNEYS ON
+
+PLAY THE GAME
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
+
+
+New York         London
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PLAY THE GAME!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+There was no denying the fact that Honor Carmody liked the boys. No one
+ever attempted to deny it, least of all Honor herself.
+
+When she finished grammar school her mother and her gay young stepfather
+told her they had decided to send her to Marlborough rather than to the
+Los Angeles High School.
+
+The child looked utterly aghast. "Oh," she said, "I wouldn't like that
+at all. I don't believe I _could_. I couldn't _bear_ it!"
+
+"My dear," her mother chided, "don't be silly! It's a quite wonderful
+school, known all over the country. Girls are sent there from Chicago
+and New York, and even Boston. You'll be with the best girls, the very
+nicest----"
+
+"That's just it," Honor interrupted, forlornly.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"_Girls._ Just girls. Oodles and oodles of nothing but girls. Honestly,
+Muzzie, I don't think I could _stand_ it." She was a large, substantial
+young creature with a broad brow and hearty coloring and candid eyes.
+Her stepfather was sure she would never have her mother's beauty, but he
+was almost equally sure that she would never need it. He studied her
+closely and her actions and reactions intrigued him. He laughed, now,
+and his wife turned mildly shocked eyes on him.
+
+"Stephen, dear! Don't encourage her in being queer. I don't like her to
+be queer." Mrs. Lorimer was not in the least queer herself, unless,
+indeed, it was queer to be startlingly lovely and girlish and appealing
+at forty-one, with a second husband and six children. She was not an
+especially motherly person except in moments of reproof and then she
+always spoke in a remote third person. "Honor, Mother wants you to be
+more with girls." Then, as if to make it clear that she was not merely
+advancing a personal whim,--"You need to be more with girls."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Why--why because Mother says you do." Mrs. Lorimer did not like to
+argue. She always got out of breath and warm-looking.
+
+Her daughter dropped on the floor at her feet. Mrs. Lorimer had small,
+happy-looking, lily-of-the-field hands and Honor took one of them
+between her hard brown paws and squeezed it. "I know, but--_why_ do you
+say so? I don't know anything about girls. Why should I, when I've had
+eight boy cousins and five boy brothers and"--she gave Stephen Lorimer a
+brief, friendly grin--"and two boy fathers!" Her stepfather was not
+really younger than his wife but he was incurably boyish. The girl grew
+earnest. "Please, _pretty-please_, let me go to L. A. High! I've counted
+on it so! And"--she was as intent and free from self-consciousness as a
+terrier at a rat hole--"all the boys I know are going to L. A. High! And
+_Jimsy's_ going, and he'll _need_ me!"
+
+Her stepfather laughed again and lighted a cigarette. "She has you
+there, Mildred. He will need her."
+
+"Of course he will." Honor turned a grateful face to him. "I'll have to
+do all his English and Latin for him, so he can get signed up every week
+and play football!"
+
+Mrs. Lorimer did not see why her daughter's finishing need be curtailed
+by young James King's athletic activities and she started in to say so
+with vigor and emphasis, but her husband held up his long beautifully
+modeled hand rather in the manner of a traffic policeman and stopped
+her.
+
+"Look here, Mildred," he said, "suppose you and I convene in special
+session and consider this thing from all angles and then let her know
+what it comes to,--shall we? Run along, Top Step!"
+
+"All right, Stepper," said the child, relievedly. "_You_ explain it to
+her." She went contentedly away and a moment later they heard her robust
+young voice lifted on the lawn next door,--"Jim-_zee_! Oh, Jimsy!
+Come-mawn-_out_!"
+
+"You see?" Mrs. Lorimer wanted rather inaccurately to know. "That's what
+we've got to stop, Stephen."
+
+He smiled. "But--as your eldest offspring just now inquired--why?"
+
+"_Why?_" She lifted her hands and let them fall into her lap again, palm
+upward, and regarded him in gentle exasperation. "Stephen, you know,
+really, sometimes I feel that you are not a bit of help to me with the
+children."
+
+"Sometimes you do, I daresay," he granted her, serenely, "but most of
+the time you must be simply starry-eyed with gratitude over the
+brilliant way I manage them. Come along over here and we'll talk it
+over!" He patted the place beside him on the couch.
+
+"You mean," said his wife a little sulkily, going, nevertheless, "that
+you'll talk me over!"
+
+"That is my secret hope," said Stephen Lorimer.
+
+It was all quite true. He did manage her children and their
+children--there were three of each--with astonishing ease and success.
+They amused him, and adored him. He understood them utterly. Honor was
+seven when her own father died and nine when her mother married again.
+Stephen Lorimer would never forget her first inspection of him.
+Nursemaids had done their worst on the subject of stepfathers; fairy
+tales had presented the pattern. He knew exactly what was going on in
+her mind, and--quite as earnestly beneath his persiflage as he had set
+himself to woo the widow--he set himself to win her daughter. It was a
+matter of moments only before he saw the color coming back into her
+square little face and the horror seeping out of her eyes. It was a
+matter of days only until she sought him out and told him, in her
+mother's presence, that she believed she liked him better than her first
+father.
+
+"Honor, _dear_! You--you mustn't, really----" Mildred Lorimer insisted
+with herself on being shocked.
+
+"Don't _you_, Muzzie? Don't you like him better?" the child wanted
+persistently to know. "He was very nice, of course; I did like him
+awfully. But he was always 'way off Down Town ... at The Office. We
+didn't have any fun with him. Stepper's always home. I'm glad we married
+a newspaper one this time."
+
+"Stephen, that dreadful name.... What will people think?"
+
+Her new husband didn't in the least care. He and Honor had gravely
+considered on that first day what they should call each other. It seemed
+to Stephen Lorimer that it was hardly fair to the gentleman who had
+stayed so largely at The Office to have his big little daughter and his
+tiny sons calling his successor Father or Dad, and _Papa_ with all its
+shades and shifts of accent left him cold. "Let's see, Honor.
+'Stepfather' as a salutation sounds rather accusing, doesn't it?
+'Step-pa,' now, is less austere, but----"
+
+"Oh, Stephen, _dear_!" They were not consulting Mrs. Lorimer at all.
+
+"I've got it! It's an inspiration! 'Stepper!' Neat, crisp, brisk. Means,
+if any one should ask you, 'Step-pa' and also, literally, stepper; a
+stepper; one who steps--into another's place."
+
+"_Stephen_----"
+
+"Well, haven't I, my dear?" He considered the three young Carmodys,
+nine, seven, and five. "Steps yourselves, aren't you? Honor's the top
+step and----"
+
+"Oh, Stepper, call me Top Step! I like that."
+
+"Right. And Billy's Bottom Step and Ted's the Tweeny! Now we're all
+set!"
+
+"Yes," said Honor, contentedly. She herded her little brothers out of
+the room and came back alone. "But--what'll I tell people you _are_?"
+
+"Why, I think," he considered, "you're young enough and trusting enough
+to call me A Writer."
+
+"I mean, are you Muzzie's step-husband, too?"
+
+It was the first time she had seen the lightness leave his eyes. "No.
+_No._ I am your moth--I am her husband. There is no step there." He got
+up and walked over to where his wife was sitting and towered over her.
+He was a tall man and he looked especially tall at that moment. "Her
+plain--husband. Extremely plain, as it happens"--he was himself again
+for an instant--"but--_her husband_." It seemed to the child that he had
+forgotten which one of them had asked him the question and was
+addressing himself to her mother by mistake. He seemed at once angry and
+demanding and anxious, and she had never seen her mother so pink.
+However, her question had been answered and she had affairs of her own.
+She went away without a backward glance so she did not see her
+stepfather drop to his knees beside the chair and gather the quiet woman
+roughly into his arms, nor hear his insistent voice. "Her husband. The
+_first--husband--she--ever had. Say it, Mildred. Say it._"
+
+And now Honor was thirteen and a half, and tardily ready for High
+School, and there were three little Lorimers, twins and a six months'
+old single. Stephen Lorimer, who had been a singularly footloose world
+rover, had settled down securely in the old Carmody house on South
+Figueroa Street. He was intensely proud of his paternity, personal and
+vicarious, and took it not seriously but joyously. He was dramatic
+critic and special writer for the leading newspaper of Los Angeles, and
+theoretically he worked by night and slept by day, but as a matter of
+puzzling fact he did not sleep at all, unless one counted his brief
+morning naps. His eyes, in consequence, seemed never to be quite open,
+but nothing, nevertheless, escaped them.
+
+An outsider, looking in on them now, the erect, hot-cheeked, imperious
+woman, a little insolent always of her beauty, and the lolling, lounging
+man with the drooping lids, would have placed his odds unhesitatingly
+on her winning of any point she might have in mind. Even Mildred Lorimer
+herself, after four years and a half of being married to him, thought
+she would win out over him this time. Honor was the only daughter she
+had, the only daughter she would ever have, for she had definitely
+decided, at forty-one, to cease her dealings with the long-legged bird
+who had flapped six times to her roof, and it seemed intolerable to her
+that--with five boys--her one girl should be so robustly ungirlish.
+
+"Now, then, let's have it. You want Honor to go to Marlborough. As she
+herself asked and I myself repeated,--why?"
+
+"And as I answered you both," said his wife, trying hard to keep the
+conversation spinning lightly in the air as he did, "it's because I want
+her to be more like other girls."
+
+"And I," said her husband, "do not." This was the place for Mildred
+Lorimer to fling her own _why_ but her husband was too quick for her.
+"Because she is so much finer and sounder and saner and sweeter as she
+is. Mildred, I have never seen any living creature so selfless. What was
+the word they coined in that play about Mars?--'_Otherdom?_' That's it,
+yes; otherdom. That's Honor Carmody. She could have finished grammar
+school at twelve, but Jimsy needed her help."
+
+"That's just it! Can't you see how wrong that is?"
+
+"No. I'm too much occupied with seeing how right it is. Good Lord, my
+dear, in a world given over to the first person perpendicular, can't you
+see the amazing beauty and rarity of your child's soul? Every day and
+all day long she gives herself,--to you, to me, to the kiddies, to her
+friends. She is the eternal mother." Mildred Lorimer was not the eternal
+mother. She was not in fact a mother at all. The physical fact of
+motherhood had six times descended upon her and she was doing her
+gentle, well-bred, conscientious best in six lively directions, but
+under it all she was forever Helen, forever the best beloved. She was
+getting rather beyond her depth but she was not giving up. Stephen, in
+discussion, had an elusive way of soaring into hazy generalities. She
+brought him down.
+
+"I can't see why it should make her any less unselfish to attend the
+best girls' school than to--to run with the boys." She brought out the
+little vulgarism with a faint curl of her lovely lip.
+
+"'Run with the boys!' That has a positively Salem flavor, hasn't it?
+Almost as deadly, that 'with,' as 'after,'" He loved words, Stephen
+Lorimer; he played with them and juggled them. "Yet isn't that exactly
+what the girls of to-day must and should do? Isn't it what the girls of
+to-morrow--naturally, unrebuked--will do? Not running after them, slyly
+or brazenly; not sitting at home, crimped and primped and curled,
+waiting to be run after. No," he said hotly, getting up and beginning to
+swallow up the room from wall to wall with his long strides, "_no_! With
+them. Running with them, chin in, chest out, sound, conditioned,
+unashamed!" He believed that he meant to write a tremendous book, one
+day, Honor's stepfather. He often reeled off whole chapters in his mind,
+warm and glowing. It was only when he got it down on paper that it
+cooled and congealed. "Running with them in the race--for the race----"
+his hurtling promenade took him to the window and he paused for an
+instant. "Come here, Mildred. Look at her!"
+
+Mildred Lorimer came to join him. On the shabby, rusty lawn of the King
+place, next door, all the rustier for its nearness to their own emerald
+turf, sat Honor Carmody and Jimsy King, jointly and severally lacing up
+a football.
+
+"Yes, look at her!" said her mother with feeling.
+
+"Leave her alone, Mildred. Leave her alive!"
+
+The two children were utterly absorbed. The boy was half a head taller
+than the girl, heavier, sturdier, of a startling beauty. There was a
+stubborn, much reviled wave in his bronze hair and his eyes were a dark
+hazel flecked with black. His skin was bronze, too, bronzed by many
+Catalina summer and winter swims at Ocean Park. It made his teeth seem
+very white and flashing.
+
+The window was open to the soft Southern California air, and the voices
+came across to the watchers.
+
+"_Hold_ it!"
+
+"I _am_ holding it!"
+
+A handsome man of forty came up the tree-shaded street, not quite
+steadily, and turned into the King's walk. His hat was pulled low over
+his eyes and the collar of his coat was turned up in spite of the
+mildness of the day. He nodded to the boy and girl as he went past them
+and on into the house.
+
+"_Again!_" said Mrs. Lorimer, tragically. "That's the second time this
+week!"
+
+"Rough on the kid," said her husband. "See him now."
+
+Jimsy King had turned his head and was following his father's slow
+progress up the steps and across the porch and into the house. "Be in in
+a minute, Dad!" he called after him.
+
+"Loyal little beggar. I saw him steering him up Broadway one morning,
+just at school time. Pluck."
+
+Honor had looked after James King, the elder, too, and then at his son,
+and then at the football in her hands again. "Hurry up," she commanded.
+"Pull it tighter! _Tighter!_ Do you call that pulling?" Inexorably she
+got his attention back to the subject in hand.
+
+"That makes it all the worse," said Mrs. Lorimer. "Of course they're
+only children--babies, really--but I couldn't have anything.... It's bad
+blood, Stephen. I _couldn't_ have my child interested in one of the
+'Wild Kings'!"
+
+"Well, you won't have, if you're wise. Let 'em alone. Let 'em lace
+footballs on the front lawn ... and they won't hold hands on the side
+porch! Why, woman dear, like the well-known Mr. Job, the thing you
+greatly fear you'll bring to pass! Shut her up in a girls' school--even
+the best and sanest--and you'll make boys suddenly into creatures of
+romance, remote, desirable. Don't emphasize and underline for her. She's
+as clean as a star and as unself-conscious as a puppy! Don't hurry her
+into what one of those English play-writing chaps calls--Granville
+Barker, isn't it?--Yes,--_Madras House_--'the barnyard drama of sex....
+Male and female created He them ... but men and women are a long time
+in the making!'"
+
+The lacing of the football was finished. The boy lifted his head and
+looked soberly at the door through which his father had entered, not
+quite steadily. Then he drew a long breath, threw back his shining
+bronze head, said something in a low tone to the girl, and ran into the
+house.
+
+Honor Carmody got to her feet and stood looking after him, the odd
+mothering look in her square child's face. She stood so for long
+moments, without moving, and her mother and her stepfather watched her.
+
+Suddenly Stephen Lorimer flung the window up as far as it would go and
+leaned out.
+
+"It's all right, Top Step," he called, meeting the leaping gladness of
+her glance. "We've decided, your mother and I. You're going to L. A.
+High! You're going----" but now he dropped his voice and spoke only for
+the woman beside him, slipping a penitent and conciliatory arm about
+her, his eyes impish, "you're going to run with the boys!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The "Wild Kings" had lived in their fine old house ever since the
+neighborhood could remember. The first and probably the wildest of them
+had come out from Virginia when Los Angeles was still a drowsing Spanish
+village, bringing with him an aged and excellent cellar and a flock of
+negro servants. Honor's Carmody grandmother could remember the
+picturesqueness of his entourage, of James King himself, the
+hard-riding, hard-drinking, soft-spoken cavalier with his proud, pale
+wife and his slim, high-stepping horses and his grinning blacks. The
+general conviction was, Grandmother Carmody said, that he had come--or
+been sent--west to make a fresh start. There was something rather
+pathetically naïve about that theory. There could never be a fresh start
+for the "Wild Kings" in a world of excellent cellars and playing cards.
+In a surprisingly short time he had re-created his earlier atmosphere
+for himself--an atmosphere of charm and cheer and color ... and pride
+and shame and misery, in which his wife and children lived and moved and
+had their being. In the early eighties he built the big beautiful house
+on South Figueroa Street, moved the last of his negro servitors and the
+last of his cellar and his young family into it and died. Since that day
+Kings had come and gone in it, big, bonny creatures, liked and sighed
+over, and the house was shabby now, cracked and peeling for the want of
+paint, the walks grass-grown, the lawn frowzy, lank and stringy curtains
+at the dim windows. There were only three bottles of the historic cellar
+left now, precious, cob-webbed; there was only one of the blacks, an
+ancient, crabbed crone of the second generation, with a witch's hand at
+cookery and a witch's temper. And there were only James King III and
+James King IV, his son, Honor's Jimsy, left of the line in the old home.
+The negress fed and mended them; an infrequent Japanese came in to make
+futile efforts on house and garden.
+
+The neighbors said, "How do you do, Mr. King? Like summer, really, isn't
+it?" and looked hastily away. One never could be sure of finding him
+quite himself. Even if he walked quite steadily he might not be able to
+talk quite steadily, but he was always a King, always sure of his
+manner, be he ever so unsure of his feet or his tongue. He had been
+worse since his wife died, when the boy was still a toddler. She was a
+slim, sandy-haired Scotch girl with steady eyes and a prominent chin,
+who had married him to reform him, and the neighbors were beginning to
+think she was in a fair way to compass it when she died. No one had ever
+been able to pity Jeanie King; she had been as proud as the pale lady
+who came with the first "Wild King" from Virginia. There was that about
+the Kings; it had to be granted that their women always stuck; they must
+have had compensating traits and graces. No King wife ever gave up or
+deserted save by death, and no King wife ever wept on a neighbor's
+shoulder.
+
+And now they had all wandered back to Virginia or up to Alaska or down
+to Mexico, and there was not an uncle or cousin of his tribe left in Los
+Angeles for Jimsy King; only his bad, beloved father, coming home at
+noon in rumpled evening dress, but wearing it better and more handily,
+for all that, than any other man on the block.
+
+It was agreed that there was no chance for Jimsy to escape the heritage
+of his blood. People were kind about it, but very firm. "If his mother
+had lived he might have had a chance, the poor boy," Mrs. Lorimer would
+sigh, "but with that father, and that home life, and that example----"
+
+"My dear," said Stephen Lorimer, "can't you see what you are doing? By
+_you_ I mean the neighborhood. You are holding his heredity up like a
+hoop for him to jump through!"
+
+Honor's stepfather held that there might be a generous share of the
+firm-chinned Scotch mother in Jimsy. Certainly it was a fighting chance;
+he was living in a day of less warmth and color than his father and his
+forbears; there were more outlets for his interest and his energy. His
+father, for instance, had not played football. Jimsy had played as soon
+as he could walk alone--football, baseball, basketball, handball, water
+polo; life was a hard and tingling game to him. "It's an even chance,"
+said Stephen Lorimer, "and if Honor's palling with him can swing it, can
+we square it with ourselves to take her away from him?" He carried his
+point, as usual, and the boy and the girl started in at Los Angeles High
+on the same day. Honor decided on the subjects which Jimsy could most
+safely take--the things he was strongest in, the weak subjects in which
+she was strong. There was an inexorable rule about being signed up by
+every teacher for satisfactory work on Friday afternoon before a
+Saturday football game; it was as a law of the Medes and Persians; even
+the teachers who adored him most needs must abide by it. There was no
+cajoling any of them; even the pretty, ridiculously young thing who
+taught Spanish maintained a Gibraltar-like firmness.
+
+"You'll simply have to study, Jimsy, that's all," said Honor.
+
+"Study, yes, but that's not learning, Skipper!" (She had been that ever
+since her first entirely seaworthy summer at Catalina.) "I can study, if
+I have to, but that's not saying I'll get anything into my sconce! I'm
+pretty slow in the head!"
+
+"I know you are," said Honor, sighing. "Of course, you've been so busy
+with other things. Think what you've done in athletics!"
+
+"Fast on the feet and slow in the head," he grinned. "Well, I'll die
+trying. But you've got to stand by, Skipper."
+
+"Of course. I'll do your Latin and English and part of your Spanish."
+
+"Gee, you're a brick."
+
+"It's nothing." She dismissed it briefly. "It's my way of doing
+something, Jimsy, that's all. It's the only way I can be on the team."
+She glowed pinkly at the thought. "When I sit up on the bleachers and
+see you make a touchdown and hear 'em yell--why I'm _there_! I'm on the
+team because I've helped a little to keep you on the team! It almost
+makes up for having to be a girl. Just for the moment, I'm not sitting
+up high, clean and starched and safe; I'm on the field, hot and muddy
+and with my nose bleeding, _doing_ something for L. A.! I'm _there_!"
+
+Jimsy slapped her on the shoulder like a man and brother. "You're
+_there_ all the time, Skipper! You're there a million!"
+
+He made the first team the first day he went out to practice. There was
+no denying him. He captained the team the second year and every year
+until he graduated, a year late for all his friend's unwearying toil. As
+a matter of fact they did not make a special effort to get him through
+on time; the team needed him, the squad needed him, L. A. needed him. It
+was more like a college than a High School in those days, with its
+numbers and its spirit, that strong, intangible evidence of things not
+seen. There was something about it, a concentrated essence of Jimsy King
+and hundreds of lesser Jimsy Kings, which made it practically
+unconquerable. In the year before his final one the team reached its
+shining perfection and held it to the end. It is still a name to conjure
+with at the school on the hill, Jimsy King's. The old teachers remember;
+the word comes down. "A regular old-time L. A. team--the fighting
+spirit. Like the days of Jimsy King!"
+
+Other teams might score on them; frequently they could not, but when
+they did the rooting section was not dashed. It lifted up its multiple
+voice, young, insolent, unafraid, in mocking song, and Honor Carmody,
+just on the edge of the section, beside her stepfather, sang with them:
+
+
+     _You can't beat L. A. High!_
+     _You can't beat L. A. High!_
+     _Use your team to get up steam_
+     _But you can't beat L. A. High!_
+
+
+It rolled out over the football field and echoed away in the soft
+Southern California air. It was gay, inexorable; you _couldn't_ beat
+L. A. High, field or bleachers.
+
+Stephen Lorimer never missed a game. His wife went once and never again.
+
+"I suppose I am too sensitive," she said, "but I can't help it. It's the
+way I'm made. I simply cannot endure seeing anything so brutal. I can't
+understand those young girls ... and the _mothers_!" Two of her own were
+on the second team, now, but she never saw them play, and they came in
+the back way, after games and practice, sneaking up to Honor's room with
+their black eyes and their gory noses for her capable first aid. She
+was not one, Mildred Lorimer, into whose blood something of the iron had
+entered. Her boys bewildered her as they grew and toughened out of baby
+fiber. She was a little unhappy about it, but she was more beautiful
+than she had ever been in her life, and freer, with the last little
+Lorimer shifting sturdily for himself and his father more in love with
+her than ever. She had more or less resigned her active motherhood to
+him. The things she might have done for Honor, the selection of her
+frocks and hats, the color scheme of her room, her parties, the girl at
+seventeen did efficiently for herself. Her childish squareness of face
+and figure was rounding out rather splendidly and she had a sure and
+dependable sense of what to wear. Her things were good in line and
+color, smartly simple. She had thick braids of honey-colored hair wound
+round her head; her brow was broad and calm, her gray eyes serene; she
+had a fresh and hearty color. Stephen Lorimer believed that she had a
+voice. She sang like one of the mocking birds in her garden, joyously,
+radiantly, riotously, and her stepfather, who knew amazingly many great
+persons, persuaded a famous artist to hear her when she gave her concert
+in Los Angeles.
+
+"Yes," she said, nodding her head, "it is a voice. It is a voice. A
+little teaching, yes; this Barrett woman who was once my pupil, she will
+be safe with her. Not too much; not too much singing. Finish your
+school, my little one. Then you shall come over to me for a year, yes?
+We shall see what we shall see!" She patted her cheek and sent her out
+of the room ahead of Stephen.
+
+"Well?" he wanted to know.
+
+"But yes, a voice, as I have said. Send her to me when her schooling is
+over."
+
+"She has a future?"
+
+The great contralto shrugged her thick shoulders. "I fear not. I think
+not."
+
+His face lengthened. "Why?"
+
+"Because, my friend, she will care more for living. She will not care so
+greatly to _get_, that large child. She will only _give_. She has not
+the fine relentless selfishness to make the artist. Well, we shall see.
+Life may break her. Send her to me. In two years, yes? No, no, I will
+have no thanks. It is so small a thing to do.... One grows fat and old;
+it is good to have youngness near. Now, go, my friend. I shall gargle my
+throat and sleep." She gave him a hot, plump hand to kiss.
+
+Honor was not especially impressed. She rather thought, when the time
+came, she should prefer to go to Stanford, but she liked her music
+lessons, meanwhile. It filled up her time, the business of singing, in
+that last year when she was more or less marking time and helping Jimsy
+through.
+
+Her stepfather watched her with growing amazement. So far as any one
+might judge, and to Mrs. Lorimer's tearful relief, Honor's attitude
+toward the last of the "Wild Kings" was at seventeen what it had been at
+twelve, at six.
+
+"I was right, wasn't I?" Stephen wanted to know.
+
+"Well ... if you can only keep on being right about it! I'm so thankful
+about her singing. That year abroad will be wonderful. She'll meet new
+people ... real men."
+
+"Young Jimsy is exhibiting every known symptom of becoming a real man."
+
+"Yes, but he's a King."
+
+"That appears to be the universal opinion regarding him."
+
+"Stephen _dear_, don't be ridiculous! You've always been as bewitched
+about the boy as Honor herself." Mrs. Lorimer was dressed for a luncheon
+and her husband, heavy-eyed and flushed of face, had cut short his late
+morning sleep to drive her. She was still for him the everlasting Helen.
+
+"Mildred," he said, quitting the battlefield for the eternal balcony,
+"do you know that you are lovelier this instant than you were the day I
+married you?"
+
+Mrs. Lorimer knew it quite well. It was due somewhat to good management
+as well as luck, and she liked having the results appreciated. She let
+him kiss her, carefully, because she had her hat on.
+
+The elder James King did not seem to age with the years. "He is,"
+Stephen Lorimer said facetiously, "only too well preserved!" His manner
+and mode of life remained the same, save that he lost more heavily at
+cards. For the first time in its history the old King place was
+mortgaged. In a day when every one who was any one, as Honor's mother
+put it, was getting a motor car, the Kings had none. Jimsy, of course,
+rode regally in every one else's. The Lorimers had two, an electric in
+which Honor's mother glided softly with her little whirring bell from
+clubs to luncheons and from luncheons to teas, and a rough and ready
+seven-passenger affair into which the whole tribe might be piled, and
+which Honor Carmody drove better than her stepfather, who was apt to
+dream at the wheel. On Sundays Stephen Lorimer took them all, Jimsy,
+Honor, Billy and Ted Carmody, the Lorimer twins and the last little
+Lorimer, on motor picnics to the beach. They drove to Santa Monica, down
+the Palisades, up the narrow, winding, wave-washed road to the Malibou
+Ranch and built a fire and broiled chops and made coffee and baked
+potatoes, after their swim, ate like refugees and slept like puppies on
+the sand. In the afternoon, when they came back to the gracious old
+house in its wide garden on South Figueroa Street Mildred Lorimer would
+be waiting, in a frock he loved, to give her husband his tea, cool,
+lovely, remote from the rougher fun of life.
+
+In the evenings--Sunday evenings--Honor held her joyous At Homes. Three
+or four favored girls and a dozen boys came to supper, a loud, hilarious
+meal. Takasugi, the cook, and Kada, the second boy, were given their
+freedom. Honor, in the quaint aprons her stepfather had picked up here
+and there over the world, pink, capable, with the assistance of Jimsy
+and her biggest brothers, got supper.
+
+It was a lively feast. Jimsy King, in one of Kada's white jackets,
+waited on the table. They ate enormously, and when they had finished
+they pronounced their ungodly grace--a thunderous tattoo on the table
+edge, begun with palms and finished with elbows--
+
+
+     None-but-the-righteous-shall-be-SAVED!--
+
+
+followed, while the cups and plates were still leaping and shuddering,
+with its secular second verse--
+
+
+     My-sister-Mary-walks-like-THIS!
+
+
+"Well, Top Step," said Stephen one of those evenings, "eleven boys
+beside the stand-by Jimsy. Fair to middling popularity, I should say!"
+
+"Popularity?" She opened her candid eyes wide at him. "Why, Stepper, you
+know it's not that! They don't come to see me! They don't mind me, of
+course, but it's the eats, and meeting each other,--and mostly Jimsy, I
+guess! Mercy,--the chocolate's boiling over!"
+
+She clearly believed it, and it was more or less true. The Carmody home
+of a Sunday night was a sort of glorified club house without rules or
+dues or by-laws. It was the thing to do, if one were so lucky. It rather
+placed a boy in the scheme of things to be one of "the Sunday-night
+bunch." Jimsy was the Committee on Membership.
+
+"Let's have that Burke boy out to supper Sunday, shan't we?" Honor would
+say. "He's doing so well on the team."
+
+"No," Jimsy would answer, definitely. "Not at the house, Skipper." Honor
+accepted his judgments unquestioningly. Some way, with the deep wisdom
+of boys, he knew, better than she could, that the young Burke person was
+better on the field than in the drawing-room. There was nothing snobbish
+in their gatherings; shabby boys came, girls who had made their own
+little dimity dresses. It was the intangible, inexorable caste of the
+best boyhood, and Honor knew, comfortably, that her particular King
+could do no wrong.
+
+The rooting section had a special yell for Jimsy, when he had sped down
+the field to a touchdown or kicked a difficult goal. It followed the
+regular High School yell, hair-lifting in its fierceness:
+
+
+     King! King! King!
+     K-I-N-G, King!
+     G-I-N-K, Gink!
+     He's the King Gink!
+     He's the King Gink!
+     He's the King Gink!
+     K-I-N-G, King! KING!
+
+
+and Honor utterly agreed with them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The house across the street from the Carmody place was suddenly sold.
+People were curious and a little anxious. Every one on that block had
+been there for a generation or so; there was a sense of permanence about
+them all--even the Kings.
+
+"Eastern people," said Mrs. Lorimer. "A mother, rather delicate-looking,
+and one son, eighteen or nineteen I should say. He's frail-looking, too,
+and he limps a little. I imagine they're very nice. Everything about
+them"--her magazine reading had taken her quite reasonably to a front
+window the day the newcomers' furniture was uncrated and carried
+in--"seems very nice." She hoped, if it developed that they really were
+desirable that they would be permanent. Los Angeles was coming to have
+such a floating population....
+
+Honor and Jimsy observed the boy from across the street, a slim, modish
+person. "Gee," said Jimsy, "it must be fierce to be lame!--to have your
+body not--not do what you tell it to! I wonder what he does? He can't do
+_anything_, can he?" His eyes were deep with honest pity.
+
+"Oh, I suppose he sort of fills in with other things," Honor conceded.
+"I expect, if people can't do the things that count most, they go in for
+other things. He seems awfully keen about his two cars."
+
+"They're peaches, both of 'em," said Jimsy without envy.
+
+"And of course he has time to be a wonder at school, if he wants to be."
+
+"Yep. Looks as if he might be a shark at it." He grinned. "Slow on his
+feet but fast in the head."
+
+"Muzzie's going to call on his mother, and then we'd better ask him to
+supper, hadn't we? He must be horribly lonesome."
+
+"I'll float over and see him," the last King suggested, "and sort of
+size him up. Give him the once-over. We don't want to start anything
+unless he's O. K. Might as well go now, I guess."
+
+"All right. Come in afterward and tell me what you think of him."
+
+He nodded and swung off across the street. It was an hour before he came
+back, glowing. "Gee, Skipper, I'm strong for that kid! Name's Van Meter,
+Carter Van Meter. He's got a head on him, that boy! He's been
+everywhere and seen everything--three times abroad--Canada, Mexico! You
+ought to hear him talk--not a bit up-stagy, no side at all, but
+interesting! I asked him for supper, Sunday night. You'll be crazy about
+him--all the bunch will!" Thus Jimsy King on the day Carter Van Meter
+limped into his life; thus Jimsy King through the years which followed,
+worshiping humbly the things he did not have in himself, belittling his
+own gifts, enlarging his own lacks, glorifying his friend. He had never
+had a deeply intimate boy friend before; the team was his friend, the
+squad; Honor had sufficed for a nearer tie. It was to be different, now;
+a sharing. She was to resent a little in the beginning, before she, too,
+came under the spell of the boy from the East.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer came smiling back from her call. "_Very_ nice," she told
+her husband and her daughter, "really charming. And her things are quite
+wonderful ... rare rugs ... portraits of ancestors. A widow. Here for
+her health, and the boy's health; he's never been strong. All she has in
+the world ... wrapped up in him. _Very_ Eastern!"--she laughed at the
+memory. "She said, 'And from what part of the East do you come, Mrs.
+Lorimer?' When I said I was born here in Los Angeles she almost
+_gasped_, and then she flushed and said, 'Oh, really? Is it possible?
+But I met some people on shipboard, once--the time before last when I
+was crossing--who were natives, and they were _quite_ delightful.'"
+
+"The word 'native' intrigues them," said Stephen, drawing off her long,
+limp suede gloves and smoothing them. "I daresay she'll be looking for
+war whoops and tomahawks. And if it comes to that, we can furnish the
+former, especially Sunday night."
+
+"Muzzie, did you meet the boy?" Honor wanted to know.
+
+"Yes. He came in for tea with us. A beautifully mannered boy. Very much
+at ease. We must have him here, Honor."
+
+"Yes, Jimsy's already asked him for Sunday night, Muzzie. Jimsy likes
+him."
+
+"Well, he may. He has a something ... I don't know what it is, exactly,
+but he will be good for all of you."
+
+"We'll be good for him, too," said her daughter, calmly. "It must be
+fearfully dull for him, not knowing any one, and being lame."
+
+He came to supper, a trim young glass of fashion, and it was he, the
+stranger, who was entirely at his ease, and the "bunch," the gay,
+accustomed bunch, which was a little shy and constrained. Jimsy stood
+sponsor for him and Honor was an earnest hostess. He said he enjoyed
+himself; certainly he made himself gently agreeable to Mrs. Lorimer, to
+the girls. Honor's stepfather observed him with his undying curiosity.
+He was a plain boy with a look of past pain in his colorless face, a
+shadowed bitterness in his eyes, a droop at the corners of his mouth
+when he was not speaking. For all his two motor cars and his rare old
+rugs and the portraits of ancestors and his idolized only sonship, life
+had clearly withheld from him the things he had wanted most. There was a
+baffled imperiousness about him, Stephen decided.
+
+"A clever youngster," he told his wife, watching him from across the
+room. "Brains. But I don't like him."
+
+"Stephen! Why not?"
+
+He shook his head. "I don't know yet. But I know. I had a curious sense,
+as he came limping into the room to-night, of '_Enter the villain_.'"
+
+"My dear,--that poor, frail boy, with his lovely, gentle manners!"
+
+"I know. It does sound rather piffle. Daresay I'm wrong. The kids will
+size him up."
+
+When Carter Van Meter came to tell his hostess good-by, he smiled
+winningly. "This has been very jolly, Mrs. Lorimer. It was good of you
+to let me come. Mother asked me to say how much she appreciated it.
+But"--he hesitated--"May I come in some afternoon when--just you and
+Miss Honor are here?" He looked wistful, and frailer at the end of the
+evening than he had at the beginning.
+
+"Of course you may, my dear boy!" Mrs. Lorimer gave him the glory of her
+special smile. "Come soon!"
+
+He came the next day but one, and as her mother was at a bridge
+afternoon it was Honor who entertained him. She had just come home from
+High School and she wore a middy blouse and a short skirt and looked
+less than her years. "Let's sit in the garden, shan't we?--I hate being
+indoors a minute more than I can help!" She led the way across the
+green, springy lawn to the little rustic building over which the vivid
+Bougainvillæa climbed and swarmed, and he followed at his halted pace.
+"Besides, we can see Jimsy from here when he comes by from football
+practice, and call him in. I just didn't happen to go to watch practice
+to-day, and now"--she smiled at him,--"I'm glad I didn't." There was
+something intensely pitiful about this lad to her mothering young heart,
+for all his poise and pride.
+
+He waited gravely until she had established herself on a bench before
+he sat. "Tell me about this fellow King. Every one seems very keen about
+him."
+
+Honor leaned back and took a serge-clad knee between two tanned hands.
+"Well, I don't know how to begin! He's--well, he's just Jimsy King,
+that's all! But it's more than any other boy in the world."
+
+"You're great friends, aren't you?"
+
+"Jimsy and I? I should say we are! We've known each other ever
+since--well, before we could walk or talk! Our nurses used to take us
+out together in our buggies. We were born next door--in these two
+houses, on the same day. Jimsy's just about an hour older than I am!"
+
+"I have never had many friends," said Carter Van Meter. "I've been
+moving about so much, traveling ... other things have interfered." He
+never referred, directly or indirectly, to his ill health or his limp.
+
+"Well, you can have all you want now," said Honor, generously. "And
+Jimsy likes you!" She bestowed that like a decoration. "Honestly, I
+never knew him to take such a fancy to any one before in all his life.
+He likes every one, you know,--I mean, he never dislikes anybody, but he
+never gets crushes. So, it means something to have him keen about you.
+If _he's_ for you, _everybody_ will be for you."
+
+"Why do people like him so?"
+
+"Can't help it," said Honor, briefly. "Even _teachers_. He's not
+terribly clever at school, and of course he doesn't have as much time to
+study as some do, but the teachers are all keen about him. They know
+what he is. I expect that's what counts, don't you? Not what people
+have, or do, or know; what they _are_. Why, one time I happened to be in
+the Vice-Principal's office about something, and it was a noontime, and
+there was a wild rough-house down in the yard. Honestly, you couldn't
+hear yourself _think_! The Principal--he was a new man, just come--kept
+looking out of the window, and getting more and more nervous, and
+finally he said, 'Shouldn't we stop that, Mrs. Dalton?' And she looked
+out and laughed and said, 'Jimsy King's in it, and he'll stop it before
+we need to notice it!' _That's_ what teachers think of him, and the
+boys--I believe they'd cut up into inch pieces for him."
+
+"I suppose it's a good deal on account of his football. He's on the
+team, isn't he?" His eyes disdained teams.
+
+"On the team? He _is_ the team! Captain last year and this,--and next!
+Wait till you see him play. He's the fastest full back we've ever had,
+since anybody can remember. There'll be a game Saturday. We play
+Redlands. Will you come, and sit with Stepper and me?"
+
+"Thanks. I don't care very much for----" he stopped, held up by the
+growing amaze in her face. "Yes, I'd like very much to go with you and
+Mr. Lorimer. I don't care much about watching games where I don't know
+the people"--he retrieved and amended his earlier sentence--"but you'll
+explain everything to me."
+
+She grinned. "I'm afraid I won't be very nice about talking to you. I
+get simply wild, at games. I'm right down there, in it. I've never
+gotten over not being a boy! But Jimsy's wonderful about letting me have
+as much share in it as I can. You'll hear all sorts of tales about him,
+when you come to know people,--plays he's made and games he's won, and
+how he never, _never_ loses his head or his temper, no matter what the
+other team does. If we should ever have another war, I expect he'd be a
+great general." Her face broke into mirth again at a memory. "Once, we
+were playing Pomona--imagine a high school playing a college and
+_beating_ them!--and somebody was out for a minute, and Jimsy was
+standing waiting, with his arms folded across his chest, and he had on
+a head guard, and it was very still, and suddenly a girl's voice piped
+up--'_Oh, doesn't he look just like Napoleon?_' He's never heard the
+last of it; it fusses him awfully. I never knew anybody so modest. I
+suppose it's because he's always been the leader, the head of things,
+ever since he started kindergarten. He's _used_ to it; it seems just
+natural to him."
+
+The new boy shifted his position uneasily.
+
+Honor thought perhaps he was suffering; his face looked pinched. "Shall
+we go in the house? Would you be more comf"--she caught herself
+up--"perhaps you're not used to being out of doors all the time? Eastern
+people find this glaring sun tiresome sometimes."
+
+"It's very nice here. You go to Los Angeles High School, too?" He didn't
+care about changing his position but he wanted intensely to change the
+subject, even if he had started it by his query. "Odd, isn't it, that
+you don't go to a girls' school?"
+
+Honor laughed. "That's what Muzzie thinks. She did want me to go, but I
+didn't want to, and Stepper--my stepfather, you know,--stood up for me.
+I never liked girls very much when I was little. I do now, of course.
+I've two or three girl friends who are _wonders_. I adore them. But I
+still like boys best. I suppose"--he saw that her mind came back like a
+needle to the pole--"it's on account of Jimsy. Wait till you really know
+him! You will be just the same. Honestly, he's the bravest, gamest
+person in the world. Once, a couple of years ago, Stepper noticed that
+he was limping, and he made him go to see the doctor. The doctor told us
+about it afterwards--he's the doctor who took care of our mothers when
+we were born. Jimsy came in and said, 'Doc, I've got a kind of a sore
+leg.' And the doctor looked at it and said, 'You've got a broken leg,
+that's what you've got! Go straight home and I'll come out and put it in
+a plaster cast.' You see"--she illustrated by putting the tips of her
+two forefingers together--"it was really broken, cracked through, but it
+hadn't slipped by. Well, the doctor had to stay and finish his office
+hours, and about an hour later he looked up and there was Jimsy, and he
+said, 'Say, Doc, would you just as soon set this leg to-morrow? You see,
+I've got a date to take Skipper--he always calls me Skipper--to a dance
+to-night. I won't dance, but I'll just----' and the doctor just roared
+at him and told him to go home that instant, and Jimsy went out, but
+when the doctor got to his house he wasn't there, and he had to wait
+about half an hour for him, and he was _furious_--he's got a terrible
+temper but he's the dearest old thing, really. Pretty soon Jimsy came
+wandering in with his arms full of books and games and puzzles and
+things he'd got to amuse himself while he was laid up! Of course the
+doctor expected him to keep perfectly still in bed, but he found he
+could make a sort of a raft of two table extension boards and slide
+downstairs to his meals. He had an awful time getting up again, but he
+didn't care. The first day he was laid up he had exactly nineteen people
+to see him, and he took the bandages off the leg and all the boys and
+teachers wrote their autographs and sentiments on the cast. He called it
+his Social Register and his Guest Book!" Honor was too happily deep in
+her reminiscences to see that her new friend was a little bored.
+
+He got suddenly to his feet. "Yes. He must be an unusual fellow. But I'd
+like to hear you sing. Won't you come into the house and sing something
+for me?"
+
+"All right," said Honor. "I love to sing, but I haven't studied very
+much yet, and I haven't any decent songs. Why doesn't somebody write
+some?--Songs _about_ something? Not just maudling along about 'heart'
+and 'part' and that kind of stuff! Come on! There's Stepper at the piano
+now. He'll play for me."
+
+It was mellow in the long living-room after the brazen afternoon sun
+outside, a livable, lovable room. Stephen Lorimer had an open book on
+the music rack and he was thumping some rather stirring chords.
+
+"Stepper," said Honor, "here's Carter Van Meter, and he wants me to sing
+for him, and I was just saying how I hated all these mushy old songs.
+Can't you find me something different?"
+
+"I have," said her stepfather. "I've got the words here and I'm messing
+about for some music to go with them."
+
+Honor looked out as she passed the window on her way to the piano. "Wait
+a minute! Here's Jimsy! I'll call him!" She sped to the door and hailed
+him, and he came swiftly in. "Hello! How was practice?"
+
+"Fair. Burke was better. Tried him on the end. 'Lo, Mr. Lorimer. 'Lo,
+Carter!"
+
+"I've got a poem here you'll all like," said Stephen Lorimer. "No, you
+needn't shuffle your feet, Jimsy. It's your kind. Sit down, all of you.
+I'll read it."
+
+"So long as it hasn't got any 'whate'ers' and yestereves' and
+'beauteous,'" the last King grinned. "Shoot!"
+
+"It's an English thing, by Henry Newbolt,--about cricket, but that
+doesn't matter. It's the thing itself. I may not have the words
+exactly,--I read it over there, and copied it down in my diary, from
+memory." He looked at the boys and the girl; Honor was waiting eagerly,
+sure of anything he might bring her; Jimsy King, fresh from the sweating
+realities of the gridiron, was good-humoredly tolerant; Carter Van Meter
+was courteously attentive, with his oddly mature air of social poise. He
+began to read, to recite, rather, his eyes on their faces:
+
+
+     There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night,
+     Ten to make and the match to win;
+     A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
+     An hour to play and the last man in,
+     And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat
+     Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
+     But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote--
+     Play up! Play up! and--Play the Game!
+
+
+Jimsy King, who was lolling on the couch, sat up, his eyes kindling.
+"Gee...." he breathed. Honor's cheeks were scarlet and she was breathing
+hard and fast. Only the new boy was unmoved, his pale face still pale,
+his shadowed eyes calm. Stephen Lorimer kept that picture of them always
+in his heart; it was, he came to think, symbol and prophecy. He swung
+into the second verse, his voice warming:
+
+
+     The sand of the desert is sodden red;
+     Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
+     The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
+     And the regiment blind with dust and smoke:
+     The River of Death has brimmed his banks;
+     And England's far, and Honor a name,
+     But the voice of a school boy rallies the ranks--
+     Play up! Play up! and--Play the Game!
+
+
+His own voice shook a little on the last line and he was a trifle amused
+at his emotionalism. He tried to bring the moment sanely back to the
+commonplace. "Corking for a song, Top Step. I'll hammer out some chords
+... doesn't need much." He looked again through the strangely charged
+atmosphere of the quiet room, at the three big children. Jimsy King was
+on his feet, shaken out of the serene insolence of his young stoicism,
+his hands opening and shutting, swallowing hard, and Honor, the
+boy-girl, Jimsy's sturdy Skipper, was crying, frankly, unashamed,
+unaware, the tears welling up out of her wide eyes, rolling down her
+bright cheeks. Only Carter Van Meter sat as before, a little withdrawn,
+a little aloof, in the shadow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+When they told Marcia Van Meter (Mrs. Horace Flack) that her little boy
+would always be lame, that not one of the great surgeon-wizards on
+either side of the Atlantic--not all the king's horses and all the
+king's men could ever weight or wrench or force the small, thin left leg
+down to the length of the right, she vowed to herself that she would
+make it up to him. She was a pretty thing, transparently frail and
+ethereal-looking, who had always projected herself passionately into the
+lives of those about her--her father's and mother's--the young husband's
+who had died soon after her son was born--and now her boy's. While he
+was less than ten years old it seemed to her that she compassed it; if
+he could not race and run with his contemporaries he rode the smartest
+of ponies and drove clever little traps; if he might not join in the
+rough sports out of doors he had a houseful of brilliant mechanical
+toys; he lived like a little Prince--like a little American Prince with
+a magic bottomless purse at his command. But when he left his little
+boyhood behind she discovered her futility; she discovered the small,
+pitiful purchasing power of money, after all. She could not buy him
+bodily strength and beauty; she could not buy him fellowship in the
+world of boys; he was forever looking out at it, wistfully,
+disdainfully, bitterly, through his plate glass window.
+
+She spent herself untiringly for him,--playmates, gifts, tutors,
+journeys. Her happiest moments were those in which he said, "Mother, I'd
+like one of those wireless jiggers,"--or a new saddle-horse, or a new
+roadster--and she was able to answer, "Dearest, I'll get it for you!
+Mother'll get it for you to-morrow!"
+
+But the days when she could spell omnipotence for him were fading away.
+He wanted now, increasingly, things beyond her gift. He was a clever
+boy, proud, poised. He learned early to wear a mask of indifference
+about his lameness, to affect a coolness for sports which came,
+eventually, to be genuine. He studied easily and well; he could talk
+with a brilliancy beyond his years. He learned--astonishingly, at his
+age--to get his deepest satisfactions from creature comforts--his
+quietly elegant clothes, his food, his surroundings. Mrs. Van Meter had
+high hopes of the move to Los Angeles; he was to be benefited, body and
+brain. She was a little anxious at finding they had moved into a
+neighborhood of boys and girls; Carter was happier with older people,
+but he seemed to like these lively, robust creatures surprisingly.
+Weeks, months, a year, went by. Carter, less than a year older than
+Jimsy King but two years ahead of him in his studies, was doing some
+special work at the University of Southern California, but his time was
+practically his own--to spend with Honor and Jimsy. Honor and Jimsy
+showed, each of them, the imprint of their association with him. They
+had come to care more for the things he held high ... books ... theaters
+... dinners at the Crafts Alexandria ... Grand Opera records on the
+victrola ... more careful dress.
+
+"Carter has really done a great deal for those children," Mildred
+Lorimer told her husband, complacently.
+
+"Yes," Stephen admitted. "It's true. He has. And"--he sighed--"they
+haven't done a thing for him."
+
+"Stephen dear,--what could they do--crude children that they are, beside
+a boy with his advantages? What could they do for him?--Make him play
+football? What did you expect them to do?"
+
+"I don't know," he said, moodily, "but at any rate they haven't done
+it."
+
+Jimsy King was going--by the grace of his own frantic eleventh hour
+efforts and his teachers' clemency and Honor Carmody--to graduate.
+Barring calamities, he would possess a diploma in February. Honor was
+tremendously earnest about it; Carter, to whom learning came as easily
+as the air he breathed, faintly amused. She thought, sometimes, for
+brief, traitorous moments, that Carter wasn't always good for Jimsy.
+
+"You see," she explained to her stepfather, "Carter doesn't realize how
+hard Jimsy has to grind for all he gets. Even now, Stepper, after being
+here a year, he actually doesn't realize the importance of Jimsy's
+getting signed up to play. It's a strange thing, with all his
+cleverness, but he doesn't, and he's always taking Jimsy out on parties
+and rides and things, and he gets behind in everything. I think I'll
+just have to speak to him about it."
+
+He nodded. "That's a good idea, Top Step. Do that."
+
+She grew still more sober. "Another thing, Stepper ... about--about Mr.
+King's--trouble. Of course, you and I have never believed that Jimsy
+_had_ to inherit it, have we?"
+
+"No. Not if people let him alone. His life, his training, his
+environment, are very different--more wholesome, vital. The energy which
+his grandfather and his uncles and his father had to find a vent for in
+cards and drink Jimsy's sweated out in athletics."
+
+"Yes. But--just the same--isn't it better for Jimsy to keep away
+from--from those things?"
+
+"Naturally. Better for anybody."
+
+She sighed. "Carter doesn't think so. He says the world is full of
+it--Jimsy must learn to be near it and let it alone."
+
+"That's true, in a sense, T. S...."
+
+"I know. But--sometimes I think Carter deliberately takes Jimsy places
+to--test him. Of course he thinks he's doing right, but it worries me."
+
+Stephen Lorimer smoked in silence. He had his own ideas. "Better have
+that talk with him," he said.
+
+Honor found the talk oddly disturbing. Carter was very sweet about it as
+he always was with her, but he held stubbornly to his own opinion.
+
+"Look here, Honor, you can't follow Jimsy through the world like a
+nursemaid, you know."
+
+"Carter! I don't mean----"
+
+"He's got to meet and face these things, to fight what somebody calls
+'the battle of his blood.' You mustn't wrap him up in cotton wool. If
+he's going, to be bowled over he might as well find it out. He must take
+his chances--just as any other fellow--just as I must."
+
+"Oh, but, Carter, you know you're strong, and----"
+
+Suddenly his pale face was stung with hot color. "Honor," he leaned
+forward, "you think I'm strong, in _any_ way? You don't consider me
+an--utter weakling?"
+
+She looked with comprehending tenderness at his crimson face. "Why,
+Carter, dear! You know I've never thought you that! There are more ways
+of being--being strong than--than just with muscles and bones!"
+
+He reached out and took one of her firm, tanned hands in his, and she
+had never seen him so winningly wistful, so wistfully winning. "I
+thought," he said, very low, "that was the only kind of strength that
+counted with you. Then--I do count with you, Honor? I do?"
+
+She was a little startled, a little frightened, wholly uncomfortable.
+There was something in Carter's voice she didn't understand ... something
+she didn't want to understand. She pulled her hand away and managed her
+boyish grin. "Of course you do,--goose! And you'll count more if you'll
+help me to look after Jimsy and have him graduate on time!" She got up
+quickly as her stepfather came into the room, and Carter went home,
+crossing the street with the rather pathetic arrogance of his halting
+gait, his head held high, tilted a little back, which gave him the
+expression of looking down on a world of swift striders.
+
+He found his mother reading before a low fire. "Well, dearest?" She
+smiled up at him, yearningly.
+
+He stood looking down at her, his face working. "Mother, I want Honor
+Carmody."
+
+"Carter!"
+
+"I want Honor Carmody." He rode over her murmured protests. "I know I'm
+only nineteen. I know I'm too young--she's too young. I'd expect to
+wait, of course. But--_I want her_."
+
+Marcia Van Meter's heart cried out to her to say again as she had said
+all through his little-boy days, "Dearest, Mother'll get her for you!
+Mother'll get her for you to-morrow!" But instead her gaze went down to
+the page she had been reading ... the last scene in "Ghosts," where
+Oswald Alving says:
+
+"_Mother, give me the sun! The sun!! The Sun!!!_" She shivered and shut
+the book with emphasis and threw it on a near-by chair. She spoke
+brightly, reassuringly. "I'm sure she's devoted to you, dear. You are
+the best of friends, and that's enough for the present, isn't it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Dearest, you've said yourself that you realize you're too young for
+anything serious, yet. Why can't you wait contentedly, until----"
+
+"There's some one else. There's Jimsy."
+
+"Carter, I'm sure they're like brother and sister. They have been
+playmates all their lives. That sort of thing rarely merges into
+romance."
+
+"Doesn't it?" His voice was seeking, hungry. "Honestly?"
+
+"_Very_ rarely, dear, believe me!" She sped to comfort him. "Besides,
+her people, her mother, would never want anything of that sort ... the
+taint in his blood ... the reputation of his family.... Mrs. Lorimer
+says they've always been called the 'Wild Kings.' Of course Jimsy seems
+quite all right, so far, and I hope and pray he always may be--he's a
+dear boy and I'm very fond of him--but, as he grows older and is beset
+by more temptations----"
+
+The boy relaxed a little from his pale rigidity and sat down opposite
+his mother. He held out his hands to the fire and she saw that they were
+trembling. "Yes," he said, "I've thought of that. I've thought of that.
+Perhaps, when he gets to college--up at Stanford, away from Honor--I've
+thought of that!" He bent his head, staring into the fire.
+
+His mother did not see the expression on his face. "Besides, dear,
+Honor's going abroad next year, for her voice. She'll meet new people,
+form new ties----"
+
+"That doesn't cheer me up very much, Mother."
+
+"I mean," she hastened, "it will break up the life-long intimacy with
+Jimsy. And perhaps you and I can go over for the summer, and take her to
+Switzerland with us. Wouldn't that be jolly? You know, dear," she
+hesitated, delicately, "while we know that money isn't everything, you
+are going to have far more to offer a girl, some day, than poor Jimsy
+King."
+
+"And less," said Carter Van Meter.
+
+He found Honor a little constrained at their next meeting and he hurried
+to put her at her old time ease with him. He steered the talk on to the
+coming football game and Honor was herself. Los Angeles High School,
+champion of Southern California, was to meet Greenmount, the northern
+champion, and nothing else in the world mattered very much to her and to
+Jimsy.
+
+"It's so perfect, Carter, to have it come in Jimsy's last year,--to win
+the State Championship for L. A. just before he leaves."
+
+"Sure of winning?"
+
+"It will be pretty stiff going. They're awfully good, Greenmount. Not as
+good as we are, on the whole, but they've got a punter--Gridley--who's a
+perfect _wizard_! If they can get within a mile of our goal, he can put
+it over! But--we've got to win. We've simply got to--and 'You can't beat
+L. A. High!'"
+
+She went to watch football practice every afternoon and Carter nearly
+always went with her. In the evenings Jimsy came over for her help with
+his lessons. He had studied harder and better, this last year; his fine
+brain was waking, catching up with his body, but he was busier than
+ever, too, and his "Skipper" had still to be on deck. He was discovered,
+that last year, to have an unsuspected talent, Jimsy King. He could act.
+His class-play was an ambitious one, a late New York success, a play of
+sport and youngness, and Jimsy played the lead. "No," the pretty Spanish
+teacher said, "he didn't play that part; he _was_ it!" It was going to
+be fine for him at Stanford, Honor's mothering thought raced ahead. The
+more he had to do, the more things he was interested in....
+
+He came in grinning a few nights before the championship game. "Say,
+Skipper, what do you think they gave me on that essay? A _B_. A measly
+_B_. Made me so sore I darn near told 'em who wrote it!"
+
+"Jimsy! You wrote it yourself, really. I just smoothed it up a little."
+
+"Yep, just a little! Well, either they're wise, or they just figured it
+couldn't be a top-notcher if I'd written it!" He cast himself on the
+couch. "Gee, Skipper, I can't work to-night! I'm a dying man! That
+dinner Carter bought me last night----"
+
+"Jimsy! You didn't--break training?"
+
+"No. But I skated pretty close to the edge. You know, it's funny, but
+when I'm out with Carter I feel like such a boob, not daring to eat this
+or that, or smoke or--or anything." Heresy this, from the three years'
+captain of L. A. High who had never considered any sacrifice worth a
+murmur which kept him fit for the real business of life. "Somehow, he's
+so keen, he makes me wish I had more in my head and--and less in my
+heels! You know what I mean, Skipper. He does make me look like a simp,
+doesn't he?"
+
+"No," said Honor, definitely. "Why, Jimsy, you're a million times
+bigger person than Carter. Everybody knows that. _Knowing_ things isn't
+everything--knowing what to wear and how to order meals at the
+Alexandria and reading all the new books and having been to Europe.
+Those things just fill in for him; they make up--a little--for the
+things you've had."
+
+"Do you mean that, Skipper? Is that straight?"
+
+"Of course, Jimsy--cross my heart!" It was curious, the way she was
+having to comfort Jimsy for not being Carter, and Carter for not being
+Jimsy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+It rained the day of the game. It had been sulking and threatening for
+twenty-four hours, and Honor wakened to the sound of a sluicing
+downpour. She ran to her window, which looked out on the garden. The
+long leaves of the banana tree were flapping wetly and the Bougainvillæa
+on the summerhouse looked soaked and sodden. Somewhere a mocking bird
+was singing deliriously, making his tuneful fun of the weather. Honor
+went down to breakfast with a sober face.
+
+They had a house-guest, a friend of her stepfather's, an Englishwoman, a
+novelist. She was a brisk, ruddy-skinned creature, with crisp sentences
+and sturdy legs in thick stockings, and she was taking a keen interest
+in American sport. "Oh, I say," she greeted Honor, "isn't this bad for
+your match?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Bruce-Drummond, it is. We were hoping for a dry field.
+They're more used to playing in the mud than we are. But it'll be all
+right."
+
+"I'm fearfully keen about it.--No, thank you--my mother was Scotch, you
+see, and I don't take sugar to my porridge. Salt, please!" She turned to
+Stephen Lorimer. "I've been meaning to ask you what you think of Arnold
+Bennett over here?"
+
+Honor's stepfather flung himself zestfully into the discussion. He liked
+clever women and he knew a lot of them, but he had been at some pains
+not to marry one. Mildred Lorimer, beside the shining copper coffee
+percolator, looked a lovely Vesta of the hearth and home.
+
+Honor wished she might take a pleat in the fore-noon. She didn't see how
+she was going to get through the hours between breakfast and the time to
+start for the game. It was a relief to see Jimsy coming across the lawn
+at ten o'clock. She ran out to meet him.
+
+"Hello, Jimsy!"
+
+"'Lo, Skipper. Isn't this weather the deuce?"
+
+"Beastly, but it doesn't really matter. We're certain to----" she broke
+off and looked closely at him. "Jimsy, what's the matter?"
+
+"Oh ... nothing."
+
+"Yes, there is! Come on in the house. There's no one home. Stepper's
+driving Miss Bruce-Drummond and Muzzie's being marcelled." She did not
+speak again until they were in the living room. "Now, tell me."
+
+"Why--it's nothing, really. Feeling kind of seedy, that's all. Didn't
+have much sleep."
+
+"Jimsy! You didn't--you weren't out with Carter?"
+
+"Just for a little while. We went to a Movie. Coach told us to--keep our
+minds off the game. But I was home and in the house at nine-thirty. It
+was--Dad. He came in about midnight. I--I didn't go to bed at all."
+
+"_Oh_...." Her eyes yearned over him, over them both. "Jimsy, I'm so
+terribly sorry. Is he--how is he now?"
+
+"Sleeping. I guess he'll sleep all day. Gee--I wish I could!" His young
+face looked gray and strained.
+
+The girl drew a long breath. "Jimsy, you've got to sleep now. You've got
+to put it--you've got to put your father away--out of your mind. You
+don't belong to him to-day; you belong to the team; you belong to
+L. A.... No matter what's happening to _you_, you've got to do your
+best--and--and _be_ your best."
+
+"If I can," he said, haggardly.
+
+"Lie down on the couch."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to lie down, Skipper--I'll just----"
+
+"Lie down on the couch, Jimsy!" She herded him firmly to the couch,
+tucked a soft, flat pillow under his head, threw a light afghan over
+him. Then she opened a window wide to the wet sweet air and drew the
+other shades down, and came to sit on the floor beside him, talking all
+the time, softly, lazily, about the English lady novelist who didn't
+take sugar "to" her porridge ... about the giddy mocking bird, singing
+in the rain ... about a new book which Carter thought was wonderful and
+which she couldn't see through at all ... until his quick, burdened
+breathing yielded to a long relaxing sigh like that of a tired puppy,
+and the hope of L. A. High and the last of the "Wild Kings" slept. She
+mounted rigid guard over him for three hours, banishing the returned
+stepfather and house-guest, keeping her noisy little brothers at bay.
+She had ordered a strictly training-table luncheon for one o'clock for
+her charge, and while the clock was striking the hour Kada brought the
+tray. Jimsy was still sleeping. Honor looked at him, hesitating, then
+she ran to the piano and struck her stepfather's rousing chords and
+began to sing:
+
+
+     There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night,
+     Ten to make and the match to win--
+
+
+At the first line he stirred, at the second he rubbed his eyes, and at
+the third he was sitting up and listening. She swung into the finish,
+and as always, it ran away with her. She had never gotten over the first
+choking thrill at the words:
+
+
+     _Play up! Play up! and--Play the Game!_
+
+
+Jimsy King came to stand beside her. His hair was mussed and his face
+flushed, and there was a sleep-crease on one cheek, but his eyes were
+clear and steady. "It's O. K., Skipper," he said. "I can. I'm going to.
+I will."
+
+Carter Van Meter drove Honor and Stephen Lorimer and Miss Bruce-Drummond
+in his newest car and the four of them sat together on the edge of the
+rooting section.
+
+It was still raining a little, teasingly, reluctant to leave off
+altogether, and the field was a batter of mud. The rooting section of
+L. A. High was damp but undaunted. The yell leaders, vehement, piercingly
+vocal, conducted them into thunderous challenges:
+
+
+     _Ali beebo! Ali by-bo!_
+     _Ali beebo by-bo bum!_
+     _Catch 'em in a rat trap,_
+     _Put 'em in a cat trap,_
+     _Catch 'em in a cat trap,_
+     _Put 'em in a rat trap!_
+     _Ali beebo! Ali by-bo!_
+     _Ali beebo by-bo bum!_
+
+
+The bleachers rocked and creaked and swayed with the rhythm of it. "My
+word!" said Miss Bruce-Drummond. She listened fascinatedly to their
+deafening repertoire. Greenmount's supporters, a rather forlorn little
+group of substitutes, with the coach and trainer and a teacher or two,
+and a pert fox terrier wearing their colors on his collar, elicitated a
+brief, passing pity from Honor. They looked strange and friendless,
+these smart Northern prep-schoolers. The L. A. rooters conscientiously
+gave their opponents' yell and received a spatter of applause. The
+Northerners trotted out on the field and were hospitably cheered.
+
+"There, Stepper," said Honor, tensely, "that's Gridley--the tallest
+one,--see? Last on the right?"
+
+"So, that's the boy with the beamish boot, eh?"
+
+"Yes. He mustn't get a chance. He _mustn't_."
+
+Miss Bruce-Drummond looked at her friend's stepdaughter. "You're
+frightfully keen about it, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes," said Honor, briefly.
+
+"I daresay I shall find it very different from Rugby, but I expect I
+shall be able to follow it if you'll explain a bit."
+
+Honor did not answer. She was standing up, yelling with all the strength
+of her lusty young lungs, as the Southern champions came out. Then the
+rooting section made everything that they had said and done before seem
+like a lullaby; it seemed to the Englishwoman she had never known there
+could be such noise. Her head hummed with it:
+
+
+     King! King! King!
+     K-I-N-G, King!
+     G-I-N-K, Gink!
+     He's the King Gink!
+     He's the King Gink!
+     He's the King Gink!
+     K-I-N-G, King! KING!
+
+
+Honor sat down again, her fists clenched, her lower lip between her
+teeth. If only it were time to begin ... time for the kick-off! This was
+always the worse part, just before.... It was L. A.'s kick-off. The
+whistle sounded, mercifully, and with the solid, satisfying impact of
+leather against leather she relaxed. It was on. It had started. All the
+weeks of waiting for the championship game were over. This was the game,
+and it was just like any other game; Jimsy was there--here, there,
+everywhere, and they would fight, fight. And you couldn't beat L. A.
+High. The mud was horrible. It took grace and fleetness and made a mock
+of them; both teams were playing raggedly. Well, of course they would,
+at first; it was so frightfully important. They would shake down into
+form in a moment.
+
+"I don't believe," cut in the fresh, crisp voice of Miss Bruce-Drummond,
+"that I quite understand what a 'down' is. Would you mind explaining it
+to me?"
+
+"Why," said Honor, without turning her head, "they have three downs in
+which to make----" she was on her feet again, screaming, "Come on! Come
+on! Come--oh----"
+
+Jimsy King, with the mud-smeared ball under his arm, had made fifteen
+precious yards before he was tackled. He was up in a flash, wiping the
+mud off his face, grinning. The rooters split the soft air asunder.
+
+Stephen Lorimer looked at Honor and at Carter Van Meter. He always felt
+sorry for the boy at a game; he looked paler and frailer than ever in
+contrast with the hearty young savages on the field, and he was never
+able really to give himself to the agony and wild joy of it.
+
+Honor forced herself to sit still, her elbows on her knees, her hot face
+propped on her clenched hands. They were playing better now, all of
+them, but it wasn't brilliant football; it couldn't be. It would be a
+battle of dogged endurance.
+
+"I say, my dear, is _that_ a down?" the English novelist wanted to know.
+
+"Yes," said Honor, patiently. "That's a down, and now there'll be
+another because they have----" again she cut short her explanation and
+caught hold of her stepfather's arm. "Stepper! Look! _Gridley isn't
+playing!_"
+
+He stared. "Really, Top Step? Why, they surely----"
+
+"I tell you he isn't playing. See,--there he is, on the side-lines, in
+the purple sweater!"
+
+"Well, so much the better for L. A.," said Carter, easily.
+
+Honor shook her head. "I don't understand it." She began, oddly, to feel
+herself enveloped in a fog of depression, of foreboding. Again and again
+her eyes left the play to rest unhappily on the silent figure in the
+purple sweater. Jimsy was playing well; every man on the team was
+playing well; but they were not gaining. Jimsy King, on whose heels were
+always the wings of Mercury, could not get up speed in that mud,--a
+brief flash, no more. She began to bargain with the gods of the
+gridiron; at first she had been concerned with scoring in the first five
+minutes of play; then she had remodeled her petition ... to score in the
+first half. Now, her throat dry, she was aching with the fear of being
+scored upon ... counting the minutes yet to play, speeding them in her
+heart. It was raining hard again. The rooting section, in spite of the
+frantic effort of the hoarse yell leaders, was slowing down. What was
+it?--The rain? The mud? Was Jimsy not himself, not the King Gink? Was
+his heart with his father in the darkened room in the old King house?
+
+"Of course, I'm not up on this at all, but I'm rather afraid your young
+friends are getting the worst of it, my dear!" said Miss Bruce-Drummond,
+cheerily.
+
+"It's the longest first half I ever saw in my life," said Honor, between
+clenched teeth.
+
+"Ah, yes,--I daresay it does seem so to you, but I expect they keep the
+time very carefully, don't you?" She looked the girl over interestedly.
+"The psychology of this sort of thing is ver-r-ry entertaining," she
+said to Stephen Lorimer.
+
+"Less than five minutes, T. S.," said her stepfather, comfortingly.
+
+"You know, I'm afraid you'll think me fearfully dull," said the
+Englishwoman, conversationally, "but I'm still not quite clear about a
+'down.' _Would_ you mind telling me the next time they do one?--Just
+when it begins, and when it ends?"
+
+"One's ended now," said Honor, bitterly, "and we've lost the ball,--on
+our twenty yard line. We've lost the ball."
+
+"Ah, well, my dear, I daresay you'll soon get it back!"
+
+Honor sprang to her feet with a cry which made people turn and look at
+her. "Look there! _Look!_ See what they're doing?" One of the Greenmount
+players had been called out by the coach and had splashed his way to the
+side-lines, to be patted wetly on the back and wrapped in a damp
+blanket. That was well enough. That was the usual thing. But the
+unusual, the astounding thing was that two of the Greenmount team had
+slopped to the side-lines and picked up Gridley, divested now of his
+purple sweater, bodily, in their arms, and carried him, dry-shod, over
+the slithering mud. Honor gave a gasping moan. "I _knew_...." There was
+a dead, sick silence on the bleachers. The rain sluiced down. Somewhere
+in a near-by garden another giddy mocking bird sang deliriously in the
+stillness. Tenderly as two nurses with a sick man, the bearers set
+Gridley down. Slowly, solemnly, he stepped off the distance to the
+quarter back; briskly, but with dreadful thoroughness, the men who had
+carried him wiped the mud from his feet with a towel and took their
+places to defend him from the wild-eyed L. A. men, poised, breathless,
+menacing. There was a muttering roar from the bleachers, hoarsely
+pleading, commanding--"Block-that-kick! _Block-that-kick!_
+BLOCK-THAT-KICK!" The kneeling quarter back opened his muddy hands; the
+muddied oval came sailing lazily into them.... There was the gentle thud
+of Gridley's toe against the leather, and then--unbelievably,
+unbearably, it was an accomplished fact, a finished thing. Gridley had
+executed his place kick. They were scored on. It stood there on the
+board, glaring white letters and figures on black:
+
+
+     GREENMOUNT 4    L. A. HIGH 0
+
+
+At first Honor's own woe engulfed her utterly. For the first instant she
+wasn't even aware of Jimsy King, standing alone, his arms folded across
+his chest, staring down the field; of his men, wiping the mud out of
+their eyes and looking at him, looking to him; of the stunned rooters.
+But at the second breath she was awake, alive again, tense, tingling,
+bursting with her message for them all, keeping herself by main force in
+her place. Jimsy King never saw any one in a game; he never knew any one
+in a game; people ceased to exist for him while he was on the field. But
+to-day, in this difficult hour, she was to see him turn and face the
+bleachers and rake them with his aghast and startled eyes until he found
+her. She was on her feet, in her white jersey suit and her blue hat and
+scarf--L. A.'s colors--waving to him, looking down at him with all her
+gallant soul in her eyes. It seemed to her as if she must be saying it
+aloud; as if she must be singing it:
+
+
+     _Play up! Play up! and--Play the Game!_
+
+
+Then the bleachers and the players saw the Captain of the L. A. team
+turn and wade briskly down the field to Gridley. They saw him hold out
+his muddy hand; they heard his clear, "Peach of a kick!" They saw him
+give the Northerner's hand a hearty shake; they saw him fling up his
+head, and grin, and face the grandstand for a second, his eyes
+seeking.... They saw him rally his men with a snapped-out order,--and
+then they were on their feet, shouting, screaming, stamping, cheering:
+
+
+     KING! KING! KING!
+
+
+The yell leaders couldn't get hold of them; there was no need. Every man
+was his own yell leader. They yelled for Gridley and for Greenmount (why
+worry, when Jimsy clearly wasn't worried?) and for their own team, man
+by man, and the call of time for the first half failed to make the
+faintest dent in their enthusiasm.
+
+"But"--said Miss Bruce-Drummond, her mouth close to Honor's ear--"you
+haven't won, have you?"
+
+"Not yet!" Honor shouted. "Wait!" She began to sing with the rest:
+
+
+     _You can't beat L. A. High!_
+     _You can't beat L. A. High!_
+     _Use your team to get up steam,_
+     _But you can't beat L. A. High!_
+
+
+It was gay, mocking, scatheless, inexorable. You _couldn't_ beat L. A.
+High. Honor swayed and swung to it. Use your team and your tricks and
+your dry-shod men to kick, but you couldn't beat L. A. High. And it
+appeared, in fact, that you couldn't, for Jimsy King's team went into
+the second half like happy young tigers, against men who were a little
+tired, a little overconfident, and in the first ten minutes of play the
+King Gink, mud-smeared beyond recognition, grinning, went over the line
+for a touchdown, and nobody minded much Burke's missing the goal because
+they had won anyway:
+
+
+     GREENMOUNT 4    L. A. HIGH 5
+
+
+and the championship, the state championship, stayed south, and it
+suddenly stopped raining and the sun came out gloriously after the
+reckless manner of Southern California suns, and everything was for the
+best in the best of all possible worlds.
+
+Honor, star-eyed, more utterly and completely happy and content than she
+had ever been in her life, turned penitently to Miss Bruce-Drummond.
+"When we get home," she said, "I'll explain to you exactly what a 'down'
+is!"
+
+They waited to see the joyous serpentine, to watch Jimsy's struggles to
+get down from the shoulders of his adorers who bore him the length of
+the field and back, and then Carter drove them home and went back for
+the Captain, who would be showered and dressed by that time. They were
+both dining with Honor, but Jimsy looked in on his father first.
+
+"Gusty says he's slept all day," he reported to Honor. He kept looking
+at her, with an odd intensity, all through the lively meal. She had
+changed her wet white jersey for one of her long-lined, cleverly simple
+frocks of L. A. blue, and her honey-colored braids were like a crown
+above her serene forehead.
+
+"You know, Stephen," said Miss Bruce-Drummond while they were having
+their coffee in the living room, "of course you know that both those
+lads are in love with your nice girl."
+
+"Do you see it, too?"
+
+She laughed. "I may not know what a 'down' is, but I've still reasonably
+sharp eyes in my head. And the odd thing is that she doesn't know it."
+
+"Isn't it amazing? I'm watching, and wondering."
+
+"It's a pretty time o' life, Stephen," said one of the clever women he
+hadn't wanted to marry.
+
+"'Youth's sweet-scented manuscript,' Ethel," said Honor's stepfather.
+
+"Jimsy, will you come here a minute?" Honor called from the dining-room
+door.
+
+"Yes, Skipper!" He was there at a bound.
+
+"Don't you think your father would like this water-ice? I think he
+could--I believe he might enjoy it."
+
+He took the little covered tray out of her hands. "I'll bet he will,
+Skipper. You're a brick. Come on over with me, will you--and wait on the
+porch?"
+
+She looked back into the roomful. "Had I better? I don't suppose they'll
+miss me for a minute----"
+
+But Carter Van Meter was coming toward them, threading his way among
+people and furniture with his slight, halting limp. He looked from one
+to the other, questioningly.
+
+"Taking this over to my Dad," Jimsy explained. "Back in a shake."
+
+"I see. How about a ride to the beach? Supper at the ship-hotel?
+Celebrate a little?"
+
+"Deuce of a lot of work for Monday," Jimsy frowned. "Haven't studied a
+lick this week."
+
+Carter laughed. "Oh, Monday's--Monday! Come along! We can't"--he turned
+to Honor--"be by ourselves to-night, with the celeb. here. Honor has to
+stay and play-pretty with her."
+
+"Well ... if we don't make it too late----"
+
+Jimsy turned and sped away with Honor's offering for James King.
+
+Honor looked at Carter. His eyes were very bright; he looked more
+excited, now, some way, than he had at the game. Poor old Carter. He
+wanted, she supposed, to do something for Jimsy ... to give him a
+wonderful party ... to spend money on him ... to excel and to shine in
+_his_ way. But--the ship-hotel--and his father over there all day in the
+darkened room--For the first time in her honest life she stooped to
+guile. "I'll be down in a minute, Carter," she said and ran upstairs,
+through the hall, down the backstairs, cut through the kitchen and
+across the wet and springy lawn to the King place.
+
+She waited in the shadow of the house until he came out.
+
+"Jimsy!"
+
+"Skipper!"
+
+"I slipped out--sh ... Jimsy, I--_please_ don't go with Carter to-night!
+I don't mean to interfere or--or nag, Jimsy,--you know that, don't you?"
+She slipped a little on the wet grass in her thin slippers, and laid
+hold of his arm to steady herself. "But--it worries me. You're the
+finest, the most wonderful person in the world, and I trust you more
+than I trust myself, but--I know how boys are about--things--and--" she
+turned her face to the dark house where so many "Wild Kings" had lived
+and moved and had their unhappy being--"I couldn't _bear_ it if----"
+
+It began to rain again, softly, and they moved unconsciously toward the
+shelter of the porch.
+
+"You were so splendid to-day! I haven't had a chance to tell you ...
+shaking hands with him, being so----"
+
+"You made me," said Jimsy King. Then, at her murmured protest. "You did.
+You made me, just as you've made me do every decent thing I've ever
+done. I'm just beginning to see it. I guess I'm the blindest bat that
+ever lived. Of course I won't go with Cart' to-night. I won't do
+anything you don't----"
+
+Honor had mounted two steps, to be under the roof of the porch, and now,
+turning sharply in her gladness, the wet slipper slipped again, and she
+would have fallen if he had not caught her.
+
+"_Skipper!_"
+
+"It's--it's all right!" said Honor in a breathless whisper. "I'm all
+right, Jimsy. Let me----"
+
+But Jimsy King would not let her go. He held her fast with all his
+football strength and all his eighteen years of living and loving, and
+he said over and over in the new, strange voice she had never heard
+before, "_Skipper! Skipper! Skipper!_"
+
+"Jimsy ... what--what is happening to us? Jimsy, dear, we never
+before--Jimsy, are we--are we--_Is this being--in love_?"
+
+And the mocking-bird of the morning, mounted on the wet Bougainvillæa on
+the summerhouse in Honor's garden, explained to them in a mad, exultant,
+thrilling burst of song.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+"At least," Mildred Lorimer wept, "at _least_, Stephen, make them keep
+it a secret! Make them promise not to tell a living soul--and not to act
+in such a way as to let people suspect! I think"--she lifted tragic,
+reproachful eyes to him--"you ought to do what you can, now, considering
+that it's all your fault."
+
+"Some day," said her husband, sturdily, "it will be all my cleverness
+... all my glory. I did honestly believe it was a cradle chumship which
+wouldn't last, Mildred. I thought it would break of its own length. But
+I'm glad it hasn't."
+
+"Stephen, how _can_ you? One of the 'Wild Kings'--I cannot bear it. I
+simply cannot bear it." She clutched at her hope. "She must go abroad
+even sooner than we planned--and _stay_ abroad. Stephen, you will make
+them keep it a secret from every one?"
+
+"They've already told Carter. Told him just after they'd told me."
+
+"Oh, poor, poor Carter!" There was a note of fresh woe in her voice.
+
+He turned sharply to look at her. "So, that's where the pointed patent
+leather pinches, Mildred?"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"You've been hoping it would be Carter?"
+
+"Dearest, I've looked upon them all as children.... It was the merest
+... idea ... thought. Mrs. Van Meter is devoted to Honor, Carter is an
+unusual boy, and they're exceptional people. And he--of course, I mean
+in his boyish way--_adores_ Honor. This will be a cruel blow for him."
+She grieved. "Poor, frail boy...."
+
+Stephen Lorimer smoked in silence for a moment. "I fancy Carter will not
+give up hope. There's nothing frail about his disposition. His will
+doesn't limp."
+
+"Well, I certainly hope he doesn't consider it final. I don't. I
+consider it a silly boy-and-girl piece of sentimental nonsense, and I
+shall do everything in my power to break it up. I consider that my
+child's happiness is at stake."
+
+"Yes," said her husband, "so do I." He got up and went round to his
+wife's chair and put penitent arms about her and comforted her. After
+all, he could afford to be magnanimous. He was going to win his point
+in the end, and meanwhile it would be an excellent thing for the
+youngsters to have Mildred doing everything in her pretty power to break
+it up. She might just as well, he believed, try to put out the hearth
+fire with the bellows.
+
+With her daughter she became motherly and admonitory in her official
+third person. "Mother wants only your happiness; you know that, dear."
+
+"Well, then, there's nothing to worry about," said Honor, comfortably,
+"for you want me to be happy and I can't be happy unless it's with
+Jimsy, so you'll have to want me to have Jimsy, Muzzie!"
+
+"Mother wants real happiness for you, Honor, genuine, lasting happiness.
+That's why she wants you to be sure. And you cannot possibly be sure at
+your age."
+
+"Yes, I can, Muzzie," said Honor, patiently. "Surer than sure.
+Why,--haven't I always had Jimsy,--ever since I can remember? _Before_ I
+can remember? He's part of everything that's ever happened to me. I
+can't imagine what things would be like without him. _I won't imagine
+it!_" Her eyes darkened and her mouth grew taut.
+
+"But you'll promise Mother to keep it a secret? You'll promise me
+faithfully?"
+
+"Of course, Muzzie, if you want me to, but I can't see what difference
+it makes. I'll never be any surer than I am now,--and I can't ever know
+Jimsy any better than I do now. Why"--she laughed--"it isn't as if I had
+fallen in love at eighteen, with a new person, some one I'd just met, or
+some one I'd known only a little while, like Carter! If I felt like this
+about Carter I'd think it was reasonable to 'wait' and be 'sure.'" She
+was aware of a new expression on her mother's lovely face and
+interpreted it in her own fashion. "I'm sorry if you don't like our
+telling Carter, Muzzie. We did it before you asked us not to, you know.
+He's always with us and I'm sure he'd have found out, anyway." She
+smiled. "Carter's funny about it. He acts--amused--as if he were years
+and years older, and we were babies playing in a sand box or making mud
+pies." It was clear that his amusement amused her, just as her mother's
+admonition amused her: nothing annoyed or disturbed her,--her serenity
+was too deep for that. Her fine placidity was lighted now with an inner
+flame, but she was very quiet about her happiness; she was not very
+articulate in her joy.
+
+"Mother cannot let you go about unchaperoned with Jimsy, Honor. People
+would very soon suspect----"
+
+"I don't think they would, Muzzie," said Honor, calmly. "None of the
+other mothers are so particular, you know. Most of the girls go on walks
+and rides alone. But we won't, if you'd rather not. Stepper will go with
+us, or Billy, or Ted."
+
+Mrs. Lorimer sighed. She could envisage just how much efficient,
+deterrent chaperonage her husband would supply.
+
+She watched them set off for the Malibou Ranch the next Sunday morning
+rather complacently, however. She had seen to it that Carter was of the
+party. To be sure, he was in the tonneau with Stephen Lorimer and the
+young Carmodys and Lorimers and the heroic-sized lunch box and the
+thermos case, while Jimsy and Honor sat in front, but at least he was
+there. There would be no ignoring Carter, as they might well ignore her
+husband and sons.
+
+Carter, talking easily and intelligently to his host about the growing
+problem of Mexico, quietly watched the two in front. They were not
+talking very much. Jimsy was driving and he kept his eyes on the road
+for the most part, and Honor sat very straight, her hands in her lap.
+Only once Carter saw, from the line of his arm, that Jimsy had put his
+left hand over hers, and when it happened he stopped short in the middle
+of his neat sentence and an instant later he said, coloring
+faintly,--"I beg your pardon, Mr. Lorimer,--you were saying?"
+
+Stephen Lorimer felt an intense pity for him but he did not see any
+present or future help for his misery. Therefore, when they had finished
+their gypsy luncheon and the younger boys were settling it by a wild
+rough-house before their swim and Jimsy rose and said, "Want to walk up
+the coast, Skipper?" and Honor said, "Yes,--just as soon as I've put
+these things away," he went deliberately and seated himself beside
+Carter and began to read aloud to him from the Sunday paper.
+
+He looked up from the sheet to watch the boy's face as the others set
+off. Carter pulled himself to his feet. He ran his tongue over his lips
+in rare embarrassment. "I--don't you feel like a stroll, too, Mr.
+Lorimer? After that enormous lunch, I----"
+
+Honor's stepfather grinned. "Well, I don't feel like a stroll in that
+direction, Carter. Let 'em alone,--shan't we?" He included him in the
+attitude of affectionate indulgence. "I've been there myself, and you
+will be there--if you haven't been already." He patted the sand beside
+him. "Sit down, old man. This editorial sounds promising."
+
+But Carter would not be denied. "Mr. Lorimer, you don't consider
+it--_serious_, do you?"
+
+"About the most serious matter in the world, I should say, Carter."
+
+The boy refused the generalization. "I mean, between Honor and Jimsy?"
+He was visibly expecting a negative answer. "I know that Mrs. Lorimer
+doesn't."
+
+"Well, I disagree with her. I should say, with average youngsters of
+their age that it was as transient as--as the measles. But they aren't
+average, Carter."
+
+"I know that. At least, Honor isn't."
+
+"Nor Jimsy. I sometimes think, Carter, that fellows of our type, yours
+and mine," he was not looking at him now, he was running his long
+fingers lazily through the hot and shining sand, "are apt to be a little
+contemptuous in our minds of his sort. Being rather long on brain, we
+fancy, we allow ourselves a scorn of the more or less unadorned brawn.
+And yet,--they're the salt of the earth, Carter; they're the cities set
+on hills. They do the world's red-blooded vital jobs while we--think.
+And Honor's not clever either; you know that, Carter. All the sense and
+balance and character in the world, Top Step, God love her, but not a
+flash of brilliancy. They're capitally suited. Sane, sound, sweet;
+gloriously fit and healthy young animals--" this was calculated cruelty;
+Carter might as well face things; there would be a girl, waiting now
+somewhere, no doubt, who wouldn't mind his limp, but Honor must have a
+mate of her own vigorous breed,--Honor who had always and would always
+"run with the boys,"--"who will produce their own sort again."
+
+The boy's mouth was twisted. "And--and how about his blood--his
+heredity? Isn't he one of the 'Wild Kings'?"
+
+"You know," Stephen lighted a cigarette, "I don't believe he is! He's
+got their looks and their charm, but I'm convinced he's two-thirds
+Scotch mother,--that sturdy soul who would have saved his father if
+death hadn't tricked her. And I'm rather a radical about heredity,
+anyway, Carter. It's gruesomely overrated, I think. What is it?--Clammy
+hands reaching out from the grave to clutch at warm young flesh--and
+pollute it? Not while there are living hands to beat them off!" He began
+to get vehement and warm. There was to be a chapter on heredity in that
+book of his, one day. "It's a bogy. It goes down before environment as
+the dark before the dawn. Why, environment's a vital, flesh and blood
+thing, fighting with and for us every instant! I could take the
+offspring of Philip the Second and Great Catherine and make a--a Frances
+Willard or a Jane Addams of her,--_if_ people didn't sit about like
+crows, cawing about her parents and her blood and her heritage. Even
+dry, statistical scientists are beginning----"
+
+And while like the Ancient Mariner he held Carter Van Meter on the sunny
+sand Honor and Jimsy walked sedately up the shore. They were a little
+ill at ease, both of them. It was the first time since--as Honor put it
+to herself--"it had happened" that they had been quite alone with each
+other in the hard, bright daylight. There had been delectable moments on
+the stairs, on the porch, stolen seconds in the summerhouse, but here
+they were on a blazing Sunday afternoon under a turquoise sky, with a
+salt and hearty wind stinging their faces, all by themselves. They would
+not be quite out of sight of the rest, though, until they rounded the
+next turn in the curving road. Jimsy looked back over his shoulder,
+obviously taking note of the fact. He knew that Honor knew it, too, and
+the sight of her hot cheeks, her resolute avoidance of his eyes put him
+suddenly at ease.
+
+"I guess," he said, casually, "this is kind of like Italy. Fair enough,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Heavenly," said Honor, a little breathlessly. "Italy! Just think,
+Jimsy,--next year at this time I'll _be_ in Italy!"
+
+"Gee," he said, solemn and aghast, "_gee_!" They had passed the turn and
+instantly he had her in a tense, vise-like hug. "No, you won't. No, you
+won't. _I won't let you._ I won't let you go 'way off there, alone,
+without me. I won't let you, Skipper, do you hear?" Suddenly he stopped
+talking and began to kiss her. Presently he laughed. "I've always known
+I was a poor nut, Skipper, but to think it took me eighteen years to
+discover what it would be like to kiss you!" He took up his task again.
+
+"Oh," said Honor, gasping, pushing him away with her hands against his
+chest--"you wouldn't have had _time_!"
+
+"I could have dropped Spanish or Math'," he grinned. "Come on,--let's go
+further up the coast. Some of those kids will be tagging after us, or
+Carter."
+
+"Not Carter. Stepper's reading to him. He won't let him come."
+
+"One peach of a scout, Stephen Lorimer is," said the boy, warmly. "Best
+scout in the world."
+
+"He's the best friend we've got in the world, Jimsy," she said gravely.
+
+"I know it. Your mother's pretty much peeved about it, Skipper."
+
+"Yes, she is, just now. Poor Muzzie! I'm afraid I've never pleased her
+very much. But she gets over things. She'll get over it when--when she
+finds that we _don't_ get over it!" She held out her hand to him and he
+took it in a hard grip, and they swung along at a fine stride, up the
+twisting shore road. They came at last to the great gate which led into
+the Malibou Ranch and they halted there and went down into a little
+pocket of rocks and sand and sun and sat down with their faces to the
+shining sea.
+
+He kissed her again. "No; you can't go to Italy, Skipper. That's
+settled."
+
+"Then--what are we going to do, Jimsy dear?"
+
+"Why, we'll just get--" his bright face clouded over. "Good Lord, I'm
+talking like a nit-wit. We've got to wait, that's all. What could I do
+now? Run up alleys with groceries? Take care of gardens?"
+
+"Not _my_ garden! You don't know a tulip from a cauliflower!"
+
+"No, I'll have to learn to do something with my head and my hands,--not
+just my legs! I guess life isn't all football, Skipper."
+
+"But I guess it's all a sort of game, Jimsy, and we have to 'play' it!
+And it wouldn't be playing the game for our people or for ourselves to
+do something silly and reckless. This thing--caring for each other--is
+the wisest, biggest thing in our lives, and we've got to keep it that,
+haven't we?"
+
+He nodded solemnly. "That's right, Skipper. We have. I guess we'll just
+have to grit our teeth and wait--_gee_--three years, anyway, till I'm
+twenty-one! That's the deuce of a long time, isn't it? Lord, why wasn't
+I born five years before you? Then it would be O. K. Loads of girls are
+married at eighteen."
+
+"You weren't born five years before me because then it would have
+spoiled everything," said Honor, securely confident of the eternal
+rightness of the scheme of things. "You would have been marching around
+in overalls when I was born, and when I was ten you would have been
+fifteen, and you wouldn't have _looked_ at me,--and now you'd be through
+college and engaged to some wonderful Stanford girl! No, it's perfectly
+all right as it is, Jimsy. Only, we've just got to be sensible."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you one thing right now, Skipper, I'm not going to wait
+five or six years. I'm going to go two years to college, enough to bat a
+little more knowledge into my poor bean, and then I'm coming out and get
+a job,--and get you!" He illustrated the final achievement by catching
+her in his arms again.
+
+When she could get her breath Honor said, "But we needn't worry about
+all of it now, dear. We haven't got to wait the four--or six years--all
+at once! Just a month, a week, a day at a time. And the time will
+fly,--you'll see! You'll have to work like a demon----"
+
+"And you won't be there to help me!"
+
+"And there'll be football all fall and baseball all spring, and
+theatricals, and we'll write to each other every day, won't we?"
+
+"Of course. But I write such bone-headed boob letters, Skipper."
+
+"I won't care what they're like, Jimsy, so long as you tell me things."
+
+"_Gee_ ... I'm going to be lost up there without you, Skipper."
+
+"You'll have Carter, dear."
+
+"I know. That'll help a lot. Honestly, I don't know how a fellow with a
+head like his puts up with me. He forgets more every night when he goes
+to sleep than I'll ever know. He's a wonder. Yes, it sure--will help a
+lot to have Carter. But it won't be you."
+
+"Jimsy, have you told--your father?"
+
+He nodded. "Last night. He was--he's been feeling great these last few
+days. He was sitting at his desk, looking over some old letters and
+papers, and I went in and--and told him."
+
+"What did he say?"
+
+"He didn't say anything at first. He just sat still for a long time,
+staring at the things he'd been reading. And then he got out a little
+old leather box that he said was my mother's and unlocked it and took
+out a ring." Jimsy thrust a hand deep into a trouser pocket and brought
+out a twist of tissue paper, yellowed and broken with age. He unwrapped
+it and laid a slender gold ring on Honor's palm.
+
+"_Jimsy!_" It was an exquisite bit of workmanship, cunningly carved and
+chased, with a look of mellow age. There were two clasped hands,--not
+the meaningless models for wedding cakes, slim, tapering, faultless, but
+two cleverly vital looking hands, a man's and a woman's, the one rugged
+and strong, the other slender and firm, and the wrists, masculine and
+feminine, merging at the opposite side of the circle into one. "Oh ..."
+Honor breathed, "it's wonderful...."
+
+"Yes. It's a very old Italian ring. It was my great-grandmother's,
+first. It always goes to the wife of the eldest son. My Dad says it's
+supposed to mean love and marriage and--and everything--'the endless
+circle of creation,' he said, when I asked him what it meant, but first
+he just said, 'Give this to your girl and tell her to _hold hard_. Tell
+her we're a bad lot, but no King woman ever let go.'"
+
+Suddenly and without warning, as on the day when Stephen Lorimer had
+first read the Newbolt poem to them, Honor began to cry.
+
+"Skipper! Skipper, _dearest_--" she was in the young iron clasp of his
+arms and his cheek was pressed down on her hair. "What is it? Skipper,
+tell me!"
+
+"Oh," she sobbed, clinging to him, "I can't bear it, Jimsy! All the
+years--all those splendid men, all those faithful women, 'holding hard'
+against--against----"
+
+He gathered her closer. "My Dad's the last of 'em, Skipper. He's the
+last 'Wild King.' It stops with him. I told him that, and he believes
+me. Do you believe me, Skipper?"
+
+She stopped sobbing and looked up at him for a long moment, her wet eyes
+solemn, her breath coming in little gasps. Then--"I do believe you,
+Jimsy," she said. "_I'll never stop believing you._"
+
+He kissed her gravely. "And now I'll show you the secret of the ring."
+He took it from her and pressed a hidden spring. The clasped hands
+slowly parted, revealing a small intensely blue sapphire. "That's for
+'constancy,' my Dad says." He put it on her finger. "It just fits!"
+
+"Yes. And it just fits--us, too, Jimsy. The jewel hidden ... the way we
+must keep our secret. Muzzie won't let me wear it here, but I'll wear it
+the minute I leave here,--and every minute of my life. It was wonderful
+for your father to let us have it--when we're so young and have so long
+to wait!"
+
+"He said--you know, he was different from anything he's ever been
+before, Skipper, more--more like his old self, I guess--he said it would
+help us to wait."
+
+"It will," said Honor, contentedly, tucking her hand into his again.
+They sat silently then, looking out at the bright sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Honor was surprised and pleased to find how little she minded living
+abroad, after all. They had arrived, the boy and herself, in the months
+between their secret understanding and their separation, at the amazed
+conclusion that it was going to be easier to be apart until that bright
+day when they might be entirely and forever together. At the best, three
+interminable years stretched bleakly between them and marriage; they had
+to mark time as best they could. She liked Florence, she liked the
+mountainous _Signorina_, her stepfather's friend, and she liked her
+work. If it had not been for Jimsy King she would without doubt have
+loved it, but there was room in her simple and single-track
+consciousness for only one engrossing and absorbing affection. She wrote
+to him every day, bits of her daily living, and mailed a fat letter
+every week, and every week or oftener came his happy scrawl from
+Stanford. Things went with him there as they had gone at L. A.
+High,--something less, naturally, of hero worship and sovereignty, but
+a steadily rising tide of triumph. He chronicled these happenings
+briefly and without emphasis. "Skipper dear," he would write in his
+crude and hybrid hand, "I've made the Freshman team all right and it's a
+pretty fair to middling bunch and I guess we'll stack up pretty well
+against the Berkeley babes from what I hear, and they made me captain.
+It seems kind of natural, and I have three fellows from the L. A.
+team,--Burke and Estrada and Finley."
+
+He was madly rushed by the best fraternities and chose naturally the
+same one as Carter Van Meter,--one of the best and oldest and most
+powerful. He made the baseball team in the spring, and the second fall
+the San Francisco papers' sporting pages ran his picture often and
+hailed him as the Cardinal's big man. Honor read hungrily every scrap of
+print which came to her,--her stepfather taking care that every mention
+of Jimsy King reached her. It was in his Sophomore year that he played
+the lead in the college play and Honor read the newspapers limp and
+limber--"James King in the lead did a remarkable piece of work." "King,
+Stanford's football star, surprised his large following by his really
+brilliant performance." "Well-known college athlete demonstrates his
+ability to act." Honor knew the play and she could shut her eyes and
+see him and hear him in the hero's part, and her love and pride warmed
+her like a fire.
+
+She had not gone home that first summer. Mildred Lorimer and Carter's
+mother managed that, between them, in spite of Stephen's best efforts,
+and, that decided, Jimsy King went with his father to visit one of the
+uncles at his great _hacienda_ in old Mexico. Mrs. Van Meter and her son
+spent his vacation on the Continent and had Honor with them the greater
+part of the time. She met their steamer at Naples and Carter could see
+the shining gladness of her face long before he could reach her and
+speak to her, and he glowed so that his mother's eyes were wet.
+
+"Honor!" He had no words for that first moment, the fluent Carter. He
+could only hold both her hands and look at her.
+
+But Honor had words. She gave back the grip of his hands and beamed on
+him. "Carter! Carter, _dear_! Oh, but it's wonderful to see you! It's
+_next_ best to having Jimsy himself!"
+
+Marcia Van Meter winced with sympathy, but her son managed himself very
+commendably. They went to Sorrento first, and stayed a week in a mellow
+old hotel above the pink cliffs, and the boy and girl sat in the garden
+which looked like a Maxfield Parrish drawing and drove up to the old
+monastery at Deserto and wandered through the silk and coral shops and
+took the little steamer across to Capri for the day while Mrs. Van Meter
+rested from the crossing. She was happier that summer than she had been
+since Carter's little-boy days, for she was giving him, in so far as she
+might, what he wanted most in all the world, and she saw his courage and
+confidence growing daily. She was a little nervous about Roman fever, so
+they left Italy for Paris, and then went on to Switzerland, and for the
+first few days she was supremely content with her choice,--Carter gained
+color and vigor in the sun and snow, and Honor glowed and bloomed, but
+she presently saw her mistake. Switzerland was not the place to throw
+Honor and Carter together,--Switzerland filled to overflowing with
+knickerbockered, hard muscled, mountain climbing men and women; Honor
+who should have been climbing with the best of them; who would be, if
+Jimsy King were with them; and her son, in the smart incongruities of
+his sport clothes ... limping, his proud young head held high.
+
+They found Miss Bruce-Drummond at Zermatt, brown as a berry and hard as
+nails with her season's work, and she was heartily glad to see Honor.
+
+"Well, my dear,--fancy finding you here! Your stepfather wrote me you
+were studying in Florence and I've been meaning to write you. What luck,
+your turning up now! The friend who came on with me has been called
+home, and you shall do some climbs with me!"
+
+"Shall I?" Honor wanted to know of her hostess, but it was Carter who
+answered.
+
+"Of course! Don't bother about us,--we'll amuse ourselves well enough
+while you're hiking,--won't we, Mater?" He was charming about it and yet
+Honor felt his keen displeasure.
+
+"Yes, do go, dear," said Mrs. Van Meter, quickly. "Make the most of it,
+for I think we'll be moving on in a very few days. I--I haven't said
+anything about it because you and Carter have been so happy here, but
+the altitude troubles me.... I've been really very wretched."
+
+"Oh," said Honor penitently, "we'll go down right away, Mrs. Van
+Meter,--_to-day_! Why didn't you tell us?"
+
+"It hasn't been serious," said Carter's mother, conscientiously, "it's
+just that I know I will be more comfortable at sea level." It was
+entirely true; she would be more comfortable at sea level or anywhere
+else, so long as she took Carter out of that picture and framed him
+suitably again. "But we needn't hurry so madly, dear. Suppose we go on
+Friday? That will give you a day with your friend." She sent Carter for
+her cloak and Honor and the Englishwoman strolled to the end of the
+veranda.
+
+"I don't believe we ought to wait even a day, if she feels the altitude
+so," said Honor, troubled. "She's really very frail."
+
+"I expect she can stick it a day," said Miss Bruce-Drummond, calmly.
+"She looks fit enough. But--I say--where's the other one? Where's your
+boy?"
+
+The warm and happy color flooded the girl's face. "Jimsy is in Mexico
+with his father, visiting their relatives there on a big ranch."
+
+"You haven't thrown him over, have you?"
+
+"Thrown Jimsy over? Thrown--" she stopped and drew a long breath. "I
+could just as easily throw _myself_ over. Why, we--_belong_! We're part
+of each other. I just--can't think of myself without thinking of
+Jimsy--or of Jimsy without thinking of me." She said it quite simply and
+steadily and smiled when she finished.
+
+"I see," said the novelist. "Yes. I see. But you're both frightfully
+young, aren't you? I expect your people will make you wait a long time,
+won't they?"
+
+"Well," said Honor, earnestly, "we're going to try our very best to
+wait three years,--three from the time when we found out we were in love
+with each other, you know,--two years longer now. Then we'll be
+twenty-one." She spoke as if every one should be satisfied then, if they
+dragged out separate existences until they had attained that hoary age,
+and Miss Bruce-Drummond, hard on forty-one, grinned with entire good
+nature.
+
+"And I daresay they'll keep you over here all the while,--not let you go
+home for holidays, for fear you might lose your heads and bolt for
+Gretna Green?"
+
+"Mercy, no!" Her eyes widened, startled. "I shall go home for all summer
+next year! I meant to go this year, but Muzzie thought I ought to stay,
+to be with Carter and Mrs. Van Meter, when they'd made such lovely plans
+for me,--and it was really all right, this time, because Jimsy ought to
+be with his father on the Mexican trip." Her smooth brow registered a
+fleeting worry over James King the elder. "But next summer it'll be
+home, and Catalina Island, and Jimsy!"
+
+But it wasn't home for her next summer, after all. Mildred Lorimer
+decided that she wanted three months on the Continent with her husband
+and her daughter.
+
+"Right," said Stephen Lorimer, amiably, "so long as we take the boy
+along."
+
+"You mean Rodney?" she wanted to know, not looking at him. (Rodney was
+the youngest Lorimer.)
+
+"I mean Jimsy King, naturally, as you quite well know, Sapphira," he
+answered, pulling her down beside him on the couch and making her face
+him.
+
+"Stephen, I don't think Mr. King can afford to send him."
+
+"Then we'll take him."
+
+"Jimsy wouldn't let us. He is very proud,--I admire it in him."
+
+"Do you, my dear? Then, can't you manage to admire some of his other
+nice young virtues and graces?"
+
+"I do, Stephen. I give the boy credit for all he is, but----"
+
+"But you don't intend to let him marry your daughter if by the hookiest
+hook and crookedest crook you can prevent it. I observed your Star
+Chamber sessions with Mrs. Van Meter last year; I saw you wave her and
+her son hopefully away; I observed, smiling with intense internal glee,
+that you welcomed them back with deep if skillfully dissembled
+disappointment. Top Step, God love her, sat tight. Don't you know your
+own child yet, Mildred? Don't you know the well and favorably known
+chemical action of absence on young and juicy hearts? Don't you
+know"--he broke off to stare at her, flushed and a little breathless as
+she always was in discussions and unbelievably youthful and beautiful
+still, and finished in quite another key--"that you're getting
+positively lovelier with each ridiculous birthday--and your aged and
+infirm spouse more and more besottedly in love with you?"
+
+She did not melt because she was tremendously in earnest. She was
+pledged in her deepest heart to break up what she felt was Honor's silly
+sentimentality--sentimentality with a dark and sinister background of
+mortgages and young widows and Wild Kings and shabby, down-at-the-heel
+houses and lawns.
+
+"Woman," said Stephen Lorimer, "did you hear what I said? It was a
+rather neat speech, I thought. However, as you did not give it the rapt
+attention it merited I will now repeat it, with appropriate gestures."
+He caught her in his arms as youthfully as Jimsy might have done with
+Honor, and told her again, between kisses. "You lovely, silly, stubborn
+thing, kiss your wise husband once more in a manner expressive of your
+admiration for his unfailing sapience, and he will then, with surprising
+agility for one of his years, lope across the intervening lawn and tell
+James King that his son goes to Europe with us in June." He grinned back
+at her from the door. "You'll do your little worst to prevent it, my
+dear, that I know, but Jimsy King goes with us!"
+
+Honor and Jimsy wrote each other rapturously on receipt of the news, but
+they were not fluent or expressive, either of them, and they could only
+underline and put in a reckless number of exclamation points. "_Gee_,"
+wrote Jimsy King, "isn't it immense? Skipper, I can't tell you how I
+feel--but, by golly, I can _show_ you when I get there!"
+
+And Honor, reading that line, grew rosily pink to the roots of her
+honey-colored hair and flung herself into an hour of practice with such
+fire and fervor that the _Signorina_ came and beamed in the doorway.
+
+"So," she nodded. "News? Good or bad?"
+
+"Good," said Honor, swinging round on the piano stool. "The best in the
+world!"
+
+"So? Well, it does not greatly matter which, my small one. It does not
+signify so much whether one feels joy or grief, so long as one feels. To
+feel ... that is to live, and to live is to sing!"
+
+Honor sprang up and ran to her and put her arm as far around her as it
+would go. She was a delicious person to hug, the _Signorina_, warm and
+soft and smelling faintly of rare and costly scents.
+
+"_So?_" said the great singer again. "It is of some comfort, then, to
+embrace so much of fatness, when your arms ache to feel muscles and hard
+flesh? There, there, my good small one," she patted her with a puffy and
+jeweled hand, "I jest, but I rejoice. It is all good for the voice,
+this."
+
+"_Signorina_," said Honor, honestly, "I've told you and told you, but
+you don't seem to believe me, that I'm only studying to fill up the time
+until they'll let me marry Jimsy. I love it, of course, and I'll always
+keep it up, as much as I can without neglecting more important things,
+but----"
+
+"Mother of our Lord," said the Italian, lifting her hands to heaven,
+"'more important things' says this babe with the voice of gold, who, by
+the grace of God and my training might one day wake the world!"
+
+"More important to _me_," said Honor, firmly. "I know it must seem silly
+to you, _Signorina_, dear, but if you were in love----"
+
+"Mothers of all the holy saints," said the fat woman, lifting her hands
+again, "when have I not been in love? Have I not had three husbands
+already, and another even now dawning on the horizon, not to
+mention--but there, that is not for pink young ears. I will say this to
+you, small one. Every woman should marry. Every artist _must_ marry. Run
+home, then, in another year, and wed the young savage, and have done
+with it. Stay a year with him--two if you like--until there is an infant
+savage. Then you shall come back and give yourself in earnest to the
+business of singing."
+
+But Honor, scarlet-cheeked, shook her head. "I can't imagine coming back
+from--from _that_, _Signorina_!" Her eyes envisaged it and the happy
+color rose and rose in her face. "But I've got a good lesson for you
+to-day! Shall I begin?"
+
+"Begin, then, my good small one," said her teacher indulgently, "and for
+the rest, we shall see what we shall see!"
+
+Honor flung herself into her work as never before, and counted the weeks
+and days and hours until the time when Jimsy should come to her, and
+Jimsy, finishing up a sound, triumphant Sophomore year, saw everything
+through a hazy front drop of his Skipper on the pier at Naples.
+
+But Jimsy King did not go abroad with Mr. and Mrs. Lorimer, after all,
+and Honor did not see him through the whole dragging summer. Stephen
+Lorimer, sick with disappointment for his stepdaughter, would have
+found relief in fixing the blame on his wife, for her lovely and
+complacent face mirrored her satisfaction at the turn of events, but he
+could hardly hold her responsible. James King was taken suddenly,
+alarmingly ill with pneumonia two days before they left Los Angeles to
+catch their steamer at New York, and it was manifestly impossible for
+his son to leave him. The doctors gave scant hope of his recovery.
+
+Therefore, it was Carter Van Meter who took Jimsy's ticket off his hands
+and Jimsy's place in the party and the summer plans, leaving his happy
+mother to spend three flutteringly hopeful months alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+James King, greatly to the surprise of his physicians, did not die, but
+he hovered on the brink of it for many thin weeks and his son gave up
+his entire vacation to be with him. The letters he sent Honor were brief
+bulletins of his father's condition, explosive regrets at having to give
+up his summer with her, but Jimsy was not a letter writer. In order
+properly to fill up more than a page it was necessary for him to be able
+to say, "Had a bully practice to-day," or, "Saw old Duffy last night and
+he told me all about--" He was not good at producing epistolary bulk out
+of empty and idle days. Stephen Lorimer, often beside Honor when she
+opened and read these messages in English Cathedral towns or beside
+Scotch lakes, ached with sympathy for these young lovers under his
+benevolent wing because of their inability to set themselves down on
+paper. He knew that his stepdaughter was very nearly as limited as the
+boy.
+
+"Ethel," he said to Miss Bruce-Drummond who had met up with them for a
+week-end at Stirling, "those poor children are so pitifully what Gelett
+Burgess calls 'the gagged and wordless folk'; it would be so much
+easier--and safer--for them if they belonged to his 'caste of the
+articulate.'"
+
+She nodded. "Yes. It's rather frightful, really, to separate people who
+have no means of communication. Especially when--" she broke off,
+looking at Carter who was pointing out to Honor what he believed to be
+the Field of Bannockburn.
+
+Stephen Lorimer shook his head. "No danger there," he said comfortably.
+"Top Step is sorry for him--a creature of another, paler world ...
+infinitely beneath her bright and beamish boy's. No, I feel a lot safer
+to have Carter with her than with Jimsy King."
+
+The Englishwoman stared. "Really?"
+
+"Yes. I daresay I exaggerate, but I've always seen something sinister
+about that youth."
+
+Miss Bruce-Drummond looked at Carter Van Meter and observed the way in
+which he was looking at Honor. "He wants her frightfully, doesn't he,
+poor thing?"
+
+"He wants her frightfully but he isn't a poor thing in the very least.
+He is an almost uncannily clever and subtle young person for his years,
+with a very large income and a fanatically devoted mother behind him,
+and he's had everything he ever wanted all his life except physical
+perfection,--and my good Top Step."
+
+"Ah, yes, but what can he do, after all?"
+
+Honor's stepfather shrugged. "He knows that she would not be allowed to
+marry the lad if he went the way of the other 'Wild Kings,'--that she is
+too sound and sane to insist on it. And I think--I thought even in their
+High School days--that he deliberately steers Jimsy into danger."
+
+"My word!" said the novelist, hotly. "What are you going to do about it,
+Stephen?"
+
+"Watch. Wait. Stand ready. I shall make it my business to drop in at the
+fraternity house once or twice next season, when I go north to San
+Francisco,--and into other fraternity houses, and put my ear to the
+ground. And if I find what I fear to find I'll take it up with both the
+lads, face to face, and then I'll send for Honor."
+
+"Right!" said Miss Bruce-Drummond, her fine, fresh-colored face glowing.
+"And I'll run down to Florence at the Christmas holidays and take her to
+Rome with me, shall I?"
+
+"It will be corking of you, Ethel."
+
+"I shall love doing it."
+
+He looked at her appreciatively. She would love doing it; she loved
+life and people, Ethel Bruce-Drummond, and she was able therefore to put
+life and people, warm and living, on to her pages. She was as fit and
+hardy as a splendid boy, her cheeks round and ruddy, her eyes bright,
+her fine bare hands brown and strong, her sturdy ankles sturdier than
+ever in her heavy knitted woolen hose and her stout Scotch brogues. He
+had known and counted on her for almost twenty years--and he had married
+Mildred Carmody. "Ethel," he said, suddenly, "in that book of mine I
+mean to have----"
+
+"Ah, yes, that book of yours, Stephen! Slothful creature! You know quite
+well you'll never do it."
+
+"Never do it! Why,"--he was indignant--"I've got tons of it done
+already, in my head! It only wants writing down."
+
+"Yes, yes," said his friend, penitently, "I make no doubt. It only wants
+writing down. Well?"
+
+"I'm going to have a chapter on friendship, and insert a really novel
+idea. Friendship has never been properly praised,--begging pardon in
+passing of Mr. Emerson and his ilk. I'm going to suggest that it be
+given dignity and weight by having licenses and ceremonies, just as
+marriage has. It has a better right, you know, really. It's a much saner
+and more probable vow--to remain friends all one's life, than in love.
+In genuine friendship there is indeed no variableness, neither shadow or
+turning. You and I, now, might quite safely have taken out our
+friendship license and plighted our troth,--twenty years, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes," said Miss Bruce-Drummond, gently, "it's twenty years, Stephen,
+and that's a quite beautiful idea. You must surely put it in your book,
+old dear." Her keen eyes, looking away across the ancient battlefields
+were a little less keen than usual, but Stephen Lorimer did not notice
+that because he was looking at his watch.
+
+"Do you know it's nearly five, woman, and Mildred waiting tea for us at
+the Stirling Arms?" So he called to the boy and girl and fell into step
+beside his friend and swung down the hill to his tea and his wife, a
+little thrilled still, as he always would be to the day of his death, at
+being with her again after even the least considerable absence.
+
+It seemed to Honor Carmody that three solid summers had been welded
+together for her soul's discipline that year; there were assuredly
+ninety-three endless days in July. She was not quite sure whether having
+Carter with them made it harder for her or easier. He was an
+accomplished traveler; things moved more smoothly for his presence,
+and--as she wrote Jimsy--he knew everything about everywhere. On the
+whole, it was pleasanter, more like home, more like the good days on
+South Figueroa Street, to have him about; she could sometimes almost
+cajole herself into thinking Jimsy must be there, too, in the next room,
+hurrying up the street, a little late for dinner, but there, near them.
+It was only when Carter talked to her of Jimsy that she grew anxious,
+even acutely unhappy. It wasn't, she would decide, thinking it over
+later, lying awake in the dark, so much what Carter had said--it was
+what he hadn't said in words. It was the thing that sounded in his
+voice, that was far back in his eyes.
+
+"Yes," he would say, smiling in reminiscence, "that was a party! Nothing
+ever like it at Stanford before in the memory of the oldest inhabitant,
+they say. And old Jimsy--I wish you could have seen him! No, I don't
+really, for you wouldn't have approved and the poor old scout would have
+been in for a lecture, but it was----"
+
+"Carter," Honor would interrupt, "do you mean, can you possibly mean
+that Jimsy--that he's--" She found she couldn't say it after all; she
+couldn't put it into the ugly definite words.
+
+"Oh, nothing serious, Honor! Nothing for you to worry about! He has to
+do more or less as others do, a man of his prominence in college. It's
+unavoidable. Of course, it might be better if he could steer clear of
+that sort of thing altogether--" he would stop at a point like that and
+frown into space for a moment, as if remembering, weighing, considering,
+and Honor's heart would sink coldly. Then he would brighten again and
+lay a reassuring hand on her sleeve. "But you mustn't worry. Jimsy's got
+a level head on his shoulders, and he has too much at stake to go too
+far. He'll be all right in the end, Honor, I'm sure of that. And you
+know I'll always keep an eye on him!".
+
+And Honor twisting on her finger the ring with the clasped hands and the
+hidden blue stone of constancy which she always wore except when her
+mother was with her, would manage a smile and say, "I know how devoted
+you are to him, Carter. You couldn't help it, could you?--Every one is.
+And you mean to help him; I know that. I _am_ grateful. It's next best
+to being with him myself." Then, because she couldn't trust herself to
+talk very much about Jimsy, she would resolutely change the subject and
+Carter would write home to his hoping mother that Honor really seemed to
+be having a happy summer and to enjoy everything, and that she was not
+very keen to talk much about Jimsy.
+
+He did not hear the talk she had with her stepfather the night before
+they were to sail for home. It came after her hour of fruitless pleading
+with her mother to be allowed to go back with them. Mildred Lorimer had
+stood firm, and Stephen had been silent and Carter had sided with
+Honor's mother.
+
+"It really would be rather a shame, Honor,--much as we'd love having you
+with us on the trip home. You're coming on so wonderfully with your
+work, the _Signorina_ says. She intends to have you in concert this
+winter, and coming home would spoil that, wouldn't it?" He was very
+sensible about it.
+
+Honor had managed to ask Stephen to see her alone, after the rest had
+gone to their rooms. They were sailing from Genoa because they had
+wanted to bring Honor back to Italy and the _Signorina_ had joined them
+at the port and would take the girl back to Florence with her. Honor
+went upstairs and came down again in fifteen minutes and found him
+waiting for her in the lounge.
+
+He got up and came to meet her and took her hands into his solid and
+reassuring clasp. "This is pretty rough, Top Step. You don't have to
+tell me."
+
+She did not, indeed. Her young face was drained of all its color that
+night and her eyes looked strained. It was mildly warm and the windows
+were open, but she was shivering a little. "Stepper, dear, I don't want
+to be a goose----"
+
+"You're not, Top Step."
+
+"But I'm anxious. When Jimsy gave me this ring, and told me what he had
+told his father--that he was not going to be another 'Wild King' and
+asked me if I believed him, I told him I'd never stop believing him, and
+I won't, Skipper. I won't!"
+
+"Right, T. S."
+
+"But--things Carter says,--things he doesn't say--Stepper, I think Jimsy
+needs me _now_."
+
+The man was silent for a long moment. He could, of course, assert his
+authority or at least his power, since the girl was Mildred's child and
+not his, break with his good friend, the _Signorina_, and take Honor
+home. But, after all, what would that accomplish, unless she went to
+Stanford? He began to think aloud. "Even if you came home with us, Top
+Step, you wouldn't be near him, would you, unless you went to college?
+And you'd hardly care to do that now--to enter your Freshman year two
+years behind the boys."
+
+"No."
+
+"And if you stayed in Los Angeles--you might almost as well be here.
+The number of miles doesn't matter."
+
+"But--perhaps Jimsy wouldn't stay at Stanford then. Oh, Stepper, dear,
+haven't we waited long enough?"
+
+"He's only twenty, T. S."
+
+She sighed. "Being young is the cruelest thing in the world!"
+
+"You are blaspheming!" said her stepfather, sternly. "T. S., that's the
+only stupid and wicked thing you've ever said in the years I've known
+you! Don't ever dare to say it--or think it--again! Being young is the
+most golden and glorious thing in the world! Being young--" he ran a
+worried hand over his thinning hair and sighed. "Ah, well, you'll know,
+some day. Meanwhile, girl, it looks as if you'd have to stick. That's
+your part in 'playing the game!' But I promise you this. I shall keep an
+eye on things for you; keep in touch with the boy, see him, hear from
+him, hear _of_ him, and if the time comes when I believe that his need
+of you is instant and vital, I'll write--no, I'll cable you to come."
+
+"Stepper!" The comfort in her eyes warmed him.
+
+"It's a promise, Top Step"--he grinned,--"as you used to say when I
+first knew you--'cross-my-heart,
+hope-never-to-see-the-back-of-my-neck!' Now, hop along to bed,--and
+trust me!"
+
+The lift in the little hotel put its head under its wing at ten-thirty
+and it was now almost eleven, so Honor set out on foot to do the three
+flights between her and her room. She ran lightly because she felt
+suddenly eased of a crushing burden; Stepper, good old Stepper, was on
+guard; Stepper was standing watch for her. There was a little
+writing-room and sun parlor on the second floor, dim now, with only one
+shaded light still burning, and as she crossed it a figure rose so
+startlingly from a deep chair that she smothered a small cry.
+
+"It's I," said Carter. He stepped between her and the stairway.
+
+"Cartie! You did make me jump!" Honor smiled at him; she was so cozily
+at peace for the moment that she had an increased tenderness for their
+frail friend. "It was so still in the hotel it might be the 'night
+before Christmas,'--'not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.'
+You'd better go to bed," she added, maternally. "You look pale and
+tired."
+
+"I'm not tired," he said shortly. He continued to stand between her and
+the stairs.
+
+"Well--_I'm_ sleepy," she said, moving to pass him. "Good----"
+
+But Carter was quicker. He caught hold of her by her arms and held her
+in a tense grip. "Honor, Honor, _Honor_!" he said, choking.
+
+"Why,--Cartie! You--please--" She tried to free herself.
+
+"Honor, I can't help it. I've got to speak. I've got to know. Don't
+you--couldn't you--care at all for me, Honor?"
+
+"Carter! Not--not the way you mean! Of course I'm fond of you, but----"
+
+"I don't want that!" He shook her, roughly, and his voice was harsh. "I
+want you to care the way I care. And I'm going to make you!"
+
+"Carter," she was not angry with him, only unhappy, "do you think this
+is fair? Do you think you're being square with Jimsy?"
+
+"No," he said, hotly, "and I don't care. I don't care for anything but
+you. Honor, you don't love Jimsy King. I know it. It's just a silly,
+boy-and-girl thing--you must realize that, now you're away from him!
+Your mother doesn't want you to marry him. What can he give you or do
+for you? And he'll go the way of his father and all his family--I've
+tried to lie to you, but I'm telling you the truth now, Honor. He's
+drinking already, and he'll grow worse and worse. Give him up, Honor!
+Give him up before he spoils your life, and let me--" with all his
+strength, far more than she would have thought it possible for him to
+have, he tried to pull her into his arms, to reach her lips.
+
+But Jimsy's Skipper, for all her two soft years in Europe, had not lost
+her swimming, hiking, driving, out-of-door vigor, and her muscles were
+better than his.
+
+"I'm going to kiss you," said Carter, huskily. "I've wanted to kiss you
+for years ... always ... and I'm going to kiss you now!"
+
+"No, you're not, Carter," said Honor. She got her arms out of his grasp
+and caught his wrists in her hands. She was very white and her eyes were
+cold. "You see? You're weak. You're weak in your arms, Carter, just as
+you're weak in your--in your character, in your friendship! And I
+despise weakness." She dropped his wrists and saw him sit down, limply,
+in the nearest chair and cover his face with his hands. Then she walked
+to the stairs and went up without a backward glance.
+
+He was pallid and silent at breakfast next morning and Honor was careful
+not to look at him. It was beginning to seem, in the eight o'clock
+sunlight, as if the happening of the night before must have been a
+horrid dream, and her sense of anger and scorn gradually gave way to
+pity. After all ... poor old Carter, who had so little ... Jimsy, who
+had so much! What Carter had said in his tirade about Jimsy's drinking
+she did not believe; it was simply temper; angry exaggeration. Mildred
+Lorimer, looking at Carter's white face and the gray shadows under his
+eyes and observing Honor's manner toward him, sighed audibly and was a
+little distant when she bade her daughter farewell. She loved her eldest
+born devotedly, but there were moments when she couldn't help but feel
+that Honor was not very much of a comfort to her....
+
+Stephen held the girl's hands hard and looked deep into her eyes.
+"Remember what I said, Top Step, 'Cross-my-heart!'"
+
+"I'll remember, Stepper, dear! _Thanks!_" She turned to Carter and held
+out a steady hand. "My love to your mother, Carter, and I do hope you'll
+have a jolly crossing."
+
+"Will you read this, please?" He lifted his heavy eyes to her face and
+slipped a note into her hand. She nodded and tucked it into her blouse.
+Then she stood with the _Signorina_, on the pier, waving, and with misty
+eyes watching the steamer melting away and away into the blue water.
+When she was alone she read the little letter.
+
+
+     "Dear Honor--" Carter had written in a ragged scrawl unlike his
+     usual firm hand--"Will you try to forgive me? You are the kindest
+     and least bitter person in the world; I know you can forgive me.
+     But--and this will be harder--can you forget last night? I promise
+     to deserve it, if you will. Will you pretend to yourself that it
+     never happened, and just remember the good days we've had this
+     summer, and that--in spite of my losing my head--I'm your friend,
+     and Jimsy's friend? Will you, Honor?"
+
+
+And Honor Carmody, looking with blurred eyes at the sea, wished she
+might wave again and reassuringly to the boy on the steamer, facing the
+long voyage so drearily. Then she realized that she still could, in a
+sense, wave to him. The steamer stopped at Naples and she could send a
+telegram to him there, and he would not have to cross the wide ocean
+under that guilty weight. She put on her hat and sped to the telegraph
+office, and there, because his note had ended with a question--had been
+indeed all a question--and because she was the briefest of feminine
+creatures, and because the _Signorina_ was waiting luncheon for her and
+did not enjoy waiting, she wired the one word, "Yes," and signed her
+name.
+
+"Carter got a telegram," said Mildred Lorimer to her husband. "I wonder
+what it could have been. Did he say?"
+
+"He didn't mention it," said Stephen. "About those silk shirts which
+weren't finished, I daresay. Certainly not bad news, by the look of
+him."
+
+When Carter Van Meter reached Los Angeles and his tearfully happy mother
+he drew her into the library and closed the door. "Mater," he said with
+an odd air of intense repressed excitement, "I'm going to show you
+something, but you must promise me on your honor not to breathe it to a
+living soul, least of all, Mrs. Lorimer."
+
+"Oh, dearest," gasped his mother, "I promise faithfully----"
+
+He took Honor's telegram out of his wallet and unfolded it and smoothed
+it out for her to read the single word it contained. Then, at her glad
+cry, "Sh ... Mater! It isn't--exactly--what you think. I can't explain
+now. But it's a hope; it may--I believe it will, one day--lead to the
+thing we both want!" He folded it again carefully into its creases and
+put it back into his wallet and he was breathing hard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Ethel Bruce-Drummond was better than her word. She did not wait for the
+Christmas holidays but went down to Florence early in December for
+Honor's first concert, and she wrote many pages to Stephen Lorimer.
+
+
+     Of course you know by this time that the concert was a
+     success--you'll have had Honor's modest cable and the explosive and
+     expensive one from the fat lark! They are sending you translations
+     from the Italian papers, and clippings in English, and copies of
+     some of the notes she's had from the more important musical people,
+     and I really can't add anything to that side of it. You know, my
+     dear Stephen, when it comes to music I'm confessedly ignorant,--not
+     quite, perhaps, like that fabled countryman of mine who said he
+     could not tell whether the band were playing "God Save the Weasel"
+     or "Pop Goes the Queen," but bad enough in all truth. Therefore, I
+     keep cannily out of all discussion of Honor's voice. I gather,
+     however, that it has surprised every one, even the _Signorina_, and
+     that there is no doubt at all about her making a genuine success
+     if she wants to hew to the line. She has had, I hear, several
+     rather unusual offers already. But of course she hasn't the
+     faintest intention of doing anything in the world but the thing her
+     heart is set upon. It's rather pathetic, really. There's something
+     a little like Trilby about her; she does seem to be singing under
+     enchantment. What she really is like, though, is a lantern-jawed
+     young Botticelli Madonna. She's lost a goodish bit of flesh, I
+     should say, and her color's not so high, and she might easily have
+     walked out of one of the canvases in the Pitti or the Ufizzi, or
+     the Belli Arti. Her hair is Botticelli hair, and that "reticence of
+     the flesh" of which one of your American novelists
+     speaks--Harrison, isn't it?--and that faint austerity.
+
+     She sang quantities of _arias_ and groups of songs of all nations,
+     and at the end she did some American Indian things,--the native
+     melodies themselves arranged in modern fashion. I expect you know
+     them. The words are very simple and touching and the Italian
+     translations are sufficiently funny. Well, the very last of all was
+     something about a captive Indian maid, and a young chap here who
+     clearly adores her and whom she hasn't even taken in upon her
+     retina played a wailing, haunting accompaniment on the flute. As
+     nearly as I can remember it went something like:
+
+
+          From the Land of the Sky Blue Water
+          They brought a captive maid.
+          Her eyes were deep as the--(I can't remember what, Stephen)
+          But she was not afraid.
+          I go to her tent in the evening
+          And woo her with my flute,
+          But she dreams of the Sky Blue Water,
+          And the captive maid is mute.
+
+
+     My dear Stephen, I give you my word that I very nearly put my nose
+     in the air and howled. She _is_ a captive maid--captive to her
+     talent and the fat song-bird and her mother's ambition and yours,
+     and her mother's determination not to let her marry her lad, and to
+     that Carter chap, and the boy playing the flute--the whole network
+     of you,--but she's dreaming of the Sky Blue Water, and dreaming is
+     doing with that child. You'd best make up your minds to it, and
+     settle some money on them and marry them off. My word, Stephen, is
+     there so much of it lying about in the world that you can afford to
+     be reckless with it? I arrived too late to see her before the
+     concert, and I went behind--together with the bulk of the American
+     and English colonies--directly it was over. She was tremendously
+     glad to see me; I was a sort of link, you know. When I started in
+     to tell her how splendidly she'd sung and how every one was
+     rejoicing she said, "Yes,--thanks--isn't every one sweet? But did
+     Stepper write you that Jimsy was 'Varsity Captain this year, and
+     that they beat Berkeley twelve to five? And that Jimsy made _both_
+     touchdowns? Do you remember that game you saw with us--and how
+     Jimsy ran down the field and shook hands with the boy who'd scored
+     on us? And how that gave every one confidence again, and we won? We
+     _always_ won!"--and standing there with her arms full of flowers
+     and all sorts of really important people waiting to pat her on the
+     head, she hummed that old battle song:
+
+
+          _You can't beat L. A. High!_
+          _You can't beat L. A. High!_
+
+
+     and her eyes filled up with tears and she gave me her jolly little
+     grin and said, "Oh, Miss Bruce-Drummond, I can hardly wait to get
+     back to real living again!"
+
+
+Honor was honestly happy over her success. It was good to satisfy--and
+more than satisfy--the kind _Signorina_ and all the genial and
+interested people she had come to know there; to send her program and
+her clippings home to her mother; it was jolly to be asked out to
+luncheon and dinner and tea and to be made much of; it was best of all
+to have something tangible to give up for Jimsy. If she had failed,
+going back to him and settling quietly down with him would have seemed
+like running to sanctuary; now--with definite promises and hard figures
+offered her--it was more than a gesture of renunciation. She could
+understand adoring a life of that sort if she hadn't Jimsy; as it was
+she listened sedately to the _Signorina's_ happy burblings and said at
+intervals:
+
+"But you know, _Signorina_ dear, that I'm going to give it up and be
+married next year?"
+
+"You cannot give it up, my poor small one. It will not give you up. It
+has you, one may truly say, by the throat!"
+
+There was no use in arguing with her. The interim had to be filled until
+summer and home. She would do, docilely, whatever the _Signorina_
+wished.
+
+Jimsy was happy and congratulatory about her concert but he took it no
+more seriously than Honor herself. His letters were full, in those days,
+of the unrest at Stanford. Certain professors had taken a determined
+stand against drinking; there was much agitation and bitterness on both
+sides. Jimsy was all for freedom; he resented dictation; he could hoe
+his own row and so could other fellows; the faculty had no right to
+treat them like a kindergarten. Honor answered calmly and soothingly;
+she managed to convey without actually setting it down on the page that
+Jimsy King of all people in the world should take care not to ally
+himself with the "wets," and he wrote back that he was keeping out of
+the whole mess.
+
+It came, therefore, as a fearful shock, the letters and newspapers'
+account of the expelling of James King of Los Angeles, 'Varsity Captain
+and prominent in college theatricals, from Stanford University for
+marching in a parade of protest against the curtailing of drinking! She
+was alone in her room when she opened her mail and she sat very still
+for minutes with her eyes shut, her fingers gripping the tiny clasped
+hands on her ring. At last, "_I'll never stop believing in you_," she
+said, almost aloud.
+
+Then she read Jimsy's own version of it. She always kept his letter for
+the last, childishly, on the nursery theorem of "First the worst, second
+the same, last the best of all the game."
+
+
+     "Skipper dearest," he wrote, in a hasty and stumbling scrawl, "I'm
+     so mad I can hardly see to write. I'd have killed that prof if it
+     hadn't been for Carter. This is how it happened. I'd been keeping
+     out of the whole mess as I told you I would. That night I was
+     digging out something at the Library and on my way back to the
+     House I saw a gang of fellows in a sort of parade, and some one at
+     the end caught hold of me and dragged me in. I asked him what the
+     big idea was and he said he didn't know, and I was sleepy and when
+     we came to the House I dropped out and went in. I wasn't in it ten
+     minutes and I didn't even know what it was about. But when they
+     called for every one who was in the parade next day I had to show
+     up, of course. Well, they asked me about it and I told them just
+     how it happened, and they said all right, then, I could go. I was
+     surprised and thankful, I can tell you, because they'd been
+     chopping off heads right and left, some of the best men in college.
+     Well, just as I was going out through the door the old prof called
+     me back and said he had one more thing to ask me. Did I consider
+     that his committee was absolutely right and justified in everything
+     they'd done? Well, Skipper, what could I say? I said just what
+     you'd have said and what you'd have wanted me to say--that I did
+     think they had been too severe and in some cases unjust and they
+     canned me for it."
+
+
+There was a letter from Stephen Lorimer, grave and distressed,
+substantiating everything that Jimsy had written. (He had taken the
+first train north and gone into the matter thoroughly with the men at
+the fraternity house, simmering with red rage, and the committee,
+regretful but adamant.) The college career, the gay, brilliant, adored
+college career of Jimsy King was at an end. Honor's stepfather had taken
+great care to have the real facts in Jimsy's case printed--he sent the
+clipping from the Los Angeles paper--and he had spent an evening with
+James King, setting forth the truth of the case. But the fact remained
+for the majority of people, gaining in sinister weight with every
+repetition, that the last of the "Wild Kings" had been expelled from
+Stanford University for drinking.
+
+
+     "Top Step," her stepfather wrote, "I'm sick with rage and
+     indignation. Your mother is taking it very hard--as is most every
+     one else. 'Expelled' is not a pretty word. I'm doing my level best
+     to put the truth before the public, to show that your boy is really
+     something of a hero in this matter, in that he might be snugly safe
+     at this moment if he had been willing to tell a politic lie. You'll
+     be unhappy over this, T. S., that's inevitable, but--I give you my
+     word--you need not hang your head. Jimsy played the game."
+
+
+Carter, who had written seldom since the happening of the summer in
+spite of her kind and casual replies to his letters, sent her now six
+reassuring pages. She was not to worry. Jimsy was really doing very
+well, as far as the drinking went, and he--Carter--would not let him do
+anything foolish or desperate in his indignation. Three times he
+repeated that she must not be anxious. A dozen times in the letter he
+showed her where she might well be anxious. The word beat itself in upon
+her brain until she could endure it no longer, and she went out through
+the pretty streets of Florence to the cable office and sent Stephen
+Lorimer one of her brief and urgent messages, "_Anxious_." Two days
+later she had his answer and it was as short as her own had been,
+"_Come_."
+
+There was a stormy scene with the _Signorina_. The waves of her fury
+rolled up and up and broke, crashing, over Honor's rocklike calm. At
+last, breathless, her fat face mottled with temper, "Go, then," said the
+singer, and went out of the room with heavy speed and slammed the door
+resoundingly. But she went with Honor to her steamer at Naples and
+embraced her forgivingly. "Go with God," she wept. "Live a little; it is
+best, perhaps. Then, my good small one, come back to me."
+
+Like all simple and direct persons Honor found relief in action. The
+packing of her trunks and bags, the securing of tickets, cabling, had
+all given her a sense of comfort. They were tangible evidences of her
+progress toward Jimsy. The ocean trip was difficult; there was nothing
+to _do_. Nevertheless the sea's large calm communicated itself to her;
+for the greater portion of the voyage she was at peace. The situation
+with Jimsy must have been grave for her stepfather to think it necessary
+to send for her, but nothing could be so bad that she could not right it
+when she was actually with Jimsy. She would never leave him again, she
+told herself.
+
+
+     Feyther an' mither may a' gey mad,
+     But whistle an' I'll come to ye, my lad!
+
+
+Her mother, her poor, lovely mother, to whom she had been always such a
+disappointment, would be mad enough in all conscience, but Stepper would
+stand by. And nothing--no thing, no person, mattered beside Jimsy.
+Friends of her mother met her steamer in New York and put her on her
+train, and friends of Stephen Lorimer met her in Chicago and drove and
+dined her and saw her off on the Santa Fe. She began to have at once a
+warm sense of the West and home. The California poppies on the china in
+the dining-car made her happy out of all proportion. When they picked up
+the desert she relaxed and settled back in her seat with a sigh and a
+smile. The blessed brown, the delicious dryness! The little jig-saw
+hills standing pertly up against the sky; the tiny, low-growing desert
+flowers; the Indian villages in the distance, the track workers' camps
+close by with Mexican women and babies waving in the doorways; even a
+lean gray coyote, loping homeward, looking back over his shoulder at the
+train, helped to make up the sum of her joy. _The West!_ How had she
+endured being away from it so long?--From its breadth and bigness, its
+sweep and space and freedom? She would never go away again. She and
+Jimsy would live here always, a part of it, belonging.
+
+She stopped worrying. She was home, and Jimsy was waiting for her, and
+everything would come right.
+
+At San Bernardino her mother and stepfather and her brothers came on
+board, surprising her. She had had a definite picture of them at the
+Santa Fe station in Los Angeles and their sudden appearance almost
+bewildered her. Her mother was a trifle tearful and reproachful but she
+was radiantly beautiful in her winter plumage. Stephen's handclasp was
+solid and comforting. Her little brothers had grown out of all belief,
+and her big brothers were heroic size, and they were all a little shy
+with her after the excitement of the first greetings. She wondered why
+Jimsy had not come out with them but at once she told herself that it
+was better so; it would have been hard for them to have their first hour
+together under so many eyes,--her mother's especially. Jimsy would be
+waiting at the station. But he was not. There were three or four of her
+girl friends with their arms full of flowers and one or two older boys
+who had finished college and were in business. They made much of her and
+she greeted them warmly for all the cold fear which had laid hold of her
+heart.
+
+Then came the drive home, the surprising number of new business
+buildings, the amazing growth of the city toward Seventh Street, the
+lamentable intrusion of apartment houses and utilitarian edifices on
+beautiful old Figueroa. Honor looked and listened and commented
+intelligently, but--_where was Jimsy?_
+
+The old house looked mellow and beautiful; the Japanese garden was a
+symphony of green plush sod and brilliant color--the Bougainvillæa
+almost smothering the little summerhouse and a mocking-bird who must be
+a grandson of the one of her betrothal night was singing his giddy heart
+out. Kada was waiting in the doorway, bowing stiffly, sucking in his
+breath, beaming; the cook just behind him, following him in sound and
+gesture, and the Japanese gardener, hat in hand, stood at the foot of
+the steps as she passed to say, "How-do? Veree glod! Veree glod! Tha's
+nize you coming home! Veree glod!"
+
+Honor shook hands with them all. Then she turned to look at her
+stepfather and he followed her into his study.
+
+"And we've got three new dogs, Honor, and two cats, and----" the
+smallest Lorimer besieged her at the door but she did not turn. She was
+very white now and trembling.
+
+"Stepper, where is Jimsy?"
+
+"Top Step, I--it's like Evangeline, rather, isn't it? He went straight
+through from the north without even stopping over here. He's gone to
+Mexico, to his uncle's ranch. And Carter got a leave of absence and went
+with him. I--you want the truth, don't you, Top Step?"
+
+"Yes," said Honor.
+
+"I'm afraid Jimsy rather ran amuck, in the bitterness of it all. His
+father took it very hard, in spite of my explanations to him, and wrote
+the boy a harsh letter; that started things, I fancy. That's when I
+cabled you. Carter telephoned his mother from the station here as they
+went through--they were on that special from San Francisco to Mexico
+City--and she told your mother that Jimsy was pretty well shot to pieces
+and that Carter didn't dare leave him alone."
+
+"Didn't he write me?"
+
+"He may have, of course, T. S., but there's nothing here for you. Mrs.
+Van Meter told Carter that I had cabled for you, so Jimsy knows."
+
+"Yes." She stood still, her hat and cloak on, deliberating. "Do the
+trains go to Mexico every day, Stepper?"
+
+"Why, yes, I believe they do, but you needn't wait to write, T. S. You
+can telegraph, and let----"
+
+"I didn't mean about writing," said Honor, quietly. "I meant about
+going. Will you see if I can leave to-day, Stepper? Then I won't unpack
+at all, you see, and that will save time."
+
+"Top Step, I know what this means to you, but--your mother.... Do you
+think you'd better?"
+
+"I am going to Mexico," said Honor. "I am going to Jimsy."
+
+"I'll find out about trains and reservations," said her stepfather.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+For a few moments it moved and concerned Honor to see that she was the
+cause of the first serious quarrel between her mother and her
+stepfather. She was shocked to see her mother's wild weeping and Stephen
+Lorimer's grim jaw and to hear the words between them, but nothing could
+really count with her in those hours.
+
+She took her mother in her arms and kissed her and spoke to her as she
+had to her little brothers in the years gone by, when they were hurt or
+sorry. "There, there, Muzzie _dear_! You can't help it. You must just
+stop caring so. It isn't your fault."
+
+"People will think--people will say----" sobbed Mildred Lorimer.
+
+"No one will blame you, dear. Every one knows what a trial I've always
+been to you."
+
+"You have, Honor! You have! You've never been a comfort to me--not since
+you were a tiny child. And even then you were tomboyish and rough and
+queer."
+
+"I know, Muzzie."
+
+"I never heard of anything so brazen in all my life--running after him
+to Mexico--to visit people you never laid eyes on in all your days,
+utter strangers to you----"
+
+"Jimsy's aunt and uncle, Muzzie."
+
+"Utter strangers to _you_, forcing yourself upon them, without even
+telegraphing to know if they can have you----"
+
+"No. I don't want Jimsy to know I'm coming."
+
+"Where's your pride, Honor Carmody? When he's done such dreadful things
+and got himself expelled from college--a young man never lives _that_
+down as long as he lives!--and gone the way of all the 'Wild Kings,' and
+hasn't even written to you! That's the thing I can't understand--your
+running after him when he's dropped you--gone without a word or a line
+to you."
+
+"He may have written, Muzzie. Letters are lost, you know, sometimes."
+
+"Very seldom. _Very_ seldom!" Mrs. Lorimer hotly proclaimed her faith in
+her government's efficiency. "I haven't lost three letters in forty
+years. No. He's jilted you, Honor. That's the ugly, shameful truth, and
+you're too blind to see it. If you knew the things Carter told his
+mother----"
+
+"I don't want to know them, Muzzie."
+
+"Of course you don't. That's just it! Blind! Blind and
+stubborn,--determined to wreck and ruin your whole life. And I must
+stand by, helpless, and see you do it. And the _danger_ of the thing!
+With Diaz out of the country it's in the hands of the brigands. You'll
+be murdered ... or worse! Well--I know whose head your blood will be on.
+Not mine, thank Heaven!" There was very little that day, Mildred Lorimer
+felt, that she could thank Heaven for. It was not using her well.
+
+"You know that Stepper will give me letters and telegraph ahead to the
+train people," said Honor. "And you mustn't believe all the hysterical
+tales in the newspapers, Muzzie dear. Here's Stepper now."
+
+Stephen Lorimer was turning the car in at the driveway and a moment
+later he came into the house. He looked very tired but he smiled at his
+stepdaughter. "You're in luck, Top Step! I've just come from the Mexican
+Consulate. Met some corking people there, Mexicans, starting home
+to-morrow. They'll be with you until the last day of your trip! Mother
+and father and daughter,--Menéndez is the name. Fascinating creatures.
+I've got your reservations, in the same car with them! Mildred," he
+turned to his wife, still speaking cheerily but begging for absolution
+with his tired eyes, "Señora Menéndez--Menéndez y García is the whole
+name--sent her compliments and said to tell you she would 'guard your
+daughter as her own.' Doesn't that make you feel better about it?"
+
+"She can defend her from bandits, I suppose?"
+
+"My dear, there will be Señor Menéndez, and they tell me the tales of
+violence are largely newspaper stuff,--as I've told you repeatedly. They
+will not only look after Honor all the way but they will telegraph to
+friends to meet her at Córdoba and drive her out to the Kings'
+_rancho_--I explained that she wished to surprise her friends. I don't
+mind telling you now that I should have gone with her myself if these
+people hadn't turned up."
+
+"Stepper, dear!"
+
+"And I'll go now, T. S., if you like."
+
+"No, Stepper. I'd rather go alone, really--as long as I'm going to be so
+well looked after, and Muzzie needn't worry."
+
+"'Needn't worry!'" said Mildred Lorimer, lifting her hands and letting
+them fall into her lap.
+
+"Honestly, Muzzie, you needn't. If you do, it's because you let
+yourself. You must know that I'll be safe with these people."
+
+"Your bodily safety isn't all," her mother, driven from that corner,
+veered swiftly. "The thing itself is the worst. The _idea_ of it--when I
+think--after all that was in the paper, and every one talking about it
+and pitying you--_pitying_ you, Honor!"
+
+Her daughter got up suddenly and crossed over to her mother. "Every one
+but you, Muzzie? Can't you manage to--pity me--a little? I think I could
+stand being pitied, just now." It was indeed a day for being mothered.
+There was a need which even the best and most understanding of
+stepfathers could not fill, and Mildred Lorimer, looking into her white
+face and her mourning eyes melted suddenly and allowed herself to be
+cuddled and somewhat comforted but the heights of comforting Honor she
+could not scale.
+
+"I think," said the girl at length, "I'd like to go up to my room and
+rest for a little while, if you don't mind, Muzzie,--and Stepper."
+
+"Right, T. S. You'll want to be fresh for to-morrow."
+
+"Do, dear--and I'll have Kada bring you up some tea. Rest until dinner
+time, because Mrs. Van Meter's dining with us," she broke off as she saw
+the small quiver which passed over her daughter's face and defended
+herself. "I had to ask her, Honor. I couldn't--in common decency--avoid
+it. She's so devoted to you, and think what she's done for you, Honor!"
+
+Honor sighed. "Very well. But will you make her promise not to let
+Carter know I am coming?"
+
+"My dear, how could she? You'll be there yourself as soon as a letter."
+
+"She might telegraph." She turned to her stepfather. "Will you make her
+promise, Stepper?"
+
+"I will, Top Step. Run along and rest. I daresay there will be some of
+the Old Guard in to see you this evening." He walked with her to the
+door and opened it for her. The small amenities of life had always his
+devoted attention. He smiled down at her. "_Rest!_" he said.
+
+"I can rest, now, Stepper." It was true. When she reached the haven of
+her big blue room she found herself relaxed and relieved. Again the
+direct simplicity of her nature upheld her; she had not found Jimsy, but
+she would find him; she was going to him without a day's delay; she
+could "rest in action."
+
+The soft-footed, soft-voiced Kada brought her a tea tray and arranged it
+deftly on a small table by the window. He smiled incessantly and kept
+sucking in his breath in his shy and respectful pleasure. "Veree glod,"
+he said as the gardener had said before him, "Veree _glod_! I lige veree
+moach you comin' home! Now when thad Meestair Jeemsie comin' home too,
+happy days all those days!" He had brought her two kinds of tiny
+sandwiches which she had favored in the old tea times, chopped olives
+and nuts in one, cream cheese and dates in the other, and there was a
+plate of paper-thin cookies and some salted almonds and he had put a
+half blown red rose on the shining napkin.
+
+"Kada, you are very kind. You always do everything so beautifully! How
+are you coming on with your painting?"
+
+"Veree glod, thank-you-veree-moach!" He bowed in still delight.
+
+"You must show me your pictures in the morning, Kada."
+
+"Thank-you-veree-moach! Soon I have one thousand dollar save', can go
+study Art School."
+
+"That's fine, Kada!"
+
+"_Bud_"--his serene face clouded over--"veree sod leavin' theeze house!
+When you stayin' home an' thad Meestair Jeemsie here I enjoy to work
+theeze house; is merry from moach comedy!"'
+
+He bowed himself out, still drawing in his breath and Honor smiled.
+"Merry from much comedy" the house had been in the old gay days; dark
+from much tragedy it seemed to-day. What would it be to her when she
+came back again? But, little by little, the old room soothed and stilled
+her. There were the sedate four-poster bed and the demure dresser and
+the little writing desk, good mahogany all of them; come by devious
+paths from a Virginia plantation; the cool blue of walls and rugs and
+hangings; the few pictures she had loved; three framed photographs of
+the Los Angeles football squad; a framed photograph of Jimsy in his
+class play; a bowl of dull blue pottery filled now with lavish winter
+roses. It was like a steadying hand on her shoulder, that sane and
+simple girlhood room.
+
+The window gave on the garden and the King house beyond it. She wondered
+whether she should see James King before she went to Mexico. She felt
+she could hardly face him gently,--Jimsy's father who had failed him in
+his dark hour. In view of what his own life had been! She leaned forward
+and watched intently. It was the doctor's motor, the same seasoned old
+car, which was stopping before the house of the "Wild Kings," and she
+saw the physician hurry up the untidy path and disappear into the house.
+James King was ill again. She would have to see him, then. Perhaps he
+would have a good message for Jimsy. She finished her tea and slipped
+into her old blue kimono, still hanging in the closet, turned back the
+embroidered spread and laid herself down upon the bed. She took Jimsy's
+ring out of the little jewel pocket where she carried it and put it on
+her finger. "I will never take it off again," she said to herself. Then
+she fell asleep.
+
+"Fresh as paint, T. S.," said her stepfather when she came down.
+
+"My dear, what an adorable frock," said her mother. "You never got
+_that_ in Italy!"
+
+"But I did, Muzzie!" Honor was penitently glad of the sign of
+fellowship. "There's a really lovely little shop in the Via Tournabouni.
+Wait till my big trunk comes and you see what I found for you there! Oh,
+here's Mrs. Van Meter!"
+
+She hurried to the door to greet Carter's mother. Marcia Van Meter
+kissed her warmly and exclaimed over her. She was thinner but it was
+becoming, and her gown suited her perfectly, and--they were seated at
+dinner now--was that an Italian ring?
+
+"Yes," said Honor, slowly, looking first at her mother, "it is an
+Italian ring, a very old one. Jimsy gave it to me. It has been in the
+King family for generations. Isn't it lovely?"
+
+"_Lovely_," said Mrs. Van Meter, coloring. She changed the subject
+swiftly but she did not really seem disconcerted. Indeed, her manner
+toward Honor during the meal and the hour that followed was
+affectionate to the point, almost, of seeming proprietary and maternal.
+Some boys and girls came in later and Mrs. Van Meter rose to go. "I'll
+run home, now, my dear, and leave you with your young friends."
+
+"I'll go across the street with you, Mrs. Van Meter," said Stephen
+Lorimer, flinging his cigarette into the fire. He had already extracted
+her promise not to telegraph Carter but he meant to hear it again.
+
+"Thanks, Mr. Lorimer, but I'm going to ask Honor to step over with me. I
+have a tiny parcel for Carter and a message. Will you come, Honor?"
+
+She slipped her arm through the girl's and gave it a little squeeze as
+they crossed the wide street. "Hasn't the city changed and grown, my
+dear? Look at the number of motors in sight at this moment! One hardly
+dares cross the street. I declare, it makes me feel almost as if I were
+in the East again." She gave her a small, tissue wrapped parcel for her
+son and came out on to the steps again with her. "Be careful about
+crossing, Honor!"
+
+"Yes," said Honor, lightly. "That would hardly do,--to come alone from
+Italy and then get myself run over on my own street. What's that
+Kipling thing Stepper quotes:
+
+
+     To sail unscathed from a heathen land
+     And be robbed on a Christian coast!
+
+
+Well, good-night, Mrs. Van Meter, and good-by, and I'll write you how
+Carter is!"
+
+The older woman put her arms about her and held her close. "Dearest
+girl, Carter told me not to breathe to any one, not even to your mother,
+about--about what happened last summer--and--and what he asked you, and
+I haven't, but I _must_ tell you how glad...." then, at the bewilderment
+in Honor's face in the light of the porch lamp,--"he showed me the
+telegram you sent him to the steamer."
+
+"Oh,--I remember!" Her brief wire to him, promising to forgive and
+forget his wild words of the evening before. She had quite forgiven, and
+she had so nearly forgotten that she could not imagine, at first, what
+his mother meant. And now, because the older woman was trembling, and
+because Carter must have told her of how he had lost control of himself
+and been for a moment false to his friend, she gave back the warm
+embrace and kissed the pale cheek. "Yes. And I _meant_ it, Mrs. Van
+Meter!"
+
+"You _blessed_ child!" Marcia Van Meter wiped her eyes. "You've made me
+very happy."
+
+Honor ran across Figueroa Street between flashing headlights on
+automobiles, and her heart was soft within her. _Poor_ old Cartie! How
+he must have grieved and reproached himself, and how seriously he must
+have taken it, to tell his mother! Fancy not forgiving people! Her
+stepfather had marked a passage for her in her pocket "R. L. S."...
+"The man who cannot forgive any mortal thing is a green hand in life,"
+Stevenson had said. Honor believed him. She could even forgive James
+King, poor, proud, miserable James King, for failing Jimsy. It was
+because he cared so much. As she started up her own walk some one called
+to her from the steps of the King house.
+
+"That you, Honor?"
+
+"Yes, Doctor! I just came home to-day. How are you?" She ran over to
+shake hands with him. "Is Mr. King very sick?"
+
+"He's dying."
+
+"Oh, Doctor _Deering_!"
+
+"Yes. No mistake about it this time. Wants to see you. Old nigger woman
+told him you were home. Will you come now?"
+
+"Of course." She followed him into the house and up the long, shabbily
+carpeted stairs. She had never seen a dying person and she began to
+shiver.
+
+As if he read her thought the doctor spoke. "Isn't going to die while
+you're here. Not for a week--perhaps two weeks. But he'll never be up
+again." His voice was gruff and his brow was furrowed. He had been with
+Jeanie King when Jimsy was born and when she died, and he had cherished
+and scorned James King for long years.
+
+There was a chair beside the bed and Honor seated herself there in
+silence. Presently the sick man opened his eyes and his worn and ravaged
+look of his son caught at her heart.
+
+"So," he said somberly, "you came home."
+
+"Yes, Mr. King. I came because Jimsy was in trouble, and to-morrow I'm
+going to him."
+
+His eyes widened and slow, difficult color came into his sharply boned
+face. "You're going ... to Mexico?"
+
+"Yes; alone."
+
+The color crept up and up until it reached the graying hair, crisply
+waved, like Jimsy's. "No King woman ever ... held harder ... than that!"
+he gasped. "You're a good girl, Honor Carmody. They knew ... what to ...
+name you, didn't they?"
+
+She leaned nearer, holding her hand so that the rays of the night light
+fell on the ring. "Didn't you know I'd 'hold hard' when you let Jimsy
+give me this?"
+
+He hauled himself up on an elbow and stared at it with tragic eyes.
+"Jeanie wore it five years.... My mother wore it thirty.... Honor
+Carmody, you're a good girl.... You make me ... ashamed.... Tell the boy
+that ... I'm sorry ... that letter. Bring him back ... in time...." He
+fell back, limp, gasping, and the doctor signaled to the girl to go. As
+she was slipping through the door the sick man spoke again, querulously.
+"Damn that mocking-bird ... make somebody shoot him!... There was one
+singing when Jimsy was born ... and when Jeanie went ... and this one
+now, mocking, mocking...."
+
+She ran back to him. "Oh, Mr. King," she said, with shy fervor, "he
+isn't making fun of _us_!--Only of the bad, hard things! One sang out
+near Fiesta Park the day we thought Greenmount would win the
+championship, and one was singing the night Jimsy and I found out that
+we loved each other,--and this one was singing when I came home to-day!"
+It was a long speech for Honor and she was a little shy and breathless.
+"I _know_ he doesn't mean it the way you think! He's telling us that
+the sad, hard, terrible things are not the real things!" Suddenly she
+bent and kissed his cold forehead. "Oh, Mr. King, if you listen to him
+with--with your _heart_--you'll hear it! He's mocking at trouble and
+disgrace,--and misunderstanding and silly pride! He's--_hear him
+now!_--he's mocking at pain and sorrow and--and _death_!"
+
+Then she ran out of the room and down the long stairs and across the
+lawn to her own house, where a noisy and jubilant section of the Old
+Guard waited.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+It was happily clear at breakfast that Stephen Lorimer had more or less
+made his peace--and Honor's peace--with his wife. Like his beloved Job,
+whom he knew almost by heart, he had ordered his cause and filled his
+mouth with arguments, and Mildred Lorimer had come to see something
+rather splendidly romantic in her daughter's quest for her true love.
+Stephen, who never appeared at breakfast, was down on time, heavy-eyed
+and flushed, and Honor saw with a pang, in the stern morning light, that
+he was middle-aged. Her gay young stepfather! His spirit had put a
+period at nineteen, but his tired body was settling back into the slack
+lines of the late fifties. Her mother had changed but little, thanks to
+the unruffled serenity of her spirit and the skillful hands which cared
+for her.
+
+"Muzzie," Honor had said, meeting her alone in the morning, "you are a
+marvel! Why, you haven't a single gray hair!"
+
+"It's--well, I suppose it's because I have it taken care of," said Mrs.
+Lorimer, flushing faintly. "It's not a dye. It's not in the least a
+dye--it simply _keeps_ the original color in the hair, that's all. I
+wouldn't think of using a dye. In the first place, they say it's really
+dangerous,--it seeps into the brain and affects your mind, and in the
+second place it gives your face a hard look, always,--and besides, I
+don't approve of it. But this thing Madame uses for me is _perfectly_
+harmless, Honor."
+
+"It's perfectly charming, Muzzie," said her daughter, giving her a
+hearty hug. It was a good world this morning. The breakfast table was
+gay, and Kada beamed. Takasugi had made countless pop-overs--Honor's
+favorites--and Kada was slipping in and out with heaping plates of them.
+"Pop-all-overs" the littlest Lorimer called them, steaming,
+golden-hearted. Honor had sung for them and the Old Guard the night
+before and even the smallest of the boys was impressed and was treating
+her this morning with an added deference which flowered in many passings
+of the marmalade and much brotherly banter. The girl herself was
+radiant. Nothing could be very wrong in a world like this. Suppose Jimsy
+had slipped once--twice--half a dozen times, when she was far away
+across the water? One swallow didn't make a spring and one slip (or
+several) didn't make a "Wild King" out of Jimsy. She was going to find
+him and talk it over and straighten it out and bring him back here where
+he belonged, where they both belonged, where they would stay. His
+expulsion from Stanford really simplified matters, when you came to
+think of it; now there need be no tiresome talk of waiting until he
+graduated from college. And she had not the faintest intention of going
+back to Italy. Just as soon as Jimsy could find something to do (and her
+good Stepper would see to that) they would be married and move into the
+old King house, and _how_ she would love opening it up to the sun and
+air and making it gay with new colors! All this in her quiet mind while
+she breakfasted sturdily with her noisy tribe. Good to be with them
+again, better still to be coming back to them, to stay with them, to
+live beside them, always.
+
+Her train went at ten and the boys would be in school and her mother had
+an appointment with the lady whose ministrations kept her hair at its
+natural tint and Honor would not hear of her breaking it, so it was her
+stepfather only who took her to the station. She was rather glad of that
+and it made her put an unconscious extra fervor, remorsefully, into her
+farewells to the rest. Just as she was leaving her room there was a
+thump on her door and a simultaneous opening of it. Ted, her eldest
+Carmody brother, came in and closed the door behind him. He was a Senior
+at L. A. High, a football star of the second magnitude and a personable
+youth in all ways, and her heart warmed to him.
+
+"Ted,--dear! I thought you'd gone to school!"
+
+"I'm just going. Sis,--I"--he came close to her, his bonny young face
+suddenly scarlet--"I just wanted to say--I know why you're going down
+there, and--and I'm for you a million! He's all right, old Jimsy. Don't
+you let anybody tell you he isn't. I--you're a sport to pike down there
+all by yourself. _You're all right_, Sis! I'm strong for you!"
+
+"Ted!" The distance between them melted; she felt the hug of his hard
+young arms and there was a lump in her throat and tears in her eyes, but
+she fought them back. He would be aghast at her if she cried. He
+wouldn't be for her a million any longer. She must not break down though
+she felt more like it than at any time since her arrival. She kept
+silent and let him pat her clumsily and heavily till she could command
+her voice. "I'm glad you want me to go, Teddy."
+
+"You bet I do. You stick, Sis! _And don't you let Carter spill the
+beans!_"
+
+"Why, Ted, he----"
+
+"You keep an eye on that bird," said the boy, grimly. "You keep your
+lamps lit!"
+
+She repeated his words to her stepfather as they drove to the station.
+"Why do you suppose he said that, Stepper?"
+
+Stephen Lorimer shrugged. "I don't think he meant anything specific,
+T. S., but you know the kids have never cared for Carter."
+
+"I know; it's that he isn't their type. They haven't understood him."
+
+"Or--it's that they have."
+
+"Stepper! You, too?" Honor was driving and she did not turn her head to
+look at him, but he knew the expression of her face from the tone of her
+voice. "Do you mean that, seriously?"
+
+"I think I do, T. S. Look here,--we might as well talk things over
+straight from the shoulder this morning. Shall we?"
+
+"Please do, Stepper." She turned into a quieter street and drove more
+slowly, so that she was able to face him for an instant, her face
+troubled.
+
+"Want me to drive?"
+
+"No,--I like the feel of the wheel again, after so long. You talk,
+Stepper."
+
+"Well, T. S., I've no tangible charge to make against Carter, save that
+his influence has been consistently bad for Jimsy since the first day
+he limped into our ken. Consistently and--_persistently_ bad, T. S. You
+know--since we're not dealing in persiflage this morning--that Carter is
+quite madly, crazily, desperately in love with you?"
+
+"I--yes, I suppose that's what you'd call it, Stepper. He--rather lost
+his head last summer,--the night before you sailed."
+
+"But the night before we sailed," said her stepfather, drawing from his
+neatly card-indexed memory, "it was with me that you held a little last
+session."
+
+"Yes,--but on my way upstairs. The lift had stopped, you know. I was
+frightfully angry at him and said something cruel, but the next morning
+he looked so white and wretched and wrote me such a pathetic letter,
+asking me to forgive and forget and all that sort of thing, and I sent
+him a wire to the steamer, saying I would."
+
+"Ah! That was his telegram. We wondered."
+
+"And he's been very nice since, in the few letters I've had from him."
+
+"I daresay. But Ted's right, Top Step. In the parlance of the saints you
+_do_ 'want to keep your lamps lit.' Carter, denied health and strength
+and physical glory, has had everything else he's ever wanted except
+you,--and he hasn't given you up yet."
+
+Honor nodded, her face flushed, her eyes straight ahead.
+
+"And now--more plain talk, T. S. This is a fine, sporting, rather
+spectacular thing you're doing, going down to Mexico after Jimsy, and
+I'm absolutely with you, but--if the worst should be true--if the boy
+really has gone to pieces--you won't marry him?"
+
+"No," said the girl steadily, after an instant's pause. "If Jimsy should
+be--like his father--I wouldn't marry him, Stepper. There shouldn't
+be--any _more_ 'Wild Kings.' But I'd never marry any one else, and--oh,
+but it would be a long time to live, Stepper, dear!"
+
+"I'm betting you'll find him in good shape,--and keep him so, Top Step.
+At any rate, however it comes out, you'll always be glad you went."
+
+"I know I will."
+
+"Yes; you're that sort of woman, T. S.,--the 'whither thou goest' kind.
+I believe women may roughly be divided into two classes; those who
+passively let themselves be loved; those who actively love. The former
+have the easier time of it, my dear." His tired eyes visioned his wife,
+now closeted with Madame. He sighed once and then he smiled. "And they
+get just as much in return, let me tell you,--more, I really believe.
+But I want you to promise me one thing."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That you'll never give up your singing. Keep it always, T. S. There'll
+be times when you need it--to run away to--to hide in."
+
+She nodded, soberly.
+
+His eyes began to kindle. "Every woman ought to have something! Men
+have. It should be with women as with men--love a thing apart in their
+lives, not their whole existence! Then they wouldn't agonize and wear on
+each other so! I believe there's a chapter in that, for my book, Top
+Step."
+
+"I'm sure there is," said Honor, warmly. They had reached the station
+now and a red cap came bounding for her bags. "And I won't even try to
+thank you, Stepper, dear, for all----"
+
+"Don't be a goose, T. S.,--look! There are your Mexicans!"
+
+Honor followed his eyes. "Aren't they _delicious_?" They hurried toward
+them. "The girl's adorable!"
+
+"They all are." Stephen Lorimer performed the introductions with proper
+grace and seriousness and they all stood about in strained silence until
+the Señora was nervously sure they ought to be getting on board. "Might
+as well, T. S.," her stepfather said. She was looking rather white, he
+thought, and they might as well have the parting over. Honor was very
+steady about it. "Good-by, Stepper. I'll write you at once, and you'll
+keep us posted about Mr. King?" She stood on the observation platform,
+waving to him, gallantly smiling, and he managed his own whimsical grin
+until her train curved out of sight. One in a thousand, his Top Step.
+How she had added to the livableness of life for him since the day she
+had gravely informed her mother that she believed she liked him better
+than her own father, that busy gentleman who had stayed so largely Down
+Town at The Office! Stephen Lorimer was too intensely and healthily
+interested in the world he was living in to indulge in pallid curiosity
+about the one beyond, but now his mind entertained a brief wonder ...
+did he know, that long dead father of Honor Carmody, about this glorious
+girl of his? Did he see her now, setting forth on this quest; this
+pilgrimage to her True Love, as frankly and freely as she would have
+gone to nurse him in sickness? He grinned and gave himself a shake as he
+went back to the machine,--he had lost too much sleep lately. He would
+turn in for a nap before luncheon; Mildred would not be out of her
+Madame's deft hands until noon.
+
+The family of Menéndez y Garcí­a beamed upon Honor with shy cordiality.
+Señor Menéndez was a dapper little gentleman, got up with exquisite care
+from the perfect flower on his lapel to his small cloth-topped patent
+leather shoes, but his wife was older and larger and had a tiny, stern
+mustache which made her seem the more male and dominant figure of the
+two. Mariquita, the girl, was all father, and she had been a year in a
+Los Angeles convent. The mother wore rich but dowdy black and an
+impossible headgear, a rather hawklike affair which appeared to have
+alighted by mistake on the piles of dusky hair where it was shakily
+balancing itself, but Mariquita's narrow blue serge was entirely modish,
+and her tan pumps, and sheer amber silk hose, and her impudent hat. The
+Señor spent a large portion of his time in the smoker and the Señora
+bent over a worn prayer book or murmured under her breath as her fingers
+slipped over the beads in her lap, but the girl chattered unceasingly.
+Her English was fluent but she had kept an intriguing accent.
+
+"Ees he not beautiful, Mees Carmody, my Pápa?" She pushed the accent
+forward to the first syllable. "And my poor _Madrecita_ of a homely to
+chill the blood? _But_ a saint, my mawther. Me, I am not so good. Also
+_gracias a Dios_, I am not so----" she leaned forward to regard herself
+in the narrow strip of mirror between the windows and--a wary eye on the
+Señora--applied a lip stick to her ripe little mouth. She wanted at once
+to know about Honor's sweethearts. "_A fe mia_--in all your life but one
+_novio_? Me, I have now seex. So many have I since I am twelve years I
+can no longer count for you!" She shrugged her perilously plump little
+shoulders. "One! Jus' like I mus' have a new hat, I mus' have a new
+_novio_!"
+
+They were all a little formal with her until after they had left El Paso
+and crossed the Mexican border at Juarez, when their manner became at
+once easy, hospitable, proprietary. They pointed out the features of the
+landscape and the stations where they paused, they plied her unceasingly
+with the things they purchased every time the train hesitated long
+enough for _vendadors_ to hold up their wares at the windows,--_fresas_
+(the famous strawberries in little leaf baskets), _higos_ (fat figs),
+_helado_ (a thin and over-sweet ice cream), and the delectable _Cajeta
+de Celaya_, the candy made of milk and fruit paste and magic. They were
+behind time and the train seemed to loiter in serenest unconcern. Señor
+Menéndez came back from the smoker with a graver face every day. The
+men who came on board from the various towns brought tales of unrest and
+feverish excitement, of violence, even, in some localities.
+
+If his friends could not be sure of meeting Honor at Córdoba and driving
+her to the Kings' _hacienda_ the Señor himself would escort her, after
+seeing his wife and daughter home. Honor assured him that she was not
+afraid, that she would be quite safe, and she was thoroughly convinced
+of it herself; nothing would be allowed to happen to her on her way to
+Jimsy.
+
+"Your father is so good," she said gratefully to Mariquita.
+
+"Yes," she smiled. "My Pápa ees of a deeferent good; he ees glad-good,
+an' my _Madrecita_ ees sad-good. Me--I am _bad_-good! You know, I mus'
+go to church wiz my mawther, but my Pápa, he weel not go. He nevair say
+'No' to my mawther; he ees _too_ kind. Jus' always on the church day he
+is seek. _So_ seek ees my poor Pápa on the church day!" She flung back
+her head and laughed and showed her short little white teeth.
+
+But Señor Menéndez had an answer to his telegram on the morning of the
+day on which they were to part; his friend, the eminent _Profesor_,
+Hidalgo Morales, accompanied by his daughter, Señorita Refugio, would
+without fail be waiting for Miss Carmody when her train reached Córdoba
+and would see her safely into the hands of her friends. Honor said
+good-by reluctantly to the family of Menéndez y García; the beautiful
+little father kissed her hand and the grave mother gave her a blessing
+and Mariquita embraced her passionately and kissed her on both cheeks
+and produced several entirely genuine tears. She saw them greeted by a
+flock of relatives and friends on the platform but they waved devotedly
+to her as long as she could see them. Then she had a quiet and solitary
+day and in the silence the old anxieties thrust out their heads again,
+but she drove them sturdily back, forcing herself to pay attention to
+the picture slipping by the car window,--the lovely languid _tierra
+caliente_ which was coming to meet her. The old _Profesor_ and his
+daughter were waiting for her; shy, kindly, earnest, less traveled than
+the Menéndez', with a covered carriage which looked as if it might be a
+relic of the days of Maximilian. Conversation drowsed on the long drive
+to the Kings' coffee plantation; the Señorita spoke no English and
+Honor's High School Spanish got itself annoyingly mixed with Italian,
+and the old gentleman, after minute inquiries as to her journey and the
+state of health of his cherished friend, Señor Felipe Hilario Menéndez
+y García, sank into placid thought. It was a ridiculous day for winter,
+even to a Southern Californian, and the tiny villages through which they
+passed looked like gay and shabby stage settings.
+
+The _Profesor_ roused at last. "We arrive, Señorita," he announced, with
+a wave of his hand. They turned in at a tall gateway of lacy ironwork
+and Honor's heart leaped--"_El Pozo_." Richard King.
+
+"The name is given because of the old well," the Mexican explained. "It
+is very ancient, very deep--without bottom, the _peóns_ believe." They
+drew up before a charming house of creamy pink plaster and red tiles,
+rioted over by flowering vines. "I wait but to make sure that Señor or
+Señora King is at home." A soft-eyed Mexican woman came to the door and
+smiled at them, and there was a rapid exchange of liquid sentence. "They
+are both at home, Señorita. We bid you farewell."
+
+The servant, wide-eyed and curious, had come at his command to take
+Honor's bags.
+
+"Oh--but--surely you'll wait? Won't you come in and rest? It was such a
+long, warm drive, and you must be tired."
+
+He bowed, hat in hand, shaking his handsome silver head. "We leave you
+to the embraces of your friends, Señorita. One day we will do ourselves
+the honor to call upon you, and Señor and Señora King, whom it is our
+privilege to know very slightly. For the present, we are content to have
+served you."
+
+"Oh," said Honor in her hearty and honest voice, holding out a frank
+hand, "this is the _kindest_ country! _Every one_ has been so good to
+me! I wish I could thank you enough!"
+
+The old gentleman stood very straight and a dark color surged up in his
+swarthy face. "Then, dear young lady, you will perhaps have the
+graciousness to say a pleasant word for us in that country of yours
+which does not love us too well! You will perhaps say we are not all
+barbarians." He gave an order to his coachman and the quaint old
+carriage turned slowly and precisely and started on its long return
+trip, the _Profesor_, still bareheaded, bowing, his daughter beaming and
+kissing her hand. Honor held herself rigidly to the task of seeing them
+off. Then--_Jimsy!_ Where was he? She had had a childish feeling that he
+would be instantly visible when she got there; she had come from Italy
+to Mexico,--from Florence to a coffee plantation beyond Córdoba in the
+_tierra caliente_ to find him,--and journeys ended in lovers' meeting,
+every wise man's son--and daughter--knew. The nods and becks and
+wreathed smiles of the serving woman brought her back to earth.
+
+"Señora King?" She asked, dutifully, for her hostess--her unconscious
+hostess--first.
+
+"_Si Señorita! Pronto!_" The servant beckoned her into a dim, cool
+_sala_ and disappeared. "Well, I know what that means," Honor told
+herself. "'Right away.' Oh, I _hope_ it's right away!"
+
+But it was not. The Kings, like all sensible people, were at their
+_siesta_; twenty racking moments went by before they came in. Richard
+King was older than Jimsy's father but he had the same look of race and
+pride, and his wife was a plain, rather tired-looking Englishwoman with
+very white teeth and broodingly tender blue eyes which belied the
+briskness of her manner.
+
+"I am Honor Carmody."
+
+"You are----" Mrs. King came forward, frowning a little.
+
+"I--I am engaged to your nephew--to Jimsy King. I think you must have
+heard of me."
+
+"My dear, of course we have! How very nice to see you! But--how--and
+where did you----"
+
+The girl interrupted breathlessly. "Oh, please,--I'll tell you
+everything, in a minute. But I must know about him! I came from Italy
+because--because of his trouble at college. Is he--is he----" she kept
+telling herself that she was Honor Carmody, the tomboy-girl who never
+cried or made scenes--Jimsy's Skipper--her dear Stepper's Top Step; she
+was not a silly creature in a novel; she would not scream and beg them
+to tell her--_tell her_--even if they stood there staring at her for
+hours longer. And then she heard Richard King saying in a voice very
+like his brother's, a little like Jimsy's:
+
+"Why, the boy's all right! Ab-so-lutely all right! Isn't he, Madeline?
+Steady as a clock. That college nonsense----"
+
+And then Honor found herself leaning back in a marvelously comfortable
+chair by an open window and Mr. King was fanning her slowly and strongly
+and Mrs. King was making her drink something cool and pungent, and
+telling her it was the long, hot drive out from Córdoba in the heat of
+the day and that she mustn't try to talk for a little while. Honor
+obeyed them docilely for what she was sure was half an hour and which
+was in fact five minutes and then she sat up straight and decisively.
+"I'm _perfectly_ all right now, thank you. Will you tell me where I can
+find Jimsy?"
+
+"I expect he's taking his nap down at the old well. I'll send for him.
+You must be quiet, my dear."
+
+She got to her feet and let them see how steady she was. "_Please_ let
+me go to him!"
+
+"But Josita will fetch him in less time, my dear, and we'll have Carter
+called, too, and----" Mrs. King stopped abruptly at the look in the
+girl's eyes. "Josita will show you the way," she said in quite another
+tone. "You must carry my sunshade and not walk too quickly."
+
+Honor tried not to walk too quickly but she kept catching up with the
+Mexican serving woman and passing her on the path, and falling back
+again with a smile of apology, and the woman smiled in return, showing
+white, even teeth. It was not as long a walk as it seemed, but their
+pace made it consume ten interminable minutes. At length the twisting
+walk twisted once more and gave on a cleared space, meltingly green,
+breathlessly still, an ancient stone well in its center.
+
+Josita gestured with a brown hand. "_Alla esta Señorito Don Diego!
+Adios, Señorita!_"
+
+"_Gracias!_" Honor managed.
+
+"_Te nada!_" She smiled and turned back along the way they had come. "It
+is nothing!" she had said. Nothing to have brought her on the last stage
+of her long quest! Jimsy was asleep in the deep grass in the shade. She
+went nearer to him, stepping softly, hardly breathing. He was stretched
+at ease, his sleeves rolled high on his tanned arms, his tanned throat
+bare, his crisp hair rolling back from his brow in the old stubborn
+wave, his thick lashes on his cheek. His skin was as clean and clear as
+a little boy's; he looked a little boy, sleeping there. She leaned over
+him and he stirred and sighed happily, as if dimly aware of her
+nearness. She tried to speak to him, to say--"Jimsy!" but she found she
+could not manage it, even in a whisper. So she sat down beside him and
+gathered him into her arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+They had a whole hour entirely to themselves and it went far toward
+restoring the years that the locusts had eaten. It was characteristic of
+them both that they talked little, even after the long ache of silence.
+For Jimsy, it was enough to have her there, in his arms, utterly his--to
+know that she had come to him alone and unafraid across land and sea;
+and for Honor the journey's end was to find him clear-eyed and
+clean-skinned and steady. Stephen Lorimer was right when he applied
+Gelett Burgess' "caste of the articulate" against them; they were very
+nearly of the "gagged and wordless folk." Yet their silence was a rather
+fine thing in its way; it expressed them--their simplicity, their large
+faith. It was not in them to make reproaches. It did not occur to Jimsy
+to say--"But why didn't you let me know you were coming?--At least you
+might have let me have the comfort of knowing you were on this side of
+the ocean!" And Honor never dreamed of saying "But Jimsy,--to rush from
+Stanford down here without sending me a line!"
+
+Therefore it was somewhat remarkable that it came out, in the brief
+speeches between the long stillnesses, that Honor knew that Carter had
+telephoned to his mother as they passed through Los Angeles, and that
+Mrs. Van Meter had spoken of Honor's return, and she had naturally
+supposed he would tell Jimsy; and that Jimsy had written her a ten page
+letter, telling with merciless detail of the one wild party of protest
+in which he had taken part, of his horror and remorse, of his
+determination to go to his people in Mexico and stay until he was
+certain he had himself absolutely in hand and had made up his mind about
+his future.
+
+"Well, it will be sent back to me from Florence," said Honor,
+contentedly.
+
+"Funny it wasn't there almost as soon as you were--I sent it so long
+ago!--The night after that party, and I didn't leave for over two weeks,
+and that makes it--well, anyhow, it's had time to be back. But it
+doesn't matter now."
+
+"No, it doesn't matter, now, Jimsy. I won't read it when it does come,
+because it's all ancient history--ancient history that--that never
+really happened at all! But I'm glad you wrote me, dear!" She rubbed
+her cheek against his bronzed face.
+
+"Of course I'd tell you everything about it, Skipper."
+
+"Of course you would, Jimsy."
+
+They were just beginning to talk about the future--beyond hurrying back
+to Jimsy's father--when Carter came for them. He called to them before
+he came limping into the little cleared space, which was partly his tact
+in not wanting to come upon them unannounced, and partly because he
+didn't want, for his own sake, to find them as he knew he would find
+them, without warning. As a matter of fact, while Honor lifted her head
+with its ruffled honey-colored braids from Jimsy's shoulder, he kept his
+arm about her in brazen serenity.
+
+Carter's eyes contracted for an instant, but he came close to them and
+held out his hand. "Honor! This is glorious! But why didn't you wire and
+let us meet you? We never dreamed of your coming! Of course, the mater
+told me you were on your way home, but I didn't tell old Jimsy here, as
+long as you hadn't. I knew you meant some sort of surprise. I thought
+he'd hear from you from L. A. by any mail, now."
+
+"Say, Cart', remember that long letter I wrote Skipper, the night after
+the big smear?"
+
+"Surely I do," Carter nodded.
+
+"Well, she never got it."
+
+"It passed her, of course. It will come back,--probably follow her down
+here."
+
+"Oh, it'll show up sometime. I gave it to you to mail, didn't I?"
+
+"Yes, I remember it distinctly, because it was the fattest one of yours
+I ever handled."
+
+He grinned ruefully. "Yep. Had a lot on my chest that night."
+
+"Mrs. King thought you ought to rest before dinner, Honor."
+
+"At least I ought to make myself decent!" She smoothed the collar
+Jimsy's arms had crumpled, the hair his shoulder had rubbed from its
+smooth plaits. "She must think I'm weird enough as it is!"
+
+But the Richard Kings had lived long enough in the turbulent _tierra
+caliente_ to take startling things pretty much for granted. Honor's
+coming was now a happily accepted fact. A cool, dim room had been made
+ready for her,--a smooth floor of dull red tiles, some astonishingly
+good pieces of furniture which had come, Mrs. King told her when she
+took her up, from the Government pawnshop in Mexico City and dated back
+to the brief glories of Maximilian's period, and a cool bath in a tin
+tub.
+
+"You are so good," said Honor. "Taking me in like this! It was a
+dreadful thing to do, but--I had to come to him."
+
+The Englishwoman put her hand on her shoulder. "My dear, it was a
+topping thing to do. I--" her very blue eyes were pools of
+understanding. "I should have done it. And we're no end pleased to have
+you! We get fearfully dull, and three young people are a feast! We'll
+have a lot of parties and divide you generously with our friends and
+neighbors--neighbors twenty miles away, my dear! We'll do some
+theatricals,--Carter says your boy is quite marvelous at that sort of
+thing."
+
+"Oh, he _is,"_ said Honor, warmly, "but I'm afraid we ought to hurry
+back to his father!"
+
+"I'll have Richard telegraph. Of course, if he's really bad, you'll have
+to go, but we do want you to stay on!" She was moving about the big
+room, giving a brisk touch here and there. "Have your cold dip and rest
+an hour, my dear. Dinner's at eight. Josita will come to help you." She
+opened the door and stood an instant on the threshold. Then she came
+back and took Honor's face between her hands and looked long at her.
+"You'll do," she said. "You'll do, my girl! There's no--no royal road
+with these Kings of ours--but they're worth it!" She dropped a brisk
+kiss on the smooth young brow and went swiftly out of the room.
+
+To the keen delight of the hosts there was a fourth guest at dinner, a
+man who was stopping at another _hacienda_ and had come in to tea and
+been cajoled into staying for dinner and the night. He was a personage
+from Los Angeles, an Easterner who had brought an invalid wife there
+fifteen years earlier, had watched her miraculous return to pink plump
+health and become the typical California-convert. He had established a
+branch of his gigantic business there and himself rolled semiannually
+from coast to coast in his private car. Honor and Jimsy were a little
+awed by touching elbows with greatness but he didn't really bother them
+very much, for they were too entirely absorbed in each other. He seemed,
+however, considerably interested in them and looked at them and listened
+to them genially. The Kings were thirstily eager for news of the
+northern world; books, plays, games, people--they drank up names and
+dates and details.
+
+"We must take a run up to the States this year," said Richard King.
+
+"It would be jolly, old dear," said his wife, levelly, her wise eyes on
+his steady hands. "If the coffee crop runs to it!"
+
+"There you have it," he growled. "If the coffee crop is bad we can't
+afford to go,--and if it's good we can't afford to leave it!"
+
+"But we needn't mind when we've house parties like this! My word,
+Rich'--fancy having four house guests at one and the same blessed time!"
+She led the way into the long _sala_ for coffee.
+
+"Yes,--isn't it great? Drink?" Richard King held up a half filled
+decanter toward his guest.
+
+The personage shook his head. "Not this weather, thanks. That enchanted
+well of yours does me better. Wonderful water, isn't it?"
+
+"Water's all right, but it's a deuce of a nuisance having to carry every
+drop of it up to the house."
+
+"Really? Isn't it piped?"
+
+"Ah, but it will be one day, Rich'! I expect the first big coffee crop
+will go there, rather than in a trip to the States. But it is rather a
+bother, meanwhile."
+
+"But you have no labor question here."
+
+"Haven't we though? With old Diaz gone the old order is changed. This
+bunch I have here now are bad ones," King shook his head. "They may
+revolute any minute."
+
+"Oh, Rich'--not really?"
+
+"I daresay they'll lack the energy when it comes to a show-down,
+Madeline. But this man Villa is a picturesque figure, you know. He
+appeals to the _peón_ imagination."
+
+The guest was interested. "Yes. Isn't it true that there's a sort of
+Robin Hood quality about him--steals from the rich to give to the
+poor--that sort of thing?"
+
+"That's more or less true, but the herd believes it utterly." He sighed.
+"It was a black day for us when Diaz sailed."
+
+Jimsy King had been listening. "But, Uncle Rich', they _have_ had a
+rotten deal, haven't they?"
+
+His uncle shrugged. "Got to treat 'em like cattle, boy. It's what they
+are."
+
+"Well, it's what they'll always be if you keep on treating 'em that
+way!" Jimsy spoke hotly and his uncle turned amused eyes on him.
+
+"Don't let that Yaqui fill you up with his red tales!"
+
+"But you'll admit the Yaquis have been abused?"
+
+"Well, I believe they have. They're a cut above the _peón_ in
+intelligence and spirit. But--can't have omelette without breaking
+eggs." He turned again to his elder guest. "This boy here has been
+palling about with a Yaqui Indian he made me take in when he was here
+last time."
+
+The great man nodded. "Yes,--I've seen them together. Magnificent
+specimen, isn't he?"
+
+"They are wonderfully built, most of them. This chap was pretty badly
+used by his master--they are virtually slaves, you know,--and bolted,
+and Jimsy found him one night----"
+
+The boy got up and came over to them. "Starving, and almost dead with
+weakness and his wounds,--beaten almost to death and one of his ears
+hacked off! And Uncle Rich' took him in and kept him for me."
+
+His uncle grinned and flung an arm across his shoulder. "And had the
+devil--and many _pesos_ to pay to the local _jefe_ and the naturally
+peevish gentleman who lost him. But at that I'll have to admit he's the
+best man on the _rancho_ to-day." He threw a teasing look at Honor,
+glowing and misty-eyed over Jimsy's championing of the oppressed. "The
+only trouble is, I suppose Jimsy will take him with him when he sets up
+housekeeping for himself. What do you think, Maddy? Could Yaqui Juan be
+taught to buttle?"
+
+"No butlers for us, Uncle Rich'!" Jimsy was red but unabashed. "We might
+rent him for a movie star and live on his earnings. We aren't very clear
+yet as to what we _will_ live on!"
+
+The personage looked at him gravely. "You are going to settle in Los
+Angeles?"
+
+"_Yes!_" said Jimsy and Honor in a breath. The good new life coming
+which would be the good old life over again, only better!
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. King, "I forgot,--I asked them to come up from the
+quarters and make music for you! They're here now! Look!" She went to
+the window and the others followed. The garden was filled with vaguely
+seen figures, massed in groups, and there was a soft murmur of voices
+and the tentative strumming of guitars. "Shall we come out on the
+veranda? You'll want a _rebozo_, Honor,--the nights are sharp." She
+called back to the serving woman. "Put out the lights, Josita."
+
+They sat in the dusk and looked out into the veiled and shadowy spaces
+and the dim singers lifted up their voices. The moon would rise late;
+there was no light save the tiny pin points of the cigarettes; it gave
+the music an elfin, eerie quality.
+
+"Pretty crude after Italy, eh, Honor?" Richard King wanted to know.
+
+"Oh, it's delicious, Mr. King! Please ask them to sing another!"
+
+"May we have the _Golondrina_?" the eldest guest wanted to know.
+
+"Well--how about it, Maddy? Think we're all cheerful enough? We know
+that two of us are! All right!" He called down the request and it seemed
+to Honor that a little quiver went through the singers in the shadow.
+The guitars broke into a poignant, sobbing melody.
+
+"I don't know what the words mean," said the personage under his breath.
+"I don't believe I want to know. I fancy every one fits his own words to
+it."
+
+"Or his own need," said Richard King's wife. She slipped her hand into
+her husband's. The melody rose and fell, sobbed and soared. Honor drew
+closer to Jimsy and he put his arm about her and held her hard. "Yes,"
+he whispered. "I know." The man who had asked for _Golondrina_ sat with
+bent head and his cigar went out. Only Carter Van Meter, as once long
+ago in Los Angeles, seemed unmoved, unstirred, scatheless.
+
+There was a little silence after the music. Then the personage said,
+"You know, I fancy that's Mexico, that song!"
+
+Jimsy King wheeled to face him through the dusk. "Yes, sir! It's true!
+That _is_ Mexico,--everything that's been done to her,--and everything
+she'll do, some day!"
+
+"It's--beautiful and terrible," said Honor. "I had to keep telling
+myself that we are all safe and happy, and that nothing is going to
+happen to us!"
+
+Carter laughed and got quickly to his feet. "I suggest indoors and
+lights--and Honor! Honor must sing for us!"
+
+She never needed urging; she sang as gladly as a bird on a bush. The
+Kings were parched for music; they begged for another and another. She
+had almost to reproduce her recital in Florence. Jimsy listened, rapt
+and proud, and at the end he said--"Not too tired for one more, Skipper?
+Our song?"
+
+"Never too tired for that, Jimsy!" She sat down again and struck her
+stepfather's ringing, rousing chords. Instantly it ceased, there in the
+room, to be Mexico; it was as if a wind off the sea blew past them. The
+first verse had them all erect in their chairs. She swung into the
+second, holding a taut rein on herself:
+
+
+     The sand of the desert is sodden red;
+     Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
+     The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
+     And the regiment blind with dust and smoke:
+     The River of Death has brimmed his banks;
+     And England's far and Honor's a name,
+     But the voice of a school boy rallies the ranks--
+     Play up! Play up! and--Play the Game!
+
+
+Honor sat still at the piano. She did not mean to lift her eyes until
+she could be sure they would not run over. Why did that song always
+sweep her away so?--from the first moment Stepper had read her the words
+in the old house on South Figueroa Street, all those years ago? Why had
+she always the feeling that it had a special meaning for her and for
+Jimsy--a warning, a challenge? Jimsy came over to stand beside her,
+comfortably silent, and then, surprisingly, the personage came to stand
+beside Jimsy.
+
+"I've been wondering," he said, "if you hadn't better come in to see me
+one day, when we're all back in Los Angeles? You haven't any definite
+plans for your future, have you?"
+
+"No, sir," said Jimsy. "Only that I've got to get something--quick!" He
+looked at Honor, listening star-eyed.
+
+The great man smiled. "I see. Well, I think I can interest you. I've
+watched you play football, King. I played football, forty years ago. I
+like the breed. My boys are all girls, worse luck--though they're the
+finest in the world----"
+
+"Oh, _yes_," said Honor, warmly.
+
+"But I like boys. And I like you, Jimsy King." He held out his hand.
+"You come to me, and if you're the lad I think you are, you'll stay."
+
+"Oh, I'll come!" Jimsy stammered, flushed and incoherent. "I'll come!
+I'll--I'll sweep out or scrub floors--or--or anything! But--I'm afraid
+you don't----" he looked unhappily at Honor.
+
+"Yes, Jimsy. He's got to know."
+
+Jimsy King stood up very straight and tall. "You've got to know that I
+was kicked out of college two months ago, for marching in a parade
+against----"
+
+"For telling the truth," cried Honor, hot cheeked, "when a cowardly lie
+would have saved him!"
+
+"But just the same, I was kicked out of college, and----"
+
+"Lord bless you, boy," said the personage, and it was the first time
+they had heard him laugh aloud, "I know you were! And that's one reason
+why I want you. _So was I!_"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+There were telegrams from Stephen Lorimer and the doctor; James King's
+condition remained unchanged. Honor and Jimsy decided to return at once,
+but Richard King flatly refused to let them go. The next train after
+Honor's had been held up just beyond Córdoba by a band of brigands,
+supposed to be a section of Villistas, the passengers robbed and
+mistreated and three of the train men killed.
+
+"Not a step without an escort," said Jimsy's uncle.
+
+Then Jimsy's new friend came to the rescue. He was eager to get home but
+cannily aware of his own especial risk,--two wealthy Americans having
+been recently taken and held for ransom. He had influence at the
+Capital; he wrote and telegraphed and the replies were suave and
+reassuring; reliable escort would be furnished as soon as
+possible,--within the week, it was hoped. Meanwhile, there was nothing
+for it but to wait. He went back to the _hacienda_ where he had been
+visiting, and life--the merry, lyrical life of _El Pozo_, moved forward.
+Jimsy's only woe was that he was condemned by her own decision to share
+Honor lavishly with his uncle and aunt and their friends and Carter.
+"Skipper, after all these years, leaving me for a darn' tea!"
+
+"Jimsy, dear," she scolded him, "you know that it's the very least I can
+do, now isn't it--honestly? Think how lovely she's been to us, and how
+much it means to her, having people here. And we've got all our lives
+ahead of us, Jimsy! Be good! And besides"--she colored a little and
+hesitated--"it's--not kind to Cartie." Then, at the sobering of his
+face, "You know he--cares for me, Jimsy, and I don't believe it's just
+cricket for us to--to sort of wave our happiness in his face all the
+time."
+
+He sighed crossly. "But--good Lord, Skipper,--he's got to get used to
+it!"
+
+"Of course,--but need we--rub it in, just now?" The fact was that Honor
+was anxious. Carter was pallid, haggard, morose. The brief flare of
+composure with which he had greeted her was gone; he showed visibly and
+unpleasantly what he was suffering at the sight of their vivid and
+hearty happiness. Mrs. King had commented pityingly on it to Honor and
+it was simply not in the girl to go on adding to his misery. She began
+to be very firm with Jimsy about their long walks or rides alone; she
+accepted all Mrs. King's invitations and plans for them; she included
+Carter whenever it was possible. These restrictions had naturally the
+result of making Jimsy the more ardent in their scant privacy, and
+Honor, amazingly free from coquetry though she was, must have sensed it.
+Perhaps the truth was that she had in her, after all, something of
+Mildred Lorimer's feeling for values and conventions; having flown from
+Florence to Córdoba to her lover she was reclaiming a little of her
+aloofness and cool ladyhood by this discipline. But she was entirely
+honest in her wish to spare Carter so far as possible. Once, when Jimsy
+was briefly away with his Yaqui henchman she asked Carter to walk with
+her, but he decided for the dim _sala;_ the heat which seemed to
+invigorate and vitalize Jimsy left him limp and spent.
+
+He brushed her generalities roughly aside. "Are you happy, Honor?"
+
+She lifted her candid eyes to his bleak young face. "Yes, Cartie.
+Happier than ever before--and I've been happy all my life."
+
+He was silent for a moment as if sorting out and considering the things
+he might say to her. "Well, you have a marvelous effect on Jimsy. I
+don't believe he's taken a drop since you've been here."
+
+"He hasn't touched a drop since he came to Mexico, Carter,--Mr. King
+told me that, and Jimsy told me himself!" Honor was a little declamatory
+in her pride and he raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Really?" He limped over to the table where the smoking things were and
+the decanter of whiskey and siphon of soda. "Let me have a look...." He
+picked up the decanter and held it to the light. "The last time I looked
+at it, it came just to the top of the design here,--and it does yet.
+Yes, it's just where it was."
+
+"Carter! I call that spying!"
+
+He turned back to her without temper. "I call it looking after my
+friend," he said gently. "I don't suppose you've let him tell you very
+much about what happened at college?"
+
+"No, Carter. What's the use of it, now? He wrote it all to me, but the
+letter must have passed me. It's a closed chapter now."
+
+"I hope to God it will stay closed," he said, haggardly. "But I'm
+afraid, Honor; I'm horribly afraid for you."
+
+"I'm not afraid, Carter,--for myself or for Jimsy." She got up and
+walked to the window; she was aware that she hated the dimness of the
+_sala_; she wanted the honest heat of the sun. "Look!" she said, gladly.
+Carter limped slowly to join her. Jimsy King was swinging toward them
+through the brazen three o'clock glare, his Yaqui Juan by his side. They
+were a sightly and eye-filling pair. They might have been done in bronze
+for studies of Yesterday and To-day. "_Look_!" said Honor again. "Oh,
+Carter, do you think any--any horrible dead trait--any clammy dead
+hand--can reach up out of the grave to pull him down?"
+
+Carter was silent.
+
+A high and cleanly anger rose in the girl. "Carter, I don't want to hurt
+you,--oh, I know I hurt you all the time, in one way, and I can't help
+that,--I don't want to be unkind, but--are you sure it isn't because
+you--care--for me that you have this hopeless feeling about Jimsy?" She
+faced him squarely and made him meet her eyes. "Carter! Tell me."
+
+His unhappy gaze struggled with her level look and slipped away. "Of
+course I want you myself, Honor. I want you--horribly, unbearably, but I
+do honestly feel it's wrong for you to marry Jimsy King."
+
+"But, Carter--see how nearly his father won out! Every one says that if
+his mother had lived--And his Uncle Richard! He's absolutely free from
+it, now. And the very look of Jimsy is enough to show you----"
+
+But Carter had turned and was staring moodily at the decanter. "It comes
+so suddenly, Honor ... with such frightful unexpectedness. Remember,
+when we were youngsters, the World's Biggest Snake, 'Samson,'--exhibited
+in a vacant store on Main Street, and how keen we all were about him?"
+
+Honor kindled to the memory. "I adored him. He had a head like a nice
+setter's and he wasn't cold or slimy a bit!"
+
+"Remember what the man told us about his hunger? How he'd go three
+months without anything, and then devour twenty live rabbits and
+chickens and cats?"
+
+She nodded, frowning. "I know. It was awful."
+
+"But the point was the suddenness. They never knew when the hunger would
+seize him. The fellow said that it came like a flash. He was gentle as a
+lamb for weeks on end--and then it came. He'd pounce on the keeper's pet
+rabbit--his dog--the man himself if he were within reach. He was an
+utterly changed creature; he was just--an _appetite_." He stood staring
+somberly at the decanter. "That's the way it comes, Honor."
+
+It seemed to be getting dimmer and dimmer in the _sala_. Honor found
+herself wishing with all her heart for her stepfather. Stephen Lorimer
+would know how to answer; how to parry,--to combat this thing. She felt
+her own weapons clumsy and blunt, but such as they were she would use
+them.
+
+"But it isn't coming ever again, Carter! I tell you it isn't coming! And
+I want you to stop saying and thinking that it is! Now I'm going to
+Jimsy!"
+
+In the wide out-of-doors, under the unbelievably blue sky and the
+stinging sun, with Jimsy and Yaqui Juan, life was sound and whole again.
+The Indian, tall as a pine, looked at her with eyes of respectful
+adoration and smiled his slow, melancholy smile, as she swung off with
+the boy, down the path which led to the old well.
+
+"Juan approves of me, doesn't he?" said Honor, contentedly.
+
+"Of course; you're my woman!" She loved his happy impudence. "Aren't
+you, Skipper?" They had passed the twist in the path--the path which was
+like a moist green tunnel through the tropic jungle--which hid them from
+the house and she halted and went swiftly into his arms.
+
+"Yes, Jimsy! _Yes!_ And--I've been stingy and mean to you but I won't
+be, any more. Carter must just--stand things."
+
+"_Skipper!_" He wasn't facile with words, Jimsy King, but he was able to
+make himself clear.
+
+"Jimsy, isn't it wonderful--the all-rightness of everything? Being
+together again, and----"
+
+"Going to be together always! And my job waiting! Isn't the old boy a
+wonder? I saw him, just now. He says he's heard from Mexico City and
+it's O. K. to start Thursday. They're going to send the escort."
+
+"In two days," said Honor, blissfully, "we'll be on our way home! Jimsy,
+in two days!"
+
+But in two days dizzyingly, terrifyingly much had happened. The pleasant
+little comedy of life at _El Pozo_ had changed to melodrama, crude and
+strident. They had been attacked by a band of _insurrectos_, a wing of
+Villa's hectic army, presumably; the _peóns_, with the exception of the
+house servants and Yaqui Juan, had gone gleefully over to the enemy;
+Richard King had been wounded in his hot-headed defense of his
+_hacienda_, shot through the shoulder, and was running a temperature;
+the telephone wires were cut; infinitely worse than all, the besiegers
+had taken possession of the well and they were entirely without water.
+
+There had been, of course, the usual supply in the house at the time of
+the attack and it had been made to last as long as was humanly possible,
+the lion's share going to the wounded man, but they had arrived, now, at
+the point of actual suffering. His rôle of helpless inaction was an
+intolerable one for Jimsy King to play. To know that--less than a
+quarter of a mile away, down the moist green path through the tropic
+verdure--was the well; to see Honor's dry lips and strained eyes,
+Carter's deathly pallor, to hear his uncle, out of his head, mercifully,
+most of the time, begging for water, meant a constant battle with
+himself not to rush out, to make one frantic try at least, but he knew
+that the deeper courage of patient waiting was required of him. They
+could only conjecture what the invaders meant to do,--whether they
+intended to have them die of thirst, whether they meant to rush the
+house when it suited their pleasure--raggedly fortified and guarded by
+Jimsy and Carter and the half dozen of the faithful. Jimsy had talked
+the latter probability over steadily with Honor and she understood.
+
+"Jimsy," she managed not to let her teeth chatter, "it's like a play
+or--or a Wild West tale, isn't it? Like a 'Frank Merriwell'--remember
+when you used to adore those things?"
+
+"No, Skipper, it's not like a 'Frank Merriwell'; he could always _do_
+something...." Jimsy's strong teeth ground together.
+
+"Yes--'Blooey, blooey! Fifteen more redskins bit the dust!'"
+
+"Skipper, you _wonder_! You brick!"
+
+"Jimsy, I--there's no use talking about things that may never happen,
+because _of course_ help will get here, but if it should not--if they
+should rush us, and we couldn't keep them out"--her hoarse voice
+faltered but her eyes held his--"you won't--you wouldn't let them--take
+me, Jimsy?"
+
+"No, Skipper."
+
+"Promise, Jimsy?"
+
+"Promise, Skipper. 'Cross my heart!'" The old good foolish words of the
+old safe days, here, now, in this hideous and garish present!
+
+With that pledge she was visibly able to give herself to a livelier
+hope. "But of course Yaqui Juan got through to the Grants' _hacienda_!
+Can you imagine him failing us, Jimsy?"
+
+He shook his head. "He'll make it if any man living could." The Indian
+had slipped through the _insurrectos_ in the first hour, as soon as it
+had been known that the wires were cut. Unless the Grants, too, were
+besieged, they would be able to telephone for help for _El Pozo_, and
+if they were likewise in duress, Yaqui Juan would go on to the next
+_rancho_,--on and on until he could set the wheels of rescue in motion.
+"I wish to God I had his job. _Doing something_----"
+
+Carter came into the _sala_. He was terrifyingly white but with an
+admirable composure. "Steady, old boy," he said, putting his frail hand
+on Jimsy's shoulder. "Sit tight! We depend on you. And you're doing"--he
+looked at the decanter, as if measuring its contents with his
+eye--"gloriously, splendidly, old son! I know the strain you're under.
+You're a bigger man even than I thought you were, Jimsy."
+
+Honor went away to sit with Mrs. King and the sick man and both boys
+stared unhappily after her. "If Skipper were only out of this----" Jimsy
+groaned.
+
+"And whose fault is it that she's in it?" Carter snarled. Two red spots
+sprang into his white cheeks.
+
+"Why--Cart'!" Jimsy backed away from him, staring.
+
+"Whose fault is it, I say?" Carter followed him. "If she hadn't been
+terrified over you, if she hadn't the insane idea of duty and loyalty to
+you, would she have come? Would she?"
+
+Jimsy King sat down and looked at him, aghast. "Good Lord,
+Cart'--that's the truth! That shows what a mutt I am. It hasn't struck
+me before. It's all my fault."
+
+"Whatever happens to Honor--_whatever happens to her_--and death
+wouldn't be the worst thing, would it?--it's your fault. Do you hear
+what I say? It's all your fault!" In all the years since he had known
+him Jimsy had never seen Carter Van Meter like this,--cool Carter, with
+his little elegancies of dress and manner, his studied detachment. This
+was a different person altogether,--hot-eyed, white-lipped, snarling.
+"Your fault if she dies here, dies of thirst; your fault if they get in
+here and carry her off, those filthy brutes out there."
+
+"They'll never ... get her," said Jimsy King. His face was scarlet and
+he was breathing hard and clenching and unclenching his hands.
+
+"Yes," Carter sneered, "yes! I know what you mean! You feel very heroic
+about it. You feel like a hero in a movie, don't you? Noble of you,
+isn't it? Slay the heroine with your own hands rather than let her----"
+
+"Oh, for God's sake, Cart'!" Jimsy got up and came toward him. "Cut it
+out! What's the good of talking like that? We're in it now, all of us,
+and we've got to stick it out. I know it's harder on you because you're
+not strong, but----"
+
+"Damn you! 'Not strong--' Not built like an ox--muscles in my brain
+instead of my legs! Because I cared for something else besides rolling
+around in the mud with a leather ball in my arms----"
+
+"Key down, old boy." Jimsy was cool now, unresentful; he understood.
+Poor old Cart' ... he couldn't stand much suffering.
+
+"That's how you got Honor, when she was a child, with no sense of
+values, but you haven't held her! You can't hold her."
+
+"Cart', I'm not going to get sore at you. I know you're about all in.
+You don't know what you're saying."
+
+"Don't I? Don't I? You listen to me. Honor Carmody never really loved
+you; it was a silly boy-and-girl, calf love affair, and when she
+realized it she stood by, of course,--she's that sort. She kept the
+letter of her promise, but she couldn't keep the spirit."
+
+"Key down, old top," said Jimsy King again, grinning. "I'm not going to
+get sore, but I don't want to use up my breath laughing at you.
+_Skipper_--going back on me!" He did laugh, ringingly.
+
+"She hasn't gone back on you; except in her heart. Good God, Jimsy
+King, what do you think you are to hold a girl like that--with her
+talent and her success and her future? She's only stuck by you because
+it was her creed, that's all."
+
+"Look here, Cart', I'm not going to argue with you. It's not on the
+square to Skipper even to talk about it, but don't be a crazy fool.
+Would she have come to me here--from Italy, if she didn't----"
+
+"Yes. Yes, she would! She's pledged to see it through--to stand by you
+as all the other miserable women have stood by the men of your
+family,--if you're cad enough to let her."
+
+That caught and stuck. "If I'm--cad enough to let her," said Jimsy in a
+curiously flat voice. But the mood passed in a flash. "It's no use
+talking like that, Carter. Of course I know I'm not good enough or
+brainy enough--or _anything_ enough for Skipper, but she thinks I am,
+and----"
+
+"You poor fool, she doesn't think so. I tell you she's only standing by
+because she said she would. I tell you she cares for some one else."
+
+"That's a lie," said Jimsy King with emphasis but without passion. The
+statement was too grotesque for any feeling over it.
+
+Carter stopped raving and snarling and became very cool and coherent.
+"I think I can prove it to you," he said, quietly.
+
+"You can't," said Jimsy, turning and walking toward the door.
+
+"Are you afraid to listen?" He asked it very quietly.
+
+"No," said Jimsy King, wheeling. "I'm not afraid. Go ahead. Get it off
+your chest."
+
+"Well, in the first place,--hasn't she kept you at arm's length here?
+Hasn't she insisted on being with other people all the time,--on having
+me with you?"
+
+"Cart', I hate to say it, but that's because she's sorry for you."
+
+"And for herself."
+
+The murky dimness of the _sala_ was pressing in on Jimsy as it had on
+the girl, that other day. He was worn with vigil and torn with thirst,
+sick with dread of what might any moment come to them,--with remorse for
+bringing Honor there, tormented with his helplessness to save her. Even
+at his best he was no match for the other's cleverness and now he was in
+the dust, blaming and hating himself. He stood there in silence,
+listening, and Carter's hoarse voice, Carter's plausible words, went on
+and on. "But I don't believe it," Jimsy would say at intervals. "She
+doesn't care for you, Cart'. She's all mine, Skipper is. She doesn't
+care for you."
+
+"Wait!" Carter took out his wallet of limp leather with his initials on
+it in delicately wrought gold letters and opened it. "I didn't mean to
+show you this, but I see that I must. It was last summer. I--I lost my
+head the night before we sailed, and let Honor see.... Then I asked
+her.... I didn't say, 'Will you marry me?' because I knew there was no
+hope of that so long as she thought there was a chance of saving you by
+standing by you. I asked her--something else. And she sent me this wire
+to the boat at Naples."
+
+Jimsy did not put out his hand to take the slip of paper which Carter
+unfolded and smoothed and held toward him. It was utterly still in the
+_sala_ but from an upper room came the sound of Richard King's voice,
+faint, thick, begging for water, and from somewhere in the distance a
+muffled shot ... three shots.
+
+Carter held the message up before Jimsy's eyes:
+
+
+     Carter Van Meter care Purser S. S. _Canopic Naples_
+                          Yes.
+                                                 HONOR.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+If Stephen Lorimer, far to the north in the safe serenity of the old
+house of South Figueroa Street, could have envisaged the three of them
+that day his chief concern would not have been for their bodily danger.
+It would have seemed to him that the intangible cloud settling down over
+them was a more tragic and sinister thing than the _insurrectos_
+besieging them, than the thirst which was cracking their lips and
+swelling and blackening their tongues.
+
+He was to remember and marvel, long afterward, that his thought on that
+date had tugged uneasily toward them all day and evening. Conditions, so
+far as he knew, were favorable; the escort for the personage would be a
+stout one and under his wing the boy and girl would be safe, and James
+King was waiting for them, spinning out his thread of life until they
+should come to him. Nevertheless, he found himself acutely unhappy
+regarding them, aware of an urgent and instant need of being with them.
+
+They had never, in all their blithe young lives, needed him so cruelly.
+He could not have driven back the bandits, but he could have driven back
+the clouds of doubt and misery and misunderstanding; he could not have
+given them water for their parched throats but he could have given them
+to drink of the waters of understanding; he could have relieved the
+drought in their wrung young hearts. He would have seen, as only a
+looker-on could see, what was happening to them. He would have yearned
+over Honor, fronting the bright face of danger so gallantly but stunned
+and crushed by the change in Jimsy, over Jimsy himself, setting out to
+do an incredibly stupid, incredibly noble deed, absolutely convinced by
+the sight of her one-word telegram that she loved Carter (and humbly
+realizing that she might well love Carter, the brilliant Carter, better
+than his unilluminated self), seeing the thing simply and objectively as
+he would be sure to do, deciding on his course and pursuing it as
+definitely as he would take a football over the line for a touchdown. He
+would even have yearned over Carter, at the very moment when the youth
+fulfilled his ancient distrust of him. He would have understood as even
+Carter himself did not, by what gradual and destructive processes he had
+arrived at the point of his outbreak to Jimsy; would have realized in
+how far his physical suffering--infinitely harder for him than for the
+others--had broken down his moral fiber; how utterly his very real love
+for Honor had engulfed every other thought and feeling. And he would
+have seen, in the last analysis, that Carter was sincere; he had come at
+last to believe his own fabrications; he honestly believed that Honor's
+betrothed would go the way of all the "Wild Kings"; that Honor would be
+ruining her life in marrying him.
+
+But Stephen Lorimer was hundreds and thousands of miles away from them
+that day of their bitter need, making tentative notes for a chapter on
+young love for his unborn book, listening to the inevitable mocking-bird
+in the Japanese garden, waiting for Mildred Lorimer to give him his tea
+... wearing the latest of his favorites among her gowns....
+
+Madeline King was spent with her vigil and Honor had coaxed her to lie
+down for an hour and let her take the chair beside Richard King's bed.
+
+"Very well, my dear. I'll rest for an hour. I'll do it because I know I
+may want my strength more, later on." She seemed to have aged ten years
+since the day Honor had come to _El Pozo_, but she came of fighting
+blood, this English wife of Jimsy's uncle. "I'm frightfully sorry you're
+let in for this, Honor, but it's no end of a comfort, having you. Call
+me if he rouses. I daresay I shan't really sleep."
+
+Honor sat on beside him, fanning him until her arm ached, resting it
+until he stirred again, trying to wet her dry lips with her thickened
+tongue. She wasn't thinking; she was merely waiting, standing it. It was
+a relief not to talk, but she must talk when she was with the boys
+again; it helped to keep them up, to keep an air of normality about
+things.
+
+Jimsy King had read the message Carter held up to him and gone away
+without comment, and Carter had stayed on in the _sala_. It was almost
+an hour before Jimsy came back. Honor's stepfather would have marked and
+marveled at the change so brief a little space of time had been able to
+register in the bonny boy's face. The flesh seemed to have paled and
+receded and the bones seemed more sharply modeled; more insistent; and
+the eyes looked very old and at the same time pitifully young. He was
+very quiet and sure of himself.
+
+"Jimsy," said Carter, "I shouldn't have told you, _now_, but I went off
+my head."
+
+Jimsy nodded. "The time doesn't matter, Cart'. I just want to ask you
+one thing, straight from the shoulder. I've been thinking and thinking
+... trying to take it in. Sometimes I seem to get it for a minute, that
+Skipper cares for you instead of me, and then it's gone again. All I can
+seem to hang on to is that telegram." The painful calm of his face
+flickered and broke up for an instant and there was an answering
+disturbance in Carter's own. "I keep seeing that ... all the time. But
+there's no use talking about it. What I want to ask you is this,
+Cart'"--he went on slowly in his hoarse and roughened voice--"you
+honestly think Skipper is sticking to me only because she thinks it's
+the thing to do? Because she thinks she must keep her word?"
+
+Carter swallowed hard and tried to moisten his aching throat, and he did
+not look at his friend.
+
+"Is that what you honestly believe, Cart'?"
+
+Carter brought his eyes back with an effort and his heart contracted.
+Jimsy King--_Jimsy King_--the boy he had envied and hated and loved by
+turns all these years; Jimsy King, idolized, adored in the old safe
+days--the old story book days--
+
+
+     King! King! King!
+     K-I-N-G, KING!
+     G-I-N-K, GINK!
+     He's the King Gink!
+     He's the King Gink!
+     He's the King Gink!
+     K-I-N-G, King! KING!
+
+
+The Jimsy King, the young prince who had had everything that all the
+wealth of Ali Baba's cave couldn't compass for Carter Van Meter ...
+standing here before him now, his face drained of its color and joy,
+begging him for a hope. There was a long moment when he hesitated, when
+the forces within him fought breathlessly and without quarter, but--long
+ago Stephen Lorimer had said of him--"_there's nothing frail about his
+disposition ... his will doesn't limp._" He wrenched his gaze away
+before he answered, but he answered steadily.
+
+"That is what I believe."
+
+Jimsy was visibly and laboriously working it out. "Then, she's only
+sticking to me because she thinks I'm worth saving. If she thought I was
+a regular 'Wild King,' if she believed what her mother and a lot of
+other people have always believed, she'd let go of me."
+
+"I believe she would," said Carter.
+
+"Then," said Jimsy King, "it's really pretty simple. She's only got to
+realize--to _see_--that I'm not worth hanging on to; that it's too late.
+That's all."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+He walked over to the little table and picked up the decanter of whisky
+and looked at it, and the scorn and loathing in his ravaged young face
+were things to marvel at, but Honor Carmody, coming into the room at
+that moment, could not see his expression. His back was toward her and
+she saw the decanter in his hand.
+
+"_Jimsy!_" She said it very low, catching her breath.
+
+His first motion was to put it down but instead he held it up to the
+fast fading light at the window and grinned. "It's makin' faces at me,
+Skipper!"
+
+"_Jimsy_," she said again, and this time he put it down.
+
+Honor began hastily to talk. "Do you think Juan will try to come back,
+or will he wait and come with the soldiers?"
+
+"He'll come back," said Jimsy with conviction. "He must have found the
+wires down at the first place he tried, or he'd have been here before
+this. Yes--as soon as he's got his message through, he'll come back to
+us. I hope to God he brings water."
+
+"But did he realize about the well? He got away at the very first, you
+know, and they weren't holding the well, then."
+
+"He'll have his own canteen, won't he?" said Jimsy crossly.
+
+Honor's eyes mothered him. "Mrs. King really slept," she said
+cheerfully. "She said she had a good nap, and dreamed!" She sat down in
+a low chair and made herself relax comfortably; only her eyes were
+tense. She never did fussy things with her hands, Honor Carmody; no one
+had ever seen her with a needle or a crochet hook. She was either doing
+things, vital, definite things which required motion, or she was still,
+and she rested people who were near her. "Well, he'll be here soon
+then," she said contentedly. "And so will the soldiers. Our Big Boss
+will have us on his mind, Jimsy. He'll figure out some way to help us.
+Just think--in another day--perhaps in another hour, this will all be
+over, like a nightmare, and we'll be back to regular living again. And
+_won't_ we be glad that we all stood it so decently?" It was a stiff,
+small smile with her cracked lips but a stout one. "You know, I'm pretty
+proud of all of us! And won't Stepper be proud of us? And your dad,
+Jimsy, and your mother, Cartie!" Her kind eyes warmed. "I'm glad she
+hasn't had to know about it until we're all safe again." She was so
+hoarse that she had to stop and rest and she looked hopefully from one
+to the other, clearly expecting them to take up the burden of talk. But
+they were silent and presently she went on again. "You know, boys, it's
+like being in a book or a play, isn't it? We're--_characters_--now, not
+just plain people! I suppose I'm the leading lady (though Mrs. King's
+the real _heroine_) and we've got two heroes and no villain. The
+_insurrectos_ are the villain--the villain in bunches." Suddenly she sat
+forward in her chair, her eyes brightening and a little color flooding
+her face. "Boys, it's our song come true! Now I know why I always got so
+thrilled over that second verse,--even the first time Stepper read it to
+us,--remember how it just bowled me over? And it seemed so remote from
+anything that could touch our lives,--yet here we are, in just such a
+tight place." They were listening now. "There isn't any desert or
+regiment or gatling, and Mr. King isn't dead, only dreadfully hurt, but
+it fits, just the same! We've got this thirst to stand ... and it's a
+good deal, isn't it? Those _insurrectos_ down there,--planning we don't
+know what, perhaps to rush the house any moment--
+
+
+     The River of Death has brimmed his banks;
+     And England's far, and Honor's a name--
+
+
+That means to us that L. A. is far, and South Figueroa Street ... all
+the safe happy things that didn't seem wonderful then...."
+
+"'_Honor's a name_,'" said Jimsy under his breath.
+
+"Oh," said the girl, "I never noticed that before! Isn't that funny?
+Well--
+
+
+     The voice of a school boy rallies the ranks!
+
+
+That fits! And won't we be thankful all our lives--all our snug, safe,
+prosy lives--that we were sporting now?-- That we all played the
+game?" Her eyes were on Jimsy, reassuring him, staying him. "When this
+is all over----"
+
+He cut roughly into her sentence. "Oh, for God's sake, Skipper, let's
+not talk!"
+
+Again he had to bear the mothering of her understanding eyes. "All
+right, Jimsy. We won't talk, then. We'll sit here together"--she changed
+to the chair nearest his and put her hand on his arm--"and wait for Juan
+and----"
+
+He sprang to his feet. "I wish you'd leave me alone!" he said. "I wish
+you'd go upstairs and stay with Aunt Maddy and Uncle Rich'. I want to be
+by myself."
+
+She did not stir. "I think I'll stay with you, Jimsy."
+
+His voice was ugly now. "When I don't want you? When I tell you I'd
+rather be alone?"
+
+Honor was still for a long moment. She rose and went to the door but
+she turned to look at him, a steady, intent scrutiny. "All right, Jimsy.
+I'll go. I'll leave you alone. I'll leave you alone because--I know I
+_can_ leave you alone." She seemed to have forgotten Carter's presence.
+She held up the hand which wore the old Italian ring with the hidden
+blue stone of constancy. "I'm 'holding hard,' Jimsy."
+
+Soon after dark Yaqui Juan came. He had been waiting for three hours,
+trying to get past the sentries; it had been impossible while there was
+any light. He was footsore and weary and had only a little water in his
+canteen, but he had found the telephone wires still up at the second
+_hacienda_, the owner had got the message off for him, and help was
+assuredly on the way to them. There was the off chance, of course, that
+the soldiers might be held up by another wing of the _insurrectos_, but
+there was every reason to hope for their arrival next day. Jimsy King
+sent the Yaqui up to Honor with the canteen, and the Indian returned to
+say that the Señorita had not touched one drop but had given it to the
+master.
+
+Carter dragged himself away to his room and Jimsy and Yaqui Juan talked
+long together in the quiet _sala_. It was a cramped and halting
+conversation with the Indian's scant English and the American's halting
+Spanish; sometimes they were unable to understand each other, but they
+came at last to some sort of agreement, though Juan shook his head
+mutinously again and again, murmuring--"_No, no! Señor Don Diego! No!_"
+
+It was almost midnight when Jimsy called them all down into the _sala_.
+They came, wondering, one by one, Carter, Mrs. King,--Richard King had
+fallen asleep after his half dozen swallows of water--and Honor, and
+Josita, her head muffled in her _rebozo_, her brown fingers busy with
+her beads.
+
+Jimsy King was standing in the middle of the room, standing insecurely,
+his legs far apart, the decanter in his hand, the decanter which had
+been more than half full when Honor left the room and had now less than
+an inch of liquor in it. Yaqui Juan, his face sullen, his eyes black and
+bitter, crouched on the floor, his arms about his knees.
+
+Honor did not speak at all. She just stood still, looking at Jimsy until
+it seemed as if she were all eyes. _"It comes so suddenly_,"--Carter had
+told her--"like the boa constrictor's hunger ... _and then he was
+just--an appetite_."
+
+"Ladies'n gem'mum," said Jimsy, thickly, "goin' shing you lil' song!"
+Then, in his hoarse and baffled voice he sang Stanford's giddy old saga,
+"The Son of a Gambolier."
+
+They all stiffened with horror and disgust. Mrs. King wept and Josita
+mumbled a frightened prayer, and Carter, red and vehement, went to him
+and tried to take the decanter away from him. Only Honor Carmody made no
+sign.
+
+
+     I'm a son of a son of a son of a gun of a son of a Gambolier,
+
+
+sang Jimsy King. He looked at every one but Honor.
+
+
+     Like every honest fellow, I love my lager beer----
+
+
+--"And my 'skee!" he patted the decanter.
+
+Madeline King put her arms about Honor. "Come away, my dear," she said.
+"Come upstairs."
+
+"No," Jimsy protested. "Don' go 'way. Got somep'n tell you. Shee this
+fool Injun here? Know wha' he's goin' do? Goin' slide out'n creep down
+to ol' well. Says _insur_--_insur-rectos_ all pretty drunk now ...
+pretty sleepy.... Fool Injun's goin' take three--four--'leven canteens
+... bring water back for you. Not f' me! _I_ got somep'n better. 'Sides,
+he'll get killed ... nice'n dead ... _fancy_ dead ... cut ears off ...
+cut tongue out firs'! Not f' me! _I'm_ goin' sleep pret' soon. Firs'
+I'll shing you lil' more!" Again the rasping travesty of melody:
+
+
+     Some die of drinkin' whisky,
+     Some die of drinkin' beer!
+     Some die of diabetes,
+     An' some----
+
+
+"Shut up, you drunken fool!" said Carter, furiously.
+
+"Oh," said Jimsy, blinking his eyes rapidly, bowing deeply. "Ladies
+present. I shee. My mishtake. My mishtake, ladies! Well, guesh I go
+sleep now. Come on. Yac', put me to bed 'fore you go. Give you lil'
+treat. All work'n no play makes Yac' a dull boy!" He roared over his own
+wit. The Indian, his face impassive, had risen to his feet and now Jimsy
+cast himself into his arms and insisted on kissing him good-night,
+clinging all the while to the decanter with its half inch of whisky.
+
+Carter wrenched it away from him. "You'll kill yourself," he said, in
+cold disgust.
+
+"Well," said his friend, reasonably, "ishn't that the big idea? Wouldn'
+you razzer drink yourself to death'n die of thirst?"
+
+They were making for the door now in a zigzag course, and when they
+passed Honor, Jimsy stayed their progress. He held out his hand and
+spoke to her, but he did not meet her eyes. "Gimme ring," he said,
+crossly.
+
+"What do you mean?" said Honor.
+
+"Gimme back ring ... busted word ... busted engagement ... want ring
+_anyway_ ... maybe nozzer girl ... _you_ can't tell!" His hoarse voice
+rose querulously. "Gimme ring, I shay!"
+
+Honor shrank back from him against Mrs. King. "Jimsy," she said, "when
+the boy that gave me this ring comes and asks me for it, he can have it.
+_You_ can't!"
+
+His legs seemed to give way beneath him, at that, and Yaqui Juan half
+led, half dragged him out of the room.
+
+Mrs. King wept again but Honor's eyes were dry. Carter started to speak
+to her but she stopped him. "Please, Carter ... I can't ... talk. I
+think I'd like to be alone."
+
+"Oh, my dear, please come up with me," Mrs. King begged, "it's so cold
+here, and----"
+
+"I have to be alone," said Honor in her worn voice.
+
+"Then you must have this," said the older woman, finding comfort in
+wrapping her in her own _serape_. It was a gay thing, striped in red and
+white and green, the Mexican colors; it looked as if it had been made
+to wear in happy days.
+
+They went away and left her alone in the _sala_. She didn't know how
+long she had sat there when she saw a muffled figure crawling across the
+veranda. She opened the door and stepped out, nodding to the _peón_ on
+guard there, leaning on his gun. "Juan?" she called softly.
+
+The crouching, cringing figure hesitated. "Si," came the soft whisper.
+He kept his head shrouded. She knew that he was sick with shame for the
+lad he had worshiped; he did not want to meet her gaze. She could
+understand that. It did not seem to her that she could ever meet any
+one's eyes again--kind Mrs. King's, Carter's--her dear Stepper's.
+Suddenly it came to her with a positive sense of relief and escape that
+perhaps there would be no need for facing any one after to-night....
+Perhaps this was to be the last night of all nights. It might well be,
+when Jimsy King slept in a drunken stupor and a Yaqui Indian slave went
+out with his life in his hands to help them. She crossed the veranda and
+leaned down and laid her hand on the covered head. Her throat was so
+swollen now that she could hardly make herself heard. "_Tu es amigo
+leal, Juan_," she said. "Good friend; good friend!" Then in her careful
+Spanish--"Go with God!"
+
+He had been always an impassive creature, Yaqui Juan, his own personal
+sufferings added to the native stoicism of his race, but he made an odd,
+smothered sound now, and caught up the trailing end of her bright
+_serape_ and pressed his face against it for an instant. Then he crept
+away into the soft blackness of the tropic night and Honor went back
+into the empty _sala_. She wished that she had seen his face; she was
+mournfully sure she would never see it again. It did not seem humanly
+possible for any one to go into the very midst of their besiegers
+encamped about the well, fill the canteens and return alive, but it was
+a gallant and splendid try, and she would have liked a memory of his
+grave face. It would have blotted out the look of Jimsy King's face,
+singing his tipsy song. She thought she would keep on seeing that as
+long as she lived, and that made it less terrible to think that she
+might not live many more hours.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+They would not leave her alone. Carter came to stay with her and she
+sent him away, and then Madeline King came, her very blue eyes red
+rimmed and deep with understanding, but Honor could not talk with her
+nor listen to her. She went away, shaking her head, and Josita came in
+her place. Honor did not mind the little Mexican serving woman. She did
+not try to talk to her. She just crouched on the floor at her feet and
+prayers slipped from her tongue and her fingers:
+
+
+     _Padre Nuestra qui estás en los cielos--_
+
+
+and presently:
+
+
+     _Santa Maria--_
+
+
+Honor found herself listening a little scornfully. Was there indeed a
+Father in the heavens or anywhere else who concerned Himself about
+things like this? Josita seemed to think so. She was in terror, but she
+was clinging to something ... somewhere.... Honor decided that she did
+not mind the murmur of her voice; she could go on with her thinking just
+the same. _Jimsy._ _Jimsy King_--Jimsy--"Wild"--King. What was she going
+to do? What had she promised Stepper that day on the way to the train?
+It all came back to her like a scene on the screen--the busy
+streets--the feel of the wheel in her hands again--Stepper's slow
+voice--"But, if the worst should be true, if the boy really has gone to
+pieces, you won't marry him?" And her own words--"No; if Jimsy should
+be--like his father--I wouldn't marry him, Stepper. There shouldn't be
+any _more_ 'Wild Kings.'"
+
+That was her promise to her stepfather, her best friend. But what had
+been her promise to Jimsy, that day on the shore below the Malibou Ranch
+when they sat in the little pocket of rocks and sand and sun, and he had
+given her the ring with the clasped hands? Hadn't she said--"I do
+believe you, Jimsy. I'll never stop believing you!" Yes, but how was she
+to go on believing that he would not do the thing she saw him do? How
+compass that? Her love and loyalty began to fling themselves against
+that solid wall of ugly fact and to fall back, bruised, breathless.
+
+Jimsy King of the hard muscles and wingèd heels, the essence of
+strength and sunny power; Jimsy King, collapsed in the arms of Yaqui
+Juan, failing her in the hour of her direst need. Jimsy, her lover, who
+had promised her she should never go alive into those dark and terrible
+hands ... Jimsy, who could not lift a finger now to defend her, or to
+put her beyond their grasp. It became intolerable to sit still. She
+sprang up and began to walk swiftly from wall to wall of the big room,
+her heels tapping sharply on the smooth red tiles. Josita lifted
+mournful eyes to stare at her for an instant and then returned to her
+beads. Honor paused and looked out of the window. She could see nothing
+through the inky blackness. Perhaps Yaqui Juan was creeping back to them
+now, the canteens of precious water hung about his neck,--and perhaps he
+was dead. There had been no shots, but they would not necessarily shoot
+him. There were other ... awfuller ways. And Jimsy King was asleep. What
+would he be like when he wakened, when he came to himself again? Could
+he ever face her? Would he _live_?... And suppose she cast him
+off,--then, what? She would go back to Italy, to the mountainous
+_Signorina_. She would embrace her warmly and there would emanate from
+her the faint odor of expensive soap and rare and costly scents, and
+she would pat her with a puffy hand and say--"So, my good small one? The
+sun has set, no? Ah, then, it does not signify whether one feel joy or
+sorrow, so long as one feels. To feel ... that is to live, and to live
+is to sing!" And she would go to work again, and sing in concert, and
+take the place offered to her in the opera. And some day, when she went
+for a holiday to Switzerland (she supposed she would still go on
+holidays; people did, no matter what had happened to them) she would
+meet Ethel Bruce-Drummond, hale and frank as the wind off the snow, and
+she would say--"But where's your boy? I say, you haven't thrown him
+over, have you?"
+
+Well, could you throw over what fell away from you? Could you? She
+realized that she was gripping the old ring with the thumb and fingers
+of her right hand, literally "holding hard." Was this what James King
+had meant? Had Jeanie King, Jimsy's firm-chinned Scotch mother who so
+nearly saved her man, had she held on in times like this? Surely no
+"Wild King" had ever failed his woman as Jimsy had failed her, in the
+face of such hideous danger. But did that absolve her? After all (her
+love and loyalty flung themselves again against the wall and it seemed
+to give, to sway) _was_ it Jimsy who had failed her? Wasn't it the
+taint in his blood, the dead hands reaching up out of the grave, the
+cruel certainty that had hemmed him in all his days,--the bitter
+man-made law that he must follow in the unsteady footsteps of his
+forbears?
+
+It wasn't Jimsy! Not _himself_; not the real boy, not the real man. It
+was the pitiful counterpart of him. The real Jimsy was there,
+underneath, buried for the moment,--buried forever unless she stood by!
+(The wall was swaying now, giving way, crumbling.) Her pride in him was
+gone, perhaps, and something of her triumphant faith, but her loyalty
+was there and her love was there, bruised and battered and breathless;
+not the rosy, untried, laughing love of that far-away day in the sand
+and sun; a grave love, scarred, weary, argus-eyed. (The wall was down
+now, a heap of stones and mortar.) She went upstairs to Jimsy's room and
+knocked on the door. There was no answer. She knocked again, and after
+an instant she tried to open it. It was locked, and she could not rouse
+him, and a sense of bodily sickness overcame her for the moment.
+
+Madeline King came out of her husband's room and hurried to her. "Ah, I
+wouldn't, my dear," she said. "Wait until he--wait a little while." She
+put her arm about her and pulled her gently away.
+
+"I'll wait," said Honor in her rasping whisper. "I'll wait for him, no
+matter how long it is."
+
+The Englishwoman's eyes filled. "My dear!" she said. "Do you mind
+sitting with Richard a few moments? I find it steadies me to move about
+a bit."
+
+"Of course I'll sit with him," said Honor, docilely, "but I'll always be
+waiting for Jimsy." She sat down beside Richard King and took up the
+fan.
+
+"He's been better ever since that bit of water," said his wife,
+thankfully. "And Juan will fetch us more! Good soul! If ever we come out
+of this, Rich' must do something very splendid for him."
+
+Carter went down into the _sala_. Honor had asked him to leave her, but
+he found that he could not stay away from her; the remembrance of her
+eyes when she looked at Jimsy was intolerable in the loneliness of his
+own room. The big living room was empty but he supposed Honor would be
+back presently, and he sat down in an easy chair and leaned his head
+back and stared at the ceiling. He had arrived, very nearly, at the end
+of his endurance. He knew it himself and he was husbanding his failing
+strength as best he could. All his life, at times of illness or stress,
+he had been subject to fainting fits; miraculously, in these dreadful
+days, he had not fainted once, but now waves were rising about him,
+almost submerging him. If the Indian came soon with the water ... if he
+could once drink his fill ... if he could drink even a few drops ... he
+could hold out. But the Indian had been gone for more than an hour, and
+there was grave doubt of his ever coming back.
+
+His eyes, skimming the ceiling, dropped to the shelves of books which
+ran about the room and rose almost to meet it. They came to a startled
+halt on a vase of ferns on a high shelf. A vase of ferns. There must
+have been water in it. _Perhaps there was water in it now!_ He was so
+weak that it was a tremendous effort for him to drag himself out of his
+chair and across the room, to climb up on the book ladder and reach for
+it. He grew so dizzy that it seemed as if he must drop it. He shook it.
+_Water!_ He lifted out the ferns and looked. It was almost full. He
+stood there with it in his hand, his eyes on the doors. He wanted with
+all his heart to call Honor, to share it. His heart and his mind wanted
+to call her, but his hands lifted the vase to his dry lips and he drank
+in great gulps. He stopped himself before he was half satisfied. He was
+equal to that. Then he put the ferns back in the vase and the vase back
+on the shelf and went into the hall and called upstairs to her.
+
+Honor came at once. "Oh, Carter, has Juan come?"
+
+"No, not yet! But I think--I hope--I've made a discovery! Look!" He
+pointed to the vase.
+
+She caught her breath. "There might be water in it?"
+
+"Yes, I'm sure there is." Again, more steadily this time, he mounted the
+little sliding book ladder and reached for the vase, and Honor stood
+watching him with wide eyes, her cracked lips parted.
+
+"_Water?_" she whispered.
+
+He nodded solemnly, shaking the tall vase for her to hear the heartening
+sound of it. When he stood on the floor he held it toward her. "You
+first, Honor."
+
+"No." She was trembling. "We'll pour it out into a pitcher. If there's
+enough to divide, we'll all have some. If there's just a little, we'll
+give it to Mr. King." She went away, walking a little unsteadily,
+putting out a hand here and there against the wall or the back of a
+chair, and in a moment she came back with a tall glass pitcher.
+"Careful, Cartie ... mustn't spill a drop...."
+
+There was less than a cupful of dark, stale water, with bits of fern
+fronds floating in it.
+
+"Only enough for him," said Honor, her chin quivering. "Oh, Cartie, I'm
+so thirsty ... so crazy thirsty...."
+
+"You must take it yourself," said Carter, sternly. "Every drop." He held
+the pitcher up to her.
+
+Honor hesitated. "Cartie, I couldn't trust myself to drink it out of the
+pitcher ... I'm afraid ... but I'll pour out about two teaspoonfuls for
+each of us...." She poured an inch of water into a tiny glass. "You
+first, Carter."
+
+"No," said Carter, "I'm not going to touch it. It's for you and the
+Kings."
+
+"Carter! You're wonderful!" She drank her pitiful portion in three sips.
+"There ... now you, please, Cartie! Just one swallow!"
+
+But Carter shook his head. "No; I don't need it. Shall I take this to
+Mrs. King?"
+
+"Yes." Her sad eyes knighted him.
+
+Carter took the pitcher of water to Mrs. King without touching a drop of
+it and helped her to strain the fern bits out of it through a
+handkerchief before she began to give it to her husband in spoonfuls.
+With the first sip he ceased his uneasy murmuring and she smiled up at
+the boy. "Thank you, Carter. It's very splendid of you. Won't you take a
+sip for yourself?"
+
+Carter said he did not need it.
+
+"You do look fresher, really. You've stood this thing extraordinarily
+well. Did you give Honor some?"
+
+"She would take only a taste."
+
+Madeline King's eyes filled. "This is a black night for her, Carter. The
+thirst--and the _insurrectos_--are the least of it for Honor."
+
+Carter's eyes were bleak. "But she had to know it some time. She had to
+find it out, sooner or later. She couldn't have gone on with it, Mrs.
+King."
+
+She sighed. "I never was so astounded, so disappointed in all my life.
+One simply cannot take it in. He has been so absolutely steady ever
+since he came down,--and so fine all through this trouble! And to fail
+us now, when we need him so,--with Honor in such danger--" She gave her
+husband the last of the water and then laid on his forehead the damp
+handkerchief through which she had strained it. "It will break his
+uncle's heart. He was no end proud of him."
+
+"She had to know it some time," said Carter, stubbornly. "Is there
+anything I can do, Mrs. King?"
+
+"Nothing, Carter."
+
+"Then I'll go back to Honor."
+
+Something in his expression, in the way his dry lips said it, made the
+woman smile pityingly. "Carter, I--I'm frightfully sorry for you, too."
+
+He drew himself up with something of the old concealing pride. "I'm
+quite all right, thank you."
+
+She was not rebuffed. "You are quite all wretched," she said, "you poor
+lad, and I'm no end sorry, but--Carter, don't think this ill wind of
+Jimsy's will blow you any good."
+
+He flushed hotly through his strained pallor.
+
+"Ah," said the Englishwoman, gently, "you were counting on it. It's no
+good, Carter. It's no good. Not with Honor Carmody."
+
+Carter did not answer her in words but there was angry denial in the
+tilt of his head as he limped away, and she looked after him sadly.
+
+He found Honor limply relaxed in a long wicker chair. "Carter," she
+whispered, "I wish I'd asked you to give Jimsy a taste of that water."
+
+"You think he deserves it?" He couldn't keep the sneer out of his voice.
+
+"No," she answered him honestly. "I don't think he deserves it ... but
+he needs it."
+
+The words repeated themselves over and over in the other's mind. He
+didn't deserve it, but he needed it. That was the way--the weak,
+sentimental, womanish way in which she would reason it out about
+herself, he supposed ... Jimsy King didn't deserve her, but he needed
+her. He was deep in his bitter reflections when he realized that she
+was speaking to him.
+
+"Cartie, I must tell you how fine I think you are! You were splendid ...
+about the water ... not taking any ... when I know how you're
+suffering." She had to speak slowly, and if Stephen Lorimer had stood
+out in the hall he would never have recognized his Top Step's voice. "Of
+course we believe help is coming ... that we'll be safe in a few hours
+... but because we may not be ... this is the time for telling the
+truth, isn't it, Carter? I want to tell you ... how I respect you....
+Once I said you were weak, when I was angry at you.... But now I know
+you're strong ... stronger than--Jimsy ... with the best kind of
+strength. I want you to know that I know that, Carty."
+
+"_Honor_!" The truth and the lie spun round and round in his aching
+head; he _was_ stronger than Jimsy King; he hadn't made a drunken beast
+of himself; suppose he had taken the first sip of the water?--He hadn't
+taken it all. He was a better man than Jimsy King. He made a swift
+motion toward her, saying her name brokenly in his choked voice, but he
+crumpled suddenly and slid from his chair to the floor and was still.
+
+Honor flew to the foot of the stairs and called Mrs. King. "Carter has
+fainted! Will you help me?"
+
+Mrs. King called the Mexican guard in from the porch to lift him to the
+couch, and she and the girl fanned him and chafed his thin wrists. When
+he came to himself he was intensely chagrined. "I'm all right," he said
+impatiently, sitting up. "I wish you wouldn't bother."
+
+"Lie still for a bit," said Mrs. King. "You've had a nasty faint."
+
+Honor saw his painful flush. "Cartie, it's no wonder you fainted,--I
+feel as if I might, any minute. And I did nearly faint once, didn't I,
+Mrs. King? The day I arrived here--remember?" She remembered all too
+keenly herself ... the instant of relaxed blackness that followed on the
+sound of Richard King's hearty voice--"Why, the boy's all right!
+Ab-so-lutely all right! Isn't he, Madeline? Steady as a clock. That
+college nonsense--" And the contrast between that day of faith
+triumphant and this dark night was so sharp and cruel that she could not
+talk any more, even to comfort Carter. They were all silent, so that
+they clearly heard the unlocking, the opening, the closing of the door
+of Jimsy's room, and then a step--a swift, sure step upon the stair.
+
+Then Yaqui Juan walked into the _sala_.
+
+"_Juan!_" They sprang at him, galvanized into life and vigor at the
+sight of him. But he stood still, staring at them with a look of scorn
+and dislike, his arms folded across his chest.
+
+"_Juan_," Mrs. King faltered,--"_no agua_?" It was incredible. He was
+back, safely back, untouched, not even breathing hard. Where was the
+water he had risked his life to bring them? The Englishwoman began to
+cry, childishly, whimpering. "I can't bear it ... I can't bear it ... I
+wanted it for Rich' ... for Rich'!"
+
+The Indian did not speak, but his scornful, accusing eyes, raking them
+all, came to rest on Honor, fixing her with pitiless intensity.
+
+The girl was shaking so that she could hardly stand; she caught hold of
+the back of a tall chair to steady herself. "Juan,--you came out of
+Señor Don Diego's room?" she whispered.
+
+"_Si, Señorita._" He was watching the dawning light in her face, but the
+sternness of his own did not soften.
+
+"You didn't go at all," wept Mrs. King, rocking to and fro and wringing
+her hands. "You didn't go at all!"
+
+"_No, Señora._"
+
+Honor Carmody screamed, a hoarse, exultant shout. It was as she had
+screamed in the old good days when Jimsy King, the ball clutched to his
+side, tore down the field and went over the line for a touchdown. "Jimsy
+went! Jimsy went! _Jimsy went!_ It was Jimsy! _Jimsy!_" She flung her
+arms over her head, swaying unsteadily on her feet. Tears streamed from
+her eyes and ran down over her white cheeks and into her parched mouth.
+In that instant there was room for no fear, no terror; they would come
+later, frantic, unbearable. Now there was only pride, pride and faith
+and clean joy. "Jimsy! _Jimsy!_" Her legs gave way beneath her and she
+slipped to the floor, but she did not cease her hoarse and pitiful
+shouting.
+
+"How could he?" said Carter Van Meter. "It was impossible--in that
+condition! Honor, he couldn't----"
+
+But Yaqui Juan strode to the little table where the empty decanter
+stood, stooped, picked up a rough jug of decorative Mexican pottery from
+an under shelf. Then, pausing until he saw that all their eyes were upon
+him, he slowly poured its contents back into the decanter. The liquor
+rose and rose until it reached the exact spot which Carter had pointed
+out to Honor--the top of the design engraved on the glass. "_Mira_!"
+said the Indian, sternly.
+
+"_God_," said Carter Van Meter.
+
+"He was acting! He was acting!" wept Mrs. King.
+
+But Jimsy's Skipper sat on the floor, waving her arms, swaying her body
+like a yell leader, still shouting his name in her cracked voice, and
+then, crazily, her eyes wide as if she visualized a field, far away, a
+game, a gallant figure speeding to victory, she sang:
+
+
+     _You can't beat L. A. High!_
+     _You can't beat L. A. High!_
+     _Use your team to get up steam_
+     _But you cant beat L. A. High!_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+The Indian looked at Honor and the bitterness in his eyes melted a
+little. "_Esta una loca_," he said.
+
+It was quite true. She was a madwoman for the moment. They tried to
+control her, to calm her, but she did not see or hear them. "Let her
+alone," said Mrs. King. "At least she is happy, Carter. She'll realize
+his danger in a minute, poor thing." She turned to Yaqui Juan at the
+sound of his voice. He told her that he was going out after his young
+lord. He was going to find Señor Don Diego, alive or dead. He had
+promised him not to leave the locked room for two hours; he had kept his
+word as long as he could endure it. Señor Don Diego had had time to come
+back unless he had been captured. Now he, Yaqui Juan, whom the young
+master had once saved, would go to him, to bring him back, or to die
+with him. The solemn, grandiloquent words had nothing of melodrama in
+them, falling from his grave lips. He took no pains to conceal his deep
+scorn for them all.
+
+Madeline King thought of her husband, wounded, helpless. "Oh,
+Juan--must you leave us? If--if something has happened to him it only
+means your life, too!"
+
+"_Voy_!" said the Indian, "_I go_!" He turned and looked again at Honor,
+this time with a warming pity in his bronze face. "_I will bring back
+your man, Señorita_," he said in Spanish. "And this great strong
+one"--he pierced Carter through with his black gaze--"shall guard you
+till I come again." Then he smiled and flung at him that stinging
+Spanish proverb which runs, "In the country of the blind the one-eyed
+man is king!" Then he went out of the house, dropping to his hands and
+knees, hugging the shadows, creeping along the tunnel of tropic green
+which led to the ancient well.
+
+Honor stopped her wild singing and shouting then, but she still sat on
+the floor, striking her hands softly together, her dry lips parted in a
+smile of utter peace.
+
+"Come, Honor, take this chair!" Carter urged her, bending over her.
+
+"I don't want a chair, Cartie," she said, gently. "I'm just waiting for
+Jimsy." She looked up and caught the expression on Madeline King's face.
+"Oh, you mustn't worry," she said, contentedly. "He'll bring him back.
+Yaqui Juan will. He'll bring him back _safe_. Why, what kind of a God
+would that be?--To let anything happen to him, _now_?" Her defense was
+impregnable.
+
+"Let her alone," said Mrs. King again. "She'll realize, soon enough,
+poor child. Stay with her, Carter. I must go back to my husband." She
+went away with a backward, pitying glance which yet held understanding.
+She knew that danger and death and thirst were smaller things than
+shame, this wife of a King who had held hard in her day.
+
+Carter sat down and watched her drearily. He wasn't thinking now. He was
+nothing at all but one burning, choking thirst, one aching resentment
+... Jimsy King, who had won, after all ... who had won alive or dead.
+
+Honor was silent for the most part but she was wholly serene. Sometimes
+she spoke and her speech was harder to hear than her happy stillness.
+"You know, Cartie, I can be glad it happened." She seemed to speak more
+easily now, almost as if her thirst had been slaked; her voice was
+clearer, steadier. "I should never have known how much I cared. It was
+easy enough, wasn't it, to look at my ring and talk about 'holding hard'
+when there wasn't really anything to hold _for_? I really found out
+about caring to-night ... what it means. I guess I never really loved
+him before to-night, Carter." She was not looking at him, hardly talking
+to him; she seemed rather to be thinking aloud. Even if she had looked
+him full in the face she would not have realized what she was doing to
+him; there was only one realization for her now. "I guess I just loved
+what he _was_--his glorious body and his eyes and the way his hair
+_will_ wave--and what he could _do_--the winning, the people cheering
+him. But to-night, when I thought--when I believed the very worst thing
+in the world of him--when I thought he had failed me--then I found out.
+Then I knew I loved--_him_." She leaned her head back against the arm of
+the chair, and her hands rested, palm upward, in her lap. "It's worth
+everything that's happened, to know that." She was mercifully still
+again. Carter thought once that she must be asleep, she was breathing so
+softly and evenly, but after a long pause she asked, with a shade of
+difference in her tone, "How long has Juan been gone, Carter?"
+
+He looked at his watch. "Twenty minutes. Perhaps half an hour."
+
+Honor rose to her feet. "Well, then," she said with conviction, "they'll
+be here soon! Any minute, now."
+
+"They may not come." He could not help saying it.
+
+"Oh, they'll come! They'll come very--" she stopped short at the sound
+of a shot. "What was that?" she asked, childishly.
+
+"That was a shot," said Carter, watching her face.
+
+"But it wouldn't hurt Jimsy or Juan. They're nearly here! That was far
+away, wasn't it, Carter?" Still her bright serenity held fear at bay.
+
+"Not very far, Honor." He wanted to see that calm of hers broken up; he
+wanted cruelly to make her sense the danger.
+
+"But, Cartie," she explained to him, patiently, "you know nothing is
+going to happen to Jimsy now, when I've just begun really to care for
+him!" She opened the door and stepped out on the veranda, and he
+followed her. "See--it's almost morning!" The east was gray and there
+was a drowsy twittering of birds.
+
+"It's the false dawn," said Carter stubbornly. "Listen--" another shot
+rang out, then three in quick succession. "I believe they're chasing
+Juan!"
+
+The Mexican who was on guard held up a hand, commanding them to listen.
+They held their breath. Through the soft silence they began to get the
+sound of running feet, stumbling feet, running with difficulty, and in
+another moment, up the green lane came Yaqui Juan, bent almost double
+with the weight of Jimsy King across his back.
+
+"Honor!" Carter tried to catch her. "Come back! You mustn't--Are you
+crazy?"
+
+But Honor and the Mexican who had been on guard at the steps were
+running, side by side, to meet them. Yaqui Juan flung a word to the
+_peón_ and he stood with his gun leveled, covering the path.
+
+"_Mira_!" said the Indian, proudly. "_Señorita_, I have brought back
+your man!"
+
+"Skipper," cried Jimsy King in a strong voice, "get in the house! Get
+_in_! I'm all right!"
+
+Then, unaccountably, inconsistently, all the terror she had not suffered
+before laid hold on her. "Jimsy! You're hurt! You're wounded!"
+
+"Just a cut on the leg, Skipper! That's why I was so slow. It's nothing,
+I tell you,--get in the house!"
+
+But Honor, running beside them, trying to carry a part of him, kept pace
+beside them until Yaqui Juan had carried Jimsy into the house and up the
+stairs and laid him on his own bed.
+
+"There are five canteens," said Jimsy. "Here--one's for you, Skipper.
+Take the rest to Mrs. King, Juan. Skipper, drink it. Just a little at
+first, you know--careful! Don't you hear what I'm saying to you?
+Drink--the water--out of this canteen!"
+
+Mechanically, her eyes always on his face, Honor loosened the cap and
+opened the canteen and drank.
+
+"There,--that's enough!" said Jimsy, sharply. "Now, wait five minutes
+before you take any more." He took the canteen away from her. "Sit
+down!" He was not meeting her eyes.
+
+"Did you have any, Jimsy?"
+
+"Gallons. I didn't have any trouble to speak of, really. Only one fellow
+actually on guard. We had a little rough-house. He struck me in the leg,
+and it bled a lot. That's what kept me. And it took--some time--with
+him."
+
+"Jimsy, is it bad? Is it still bleeding? Let me see!"
+
+He pushed her away, almost roughly. "It's all right. Juan tied it up.
+It'll do. I guess you can have a little more water, now,--but take it
+slowly.... There! Now you'd better go and see about the rest. Don't let
+them take too much at first."
+
+"I'm not going away," said Honor, quietly. "I'm not going to leave you
+again, ever." She pulled her chair close beside the bed and took his
+hand in both of hers. "Jimsy, I know. I know everything."
+
+"That darn' Indian," said Jimsy, crossly. "If he'd stayed in here, with
+the door locked! I'd have been back in half an hour longer."
+
+"And he poured the whisky back into the decanter. Oh, Jimsy----"
+
+"Well, I suppose it was a fool stunt, but I knew I could put it over. I
+did a booze-fighter in the Junior play,--and I guess it comes pretty
+easy!" He turned away from her, his face to the wall. "I'd like to be
+alone, now, Skipper. You'd better look after Cart'. Watch him on the
+water. He'll kill himself if he takes too much."
+
+"Jimsy, I'm not going to leave you."
+
+He lifted himself on his elbow. "Skipper, dear," he said gently, "what's
+the use? I suppose I took a crazy kid way to show you I wasn't worth
+your sticking to, and I guess I'm not, if it comes to that, but the fact
+remains, and we can't get away from it."
+
+"What fact, Jimsy?"
+
+"That you--care--for Carter."
+
+"Jimsy, have you lost your senses? I--care for _Carter_?"
+
+"He told me."
+
+"Then," said Honor, her eyes darkening, "he told you a lie."
+
+He dropped back on the pillow. He had lost a lot of blood before Yaqui
+Juan found him and tied up his cut, and he looked white and spent. "Oh,
+Skipper, please.... Let's not drag it out. I saw your message to him."
+
+"What message?"
+
+"The one you sent to the steamer, after he'd lost his head and told you
+he loved you,--and--and asked you if you loved him." Difficult words;
+grotesque and meaningless, but he must manage with them. "I'm not
+blaming you, Skipper. I know I'm slow in the head beside Cart' and he
+can give you a lot that I can't. And nothing--hanging over him. You'd
+have played the game through to the last gun; I know that. But it
+wouldn't have been right for any of us. I'm glad Cart' blew up and told
+me."
+
+Honor laid his hand gently back on the bedspread of exquisite Mexican
+drawnwork and stood up. "Carter showed you the telegram I sent him from
+Genoa?"
+
+"Yes. He carries it always in his wallet."
+
+"He told you it meant that I loved him?"
+
+"Skipper, don't feel like that about it. It had to come out, some time."
+His voice sounded weary and weak.
+
+She bent over him, speaking gently. "Be quiet, Jimsy; lie still. I'm
+going to bring Carter up here."
+
+"Oh, Skipper, what's the use? You--you make me wish that greaser had
+finished me, down at the well. Please----"
+
+"Wait!"
+
+He heard her feet in the hall, flying down the stairs, and he turned his
+face to the wall again, his young mouth quivering.
+
+She found Carter lying on the wide couch, one arm trailing limply over
+the side of it, the emptied canteen dangling from his hand, and he was
+breathing with difficulty. His face was darkly mottled and congested but
+Honor did not notice it. "Carter," she said, "I want you to come with me
+and tell Jimsy how you lied to him. I want you to tell him what my
+message really meant."
+
+"I--can't come--now," he gasped. "I can't--" he tried to raise himself
+but he fell back on the pillows.
+
+"Then give me your wallet," she said, implacably, bending over him.
+
+"No, _no_! It isn't there--wait! By and by I'll----" but his eyes
+betrayed him.
+
+Roughly, with fierce haste, she thrust her hand into his coat pocket and
+pulled out his wallet of limp leather with the initials in slimly
+wrought gold letters.
+
+"Please, Honor! Please,--let me--I'll give you--I'll find it--" he
+clutched at her dress but she stepped back from the couch and he lost
+his balance and fell heavily to the floor.
+
+When she pulled out the bit of closely folded paper with a sharp sound
+of triumph there came with it a thick letter which dropped on the red
+tiles. He snatched at it but Honor's downward swoop was swifter. She
+stood staring at it, her eyes opening wider and wider, turning the plump
+letter in her hands.
+
+"Jimsy's letter to me," she said at last in a flat, curious tone. "The
+one he gave you to mail." She was not exclamatory. She was too utterly
+stunned for that. She seemed to be considering a course of action, her
+brows drawn. "I won't tell Jimsy; I'm--afraid of what he'd do. I'll let
+him go on believing in you, if you go away."
+
+He looked up at her from his horrid huddle on the floor, through his
+bloodshot eyes, the boy who had taught her so much about books and plays
+and dinners in restaurants and the right sort of music to admire, and it
+seemed to him that her long known, long loved face was a wholly strange
+one, sharply chiseled from cold stone.
+
+"If you'll go away," she went on, "I won't tell him about the letter."
+She was looking at him curiously, as if she had never seen him before.
+"All these years I've been sorry for you because you limped. But I
+haven't been sorry enough. I see now; it's--your soul that limps. Well,
+you must limp away, out of our lives. I won't have you near us. You've
+tried and tried to drag him down but something--somewhere--has held him
+up! As soon as help comes-to-morrow--to-day--I'm going to marry him,
+here, in Mexico, and I'll never leave him again as long as we live. Do
+you hear?"
+
+She turned to go, but he made a smothered, inarticulate sound and she
+looked down at him, and down and down, to the depths where he lay. "You
+poor--thing," she said, gently. "Oh, you poor thing!"
+
+She ran up to Jimsy and sat down on the edge of his bed and gathered him
+into her arms, so that his head rested on her breast. "Carter--poor
+Carter," she said, "is too weak to come upstairs now, but I am going to
+tell you the whole truth, and you are going to believe me. Listen,
+dearest----"
+
+They were still like that, still talking, when Madeline King rushed into
+the room. "Children," she cried, "oh, my dears--haven't you heard them?
+Don't you know?"
+
+"No," they told her, smiling with courteous young attention.
+
+"They're here--the soldiers! It's all right!" She was crying
+contentedly. "Rich' is conscious,--he understands. My dears, we're
+saved! I tell you we're saved!"
+
+"Oh, we knew that," said Honor, gravely.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Play the Game!, by Ruth Comfort Mitchell
+
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