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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Key to Yesterday, by Charles Neville Buck
+
+
+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: The Key to Yesterday
+
+
+Author: Charles Neville Buck
+
+
+
+Release Date: September 19, 2010  [eBook #33759]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KEY TO YESTERDAY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David Garcia, Roger Frank, Sam W., and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images
+generously made available by Kentuckiana Digital Library
+(http://kdl.kyvl.org/)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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+      See 33759-h.htm or 33759-h.zip:
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+
+
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Kentuckiana Digital Library. See
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+
+
+Transcriber's Note
+
+      Image captions in {curly brackets} have been added by the
+      transcriber for the convenience of the reader.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE KEY TO YESTERDAY
+
+by
+
+CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Grosset & Dunlap
+Publishers
+
+Copyright, 1910, by
+W. J. Watt & Company
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: {Saxon and Duska with her portrait}]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    CHAPTER I                1
+    CHAPTER II              22
+    CHAPTER III             37
+    CHAPTER IV              55
+    CHAPTER V               70
+    CHAPTER VI              88
+    CHAPTER VII            102
+    CHAPTER VIII           119
+    CHAPTER IX             134
+    CHAPTER X              156
+    CHAPTER XI             172
+    CHAPTER XII            186
+    CHAPTER XIII           207
+    CHAPTER XIV            221
+    CHAPTER XV             238
+    CHAPTER XVI            255
+    CHAPTER XVII           270
+    CHAPTER XVIII          285
+    CHAPTER XIX            304
+    CHAPTER XX             315
+    CHAPTER XXI            333
+
+
+
+
+The Key to Yesterday
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The palings of the grandstand inclosure creaked in protest under the
+pressure. The shadows of forward-surging men wavered far out across
+the track. A smother of ondriving dust broke, hurricane-like, around
+the last turn, sweeping before it into the straightaway a struggling
+mass of horse-flesh and a confusion of stable-colors. Back to the
+right, the grandstand came to its feet, bellowing in a madman's
+chorus.
+
+Out of the forefront of the struggle strained a blood-bay colt. The
+boy, crouched over the shoulders, was riding with hand and heel to the
+last ounce of his strength and the last subtle feather-weight of his
+craft and skill. At his saddleskirts pressed a pair of distended
+nostrils and a black, foam-flecked muzzle. Behind, with a gap of track
+and daylight between, trailed the laboring "ruck."
+
+A tall stranger, who had lost his companion and host in the maelstrom
+of the betting shed, had taken his stand near the angle where the
+paddock grating meets the track fence. A Derby crowd at Churchill
+Downs is a congestion of humanity, and in the obvious impossibility of
+finding his friend he could here at least give his friend the
+opportunity of finding him, since at this point were a few panels of
+fence almost clear. As the two colts fought out the final decisive
+furlongs, the black nose stealing inch by inch along the bay neck, the
+stranger's face wore an interest not altogether that of the casual
+race-goer. His shoulders were thrown back, and his rather lean jaw
+angle swept into an uncompromising firmness of chin--just now
+uptilted.
+
+The man stood something like six feet of clear-cut physical fitness.
+There was a declaration in his breadth of shoulder and depth of chest,
+in his slenderness of waist and thigh, of a life spent only partly
+within walls, while the free swing of torso might have intimated to
+the expert observer that some of it had been spent in the saddle.
+
+Of the face itself, the eyes were the commanding features. They were
+gray eyes, set under level brows; keenly observant by token of their
+clear light, yet tinged by a half-wistful softness that dwells
+hauntingly in the eyes of dreamers.
+
+Just now, the eyes saw not only the determination of a four-furlong
+dash for two-year-olds, but also, across the fresh turf of the
+infield, the radiant magic of May, under skies washed brilliant by
+April's rains.
+
+Then, as the colts came abreast and passed in a muffled roar of
+drumming hoofs, his eyes suddenly abandoned the race at the exact
+moment of its climax: as hundreds of heads craned toward the judges'
+stand, his own gaze became a stare focused on a point near his elbow.
+
+He stared because he had seen, as it seemed to him, a miracle, and the
+miracle was a girl. It was, at all events, nothing short of miraculous
+that such a girl should be discovered standing, apparently
+unaccompanied, down in this bricked area, a few yards from the paddock
+and the stools of the bookmakers.
+
+Unlike his own, her eyes had remained constant to the outcome of the
+race, and now her face was averted, so that only the curve of one
+cheek, a small ear and a curling tendril of brown hair under the wide,
+soft brim of her Panama hat rewarded him for the surrender of the
+spectacle on the track.
+
+Most ears, he found himself reflecting with, a sense of triumphant
+discovery, simply grow on the sides of heads, but this one might have
+been fashioned and set by a hand gifted with the exquisite perfection
+of the jeweler's art.
+
+A few moments before, the spot where she stood had been empty save for
+a few touts and trainers. It seemed inconceivable, in the abrupt
+revelation of her presence, that she could, like himself, have been
+simply cut off from companions and left for the interval waiting. He
+caught himself casting about for a less prosaic explanation. Magic
+would seem to suit her better than mere actuality. She was sinuously
+slender, and there was a splendid hint of gallantry in the unconscious
+sweep of her shoulders. He was conscious that the simplicity of her
+pongee gown loaned itself to an almost barbaric freedom of carriage
+with the same readiness as do the draperies of the Winged Victory.
+Yet, even the Winged Victory achieves her grace by a pose of
+triumphant action, while this woman stood in repose except for the
+delicate forward-bending excitement of watching the battle in the
+stretch.
+
+The man was not, by nature, susceptible. Women as sex magnates had
+little part in his life cosmos. The interest he felt now with
+electrical force, was the challenge that beauty in any form made upon
+his enthusiasm. Perhaps, that was why he stood all unrealizing the
+discourtesy of his gaping scrutiny--a scrutiny that, even with her
+eyes turned away, she must have felt.
+
+At all events, he must see her face. As the crescendo of the
+grandstand's suspense graduated into the more positive note of climax
+and began to die, she turned toward him. Her lips were half-parted,
+and the sun struck her cheeks and mouth and chin into a delicate
+brilliance of color, while the hat-brim threw a band of shadow on
+forehead and eyes. The man's impression was swift and definite. He
+had been waiting to see, and was prepared. The face, he decided, was
+not beautiful by the gauge of set standards. It was, however,
+beautiful in the better sense of its individuality; in the delicacy of
+the small, yet resolute, chin and the expressive depth of the eyes.
+Just now, they were shaded into dark pools of blue, but he knew they
+could brighten into limpid violet.
+
+She straightened up as she turned and met his stare with a steadiness
+that should have disconcerted it, yet he found himself still studying
+her with the detached, though utterly engrossed, interest of the
+critic. She did not start or turn hurriedly away. Somehow, he caught
+the realization that flight had no part in her system of things.
+
+The human tide began flowing back toward the betting shed, and left
+them alone in a cleared space by the palings. Then, the man saw a
+quick anger sweep into the girl's face and deepen the color of her
+cheeks. Her chin went up a trifle, and her lips tightened.
+
+He found himself all at once in deep confusion. He wanted to tell her
+that he had not realized the actuality of his staring impertinence,
+until she had, with a flush of unuttered wrath and embarrassment,
+revealed the depth of his felony ... for he could no longer regard it
+as a misdemeanor.
+
+There was a note of contempt in her eyes that stung him, and presently
+he found himself stammering an excuse.
+
+"I beg your pardon--I didn't realize it," he began lamely. Then he
+added as though to explain it all with the frank outspokenness of a
+school-boy: "I was wishing that I could paint you--I couldn't help
+gazing."
+
+For a few moments as she stood rigidly and indignantly silent, he had
+opportunity to reflect on the inadequacy of his explanation. At last,
+she spoke with the fine disdain of affronted royalty.
+
+"Are you quite through looking at me? May I go now?"
+
+He was contrite.
+
+"I don't know that I could explain--but it wasn't meant to be--to
+be----" He broke off, floundering.
+
+"It's a little strange," she commented quietly as though talking to
+herself, "because you _look_ like a gentleman."
+
+The man flushed.
+
+"You are very kind and flattering," he said, his face instantly
+hardening. "I sha'n't tax you with explanation. I don't suppose any
+woman could be induced to understand that a man may look at her--even
+stare at her--without disrespect, just as he might look at a sunset or
+a wonderful picture." Then, he added half in apology, half in
+defiance: "I don't know much about women anyway."
+
+For a moment, the girl stood with her face resolutely set, then she
+looked up again, meeting his eyes gravely, though he thought that she
+had stifled a mutinous impulse of her pupils to riffle into amusement.
+
+"I must wait here for my uncle," she told him. "Unless you have to
+stay, perhaps you had better go."
+
+The tall stranger swung off toward the betting shed without a backward
+glance, and engulfed himself in the mob where one had to fight and
+shoulder a difficult way in zigzag course.
+
+Back of the forming lines of winners with tickets to cash, he caught
+sight of a young man almost as tall as himself and characterized by
+the wholesome attractiveness of one who has taken life with zest and
+decency. He wore also upon feature and bearing the stamp of an
+aristocracy that is not decadent. To the side of this man, the
+stranger shouldered his way.
+
+"Since you abandoned me," he accused, "I've been standing out there
+like a little boy who has lost his nurse." After a pause, he added:
+"And I've seen a wonderful girl--the one woman in your town I want to
+meet."
+
+His host took him by the elbow, and began steering him toward the
+paddock gate.
+
+"So, you have discovered a divinity, and are ready to be presented.
+And you are the scoffer who argues that women may be eliminated. You
+are--or were--the man who didn't care to know them."
+
+The guest answered calmly and with brevity:
+
+"I'm not talking about women. I'm talking about a woman--and she's
+totally different."
+
+"Who is she, Bob?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+"I know a few of them--suppose you describe her."
+
+The stranger halted and looked at his friend and host with
+commiserating pity. When he deigned to speak, it was with infinite
+scorn.
+
+"Describe her! Why, you fool, I'm no poet laureate, and, if I were, I
+couldn't describe her!"
+
+For reply, he received only the disconcerting mockery of ironical
+laughter.
+
+"My interest," the young man of the fence calmly deigned to explain,
+"is impersonal. I want to meet her, precisely as I'd get up early in
+the morning and climb a mountain to see the sun rise over a
+particularly lovely valley. It's not as a woman, but as an object of
+art."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On other and meaner days, the track at Churchill Downs may be in large
+part surrendered to its more rightful patrons, the chronics and
+apostles of the turf, and racing may be only racing as roulette is
+roulette. But on Derby Day it is as though the community paid tribute
+to the savor of the soil, and honored in memory the traditions of the
+ancient regime.
+
+To-day, in the club-house inclosure, the roomy verandahs, the
+close-cropped lawn and even the roof-gallery were crowded; not indeed
+to the congestion of the grandstand's perspiring swarm, for Fashion's
+reservation still allowed some luxury of space, but beyond the numbers
+of less important times. In the burgeoning variety of new spring gowns
+and hats, the women made bouquets, as though living flowers had been
+brought to the shrine of the thoroughbred.
+
+A table at the far end of the verandah seemed to be a little Mecca for
+strolling visitors. In the party surrounding it, one might almost have
+caught the impression that the prettiness of the feminine display had
+been here arranged, and that in scattering attractive types along the
+front of the white club-house, some landscape gardener had reserved
+the most appealing beauties for a sort of climacteric effect at the
+end.
+
+Sarah and Anne Preston were there, and wherever the Preston sisters
+appeared there also were usually gathered together men, not to the
+number of two and three, but in full quorum. And, besides the Preston
+sisters, this group included Miss Buford and a fourth girl.
+
+Indeed, it seemed to be this fourth who held, with entire
+unconsciousness, more than an equal share of attention. Duska Filson
+was no more cut to the pattern of the ordinary than the Russian name
+her romantic young mother had given her was an exponent of the life
+about her. She was different, and at every point of her divergence
+from a routine type it was the type that suffered by the contrast.
+Having preferred being a boy until she reached that age when it became
+necessary to bow to the dictate of Fate and accept her sex, she had
+retained an understanding for, and a comradeship with, men that made
+them hers in bondage. This quality she had combined with all that was
+subtly and deliciously feminine, and, though she loved men as she
+loved small boys, some of them had discovered that it was always as
+men, never as a man.
+
+She had a delightfully refractory way of making her own laws to
+govern her own world--a system for which she offered no apology; and
+this found its vindication in the fact that her world was
+well-governed--though with absolutism.
+
+The band was blaring something popular and reminiscent of the winter's
+gayeties, but the brasses gave their notes to the May air, and the May
+air smoothed and melted them into softness. Duska's eyes were fixed on
+the green turf of the infield where several sentinel trees pointed
+into the blue.
+
+Mr. Walter Bellton, having accomplished the marvelous feat of escaping
+from the bookmaker's maelstrom with the immaculateness of his personal
+appearance intact, sauntered up to drop somewhat languidly into a
+chair.
+
+"When one returns in triumph," he commented, "one should have chaplets
+of bay and arches to walk under. It looks to me as though the
+reception-committee has not been on the job."
+
+Sarah Preston raised a face shrouded in gravity. Her voice was
+velvety, but Bellton caught its undernote of ridicule.
+
+"I render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's--but what is
+your latest triumph?" She put her question innocently. "Did you win a
+bet?"
+
+If Mr. Bellton's quick-flashing smile was an acknowledgment of the
+thrust at his somewhat notorious self-appraisement, his manner at
+least remained imperturbably complacent.
+
+"I was not clamoring for my own just dues," he explained, with
+modesty. "For myself, I shall be satisfied with an unostentatious
+tablet in bronze when I'm no longer with you in the flesh. In this
+instance I was speaking for another."
+
+He did not hasten to announce the name of the other. In even the
+little things of life, this gentleman calculated to a nicety dramatic
+values and effects. Just as a public speaker in nominating a candidate
+works up to a climax of eulogy, and pauses to let his hearers shout,
+"Name him! Name your man!" so Mr. Bellton paused, waiting for someone
+to ask of whom he spoke.
+
+It was little Miss Buford who did so with the debutante's legitimate
+interest in the possibility of fresh conquest.
+
+"And who has returned in triumph?"
+
+"George Steele."
+
+Sarah Preston arched her brows in mild interest.
+
+"So, the wanderer is home! I had the idea he was painting masterpieces
+in the _Quartier Latin_, or wandering about with a sketching easel in
+southern Spain."
+
+"Nevertheless, he is back," affirmed the man, "and he has brought with
+him an even greater celebrity than himself--a painter of international
+reputation, it would seem. I met them a few moments ago in the
+paddock, and Steele intimated that they would shortly arrive to lay
+their joint laurels at your feet."
+
+Louisville society was fond of George Steele, and, when on occasion he
+dropped back from "the happy roads that lead around the world," it was
+to find a welcome in his home city only heightened by his long
+absence.
+
+"Who is this greater celebrity?" demanded Miss Buford. She knew that
+Steele belonged to Duska Filson, or at least that whenever he returned
+it was to renew the proffer of himself, even though with the knowledge
+that the answer would be as it had always been: negative. Her
+interest was accordingly ready to consider in alternative the other
+man.
+
+"Robert A. Saxon--the first disciple of Frederick Marston," declared
+Mr. Bellton. If no one present had ever heard the name before, the
+consequential manner of its announcement would have brought a sense of
+deplorable unenlightenment.
+
+Bellton's eyes, despite the impression of weakness conveyed by the
+heavy lenses of his nose-glasses, missed little, and he saw that Duska
+Filson still looked off abstractedly across the bend of the
+homestretch, taking no note of his heralding.
+
+"Doesn't the news of new arrivals excite you, Miss Filson?" he
+inquired, with a touch of drawl in his voice.
+
+The girl half-turned her head with a smile distinctly short of
+enthusiasm. She did not care for Bellton. She was herself an exponent
+of all things natural and unaffected, and she read between the
+impeccably regular lines of his personality, with a criticism that was
+adverse.
+
+"You see," she answered simply, "it's not news. I've seen George
+since he came."
+
+"Tell us all about this celebrity," prompted Miss Buford, eagerly.
+"What is he like?"
+
+Duska shook her head.
+
+"I haven't seen him. He was to arrive this morning."
+
+"So, you see," supplemented Mr. Bellton with a smile, "you will, after
+all, have to fall back on me--I have seen him."
+
+"You," demurred the debutante with a disappointed frown, "are only a
+man. What does a man know about another man?"
+
+"The celebrity," went on Mr. Bellton, ignoring the charge of
+inefficiency, "avoids women." He paused to laugh. "He was telling
+Steele that he had come to paint landscape, and I am afraid he will
+have to be brought lagging into your presence."
+
+"It seems rather brutal to drag him here," suggested Anne Preston. "I,
+for one, am willing to spare him the ordeal."
+
+"However," pursued Mr. Bellton with some zest of recital, "I have
+warned him. I told him what dangerous batteries of eyes he must
+encounter. It seemed to me unfair to let him charge into the lists of
+loveliness all unarmed--with his heart behind no shield."
+
+"And he ... how did he take your warning?" demanded Miss Buford.
+
+"I think it is his craven idea to avoid the danger and retreat at the
+first opportunity. He said that he was a painter, had even been a
+cow-puncher once, but that society was beyond his powers and his
+taste."
+
+The group had been neglecting the track. Now, from the grandstand came
+once more the noisy outburst that ushers the horses into the stretch,
+and conversation died as the party came to its feet.
+
+None of its members noticed for the moment the two young men who had
+made their way between the chairs of the verandah until they stood
+just back of the group, awaiting their turn for recognition.
+
+As the horses crossed the wire and the pandemonium of the stand fell
+away, George Steele stepped forward to present his guest.
+
+"This is Mr. Robert Saxon," he announced. "He will paint the portraits
+of you girls almost as beautiful as you really are.... It's as far as
+mere art can go."
+
+Saxon stood a trifle abashed at the form of presentation as the group
+turned to greet him. Something in the distance had caught Duska
+Filson's imagination-brimming eyes. She was sitting with her back
+turned, and did not hear Steele's approach nor turn with the others.
+
+Saxon's casually critical glance passed rapidly over the almost too
+flawless beauty of the Preston sisters and the flower-like charm of
+little Miss Buford, then fell on a slender girl in a simple pongee
+gown and a soft, wide-brimmed Panama hat. Under the hat-brim, he
+caught the glimpse of an ear that might have been fashioned by a
+jeweler and a curling tendril of brown hair. If Saxon had indeed been
+the timorous man Bellton intimated, the glimpse would have thrown him
+into panic. As it was, he showed no sign of alarm.
+
+His presentation as a celebrity had focused attention upon him in a
+manner momentarily embarrassing. He found a subtle pleasure in the
+thought that it had not called this girl's eyes from whatever occupied
+them out beyond the palings. Saxon disliked the ordinary. His
+canvases and his enthusiasms were alike those of the individualist.
+
+"Duska," laughed Miss Buford, "come back from your dreams, and be
+introduced to Mr. Saxon."
+
+The painter acknowledged a moment of suspense. What would be her
+attitude when she recognized the man who had stared at her down by the
+paddock fence?
+
+The girl turned. Except himself, no one saw the momentary flash of
+amused surprise in her eyes, the quick change from grave blue to
+flashing violet and back again to grave blue. To the man, the swiftly
+shifting light of it seemed to say: "You are at my mercy; whatever
+liberality you receive is at the gift and pleasure of my generosity."
+
+"I beg your pardon," she said simply, extending her hand. "I was just
+thinking--" she paused to laugh frankly, and it was the music of the
+laugh that most impressed Saxon--"I hardly know what I was thinking."
+
+He dropped with a sense of privileged good-fortune into the vacant
+chair at her side.
+
+With just a hint of mischief riffling her eyes, but utter artlessness
+in her voice, she regarded him questioningly.
+
+"I wonder if we have not met somewhere before? It seems to me----"
+
+"Often," he asserted. "I think it was in Babylon first, perhaps. And
+you were a girl in Macedon when I was a spearman in the army of
+Alexander."
+
+She sat as reflective and grave as though she were searching her
+recollections of Babylon and Macedon for a chance acquaintance, but
+under the gravity was a repressed sparkle of mischievous delight.
+
+After a moment, he demanded brazenly:
+
+"Would you mind telling me which colt won that first race?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+"His career has been pretty much a march of successive triumphs
+through the world of art, and he has left the critics only one peg on
+which to hang their carping."
+
+Steele spoke with the warmth of enthusiasm. He had succeeded in
+capturing Duska for a few minutes of monopoly in the semi-solitude of
+the verandah at the back of the club-house. Though he had a hopeless
+cause of his own to plead, it was characteristic of him that his first
+opportunity should go to the praise of his friend.
+
+"What is that?" The girl found herself unaccountably interested and
+ready to assume this stranger's defense even before she knew with what
+his critics charged him.
+
+"That he is a copyist," explained the man; "that he is so enamored of
+the style of Frederick Marston that his pictures can't shake off the
+influence. He is great enough to blaze his own trail--to create his
+own school, rather than to follow in the tracks of another. Of
+course," he hastened to defend, "that is hardly a valid indictment.
+Every master is, at the beginning of his career, strongly affected by
+the genius of some greater master. The only mistake lies in following
+in the footsteps of one not yet dead. To play follow-the-leader with a
+man of a past century is permissible and laudable, but to give the
+same allegiance to a contemporary is, in the narrow view of the
+critics, to accept a secondary place."
+
+The Kentuckian sketched with ardor the dashing brilliance of the
+other's achievement: how five years had brought him from lethal
+obscurity to international fame; how, though a strictly American
+product who had not studied abroad, his _Salon_ pictures had
+electrified Paris. And the girl listened with attentive interest.
+
+When the last race was ended and the thousands were crowding out
+through the gates, Saxon heard his host accepting a dinner invitation
+for the evening.
+
+"I shall have a friend stopping in town on his way East, whom I want
+you all to meet," explained Mr. Bellton, the prospective host. "He is
+one Senor Ribero, an attache of a South American legation, and he may
+prove interesting."
+
+Saxon caught himself almost frowning. He did not care for society's
+offerings, but the engagement was made, and he had now no alternative
+to adding his declaration of pleasure to that of his host. He was,
+however, silent to taciturnity as Steele's runabout chugged its way
+along in the parade of motors and carriages through the gates of the
+race-track inclosure. In his pupils, the note of melancholy unrest was
+decided, where ordinarily there was only the hint.
+
+"There is time," suggested the host, "for a run out the Boulevard; I'd
+like to show you a view or two."
+
+The suggestion of looking at a promising landscape ordinarily
+challenged Saxon's interest to the degree of enthusiasm. Now, he only
+nodded.
+
+It was not until Steele, who drove his own car, stopped at the top of
+the Iroquois Park hill that Saxon spoke. They had halted at the
+southerly brow of the ridge from which the eye sweeps a radius of
+twenty miles over purpled hills and polychromatic valleys, to yet
+other hills melting into a sky of melting turquois. Looking across the
+colorful reaches, Saxon gave voice to his enthusiasm.
+
+They left the car, and stood on the rocks that jut out of the clay at
+the road's edge. Beneath them, the wooded hillside fell away, three
+hundred feet of precipitous slope and tangle. For a time, Saxon's eyes
+were busy with the avid drinking in of so much beauty, then once more
+they darkened as he wheeled toward his companion.
+
+"George," he said slowly, "you told me that we were to go to a cabin
+of yours tucked away somewhere in the hills, and paint landscape. I
+caught the idea that we were to lead a sort of camp-life--that we were
+to be hermits except for the companionship of our palettes and nature
+and each other--and the few neighbors that one finds in the country,
+and----" The speaker broke off awkwardly.
+
+Steele laughed.
+
+"'It is so nominated in the bond.' The cabin is over there--some
+twenty miles." He pointed off across the farthest dim ridge to the
+south. "It is among hills where--but to-morrow you shall see for
+yourself!"
+
+"To-morrow?" There was a touch of anxious haste in the inquiry.
+
+"Are you so impatient?" smiled Steele.
+
+Saxon wheeled on his host, and on his forehead were beads of
+perspiration though the breeze across the hilltops was fresh with the
+coming of evening. His answer broke from his lips with the abruptness
+of an exclamation.
+
+"My God, man, I'm in panic!"
+
+The Kentuckian looked up in surprise, and his bantering smile
+vanished. Evidently, he was talking with a man who was suffering some
+stress of emotion, and that man was his friend.
+
+For a moment, Saxon stood rigidly, looking away with drawn brow, then
+he began with a short laugh in which there was no vestige of mirth:
+
+"When two men meet and find themselves congenial companions," he said
+slowly, "there need be no questions asked. We met in a Mexican hut."
+
+Steele nodded.
+
+"Then," went on Saxon, "we discovered a common love of painting. That
+was enough, wasn't it?"
+
+Steele again bowed his assent.
+
+"Very well." The greater painter spoke with the painfully slow control
+of one who has taken himself in hand, selecting tone and words to
+safeguard against any betrayal into sudden outburst. "As long as it's
+merely you and I, George, we know enough of each other. When it
+becomes a matter of meeting your friends, your own people, you force
+me to tell you something more."
+
+"Why?" Steele demanded; almost hotly. "I don't ask my friends for
+references or bonds!"
+
+Saxon smiled, but persistently repeated:
+
+"You met me in Mexico, seven months ago. What, in God's name, do you
+know about me?"
+
+The other looked up, surprised.
+
+"Why, I know," he said, "I know----" Then, suddenly wondering what he
+did know, he stopped, and added lamely: "I know that you are a
+landscape-painter of national reputation and a damned good fellow."
+
+"And, aside from that, nothing," came the quick response. "What I am
+on the side, preacher, porch-climber, bank-robber--whatever else, you
+don't know." The speaker's voice was hard.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean that, before you present me to your friends, to such people
+for example--well such people as I met to-day--you have the right to
+ask; and the unfortunate part of it is that, when you ask, I can't
+answer."
+
+"You mean----" the Kentuckian halted in perplexed silence.
+
+"I mean," said Saxon, forcing his words, "that God Almighty only knows
+who I am, or where I came from. I don't."
+
+Of all the men Steele had ever known, Saxon had struck him, through
+months of intimacy, as the most normal, sane and cleanly constituted.
+Eccentricity was alien to him. In the same measure that all his
+physical bents were straight and clean-cut, so he had been mentally a
+contradiction of the morbid and irrational. The Kentuckian waited in
+open-eyed astonishment, gazing at the man whose own words had just
+convicted him of the wildest insanity.
+
+Saxon went on, and even now, in the face of self-conviction of
+lunacy, his words fell coldly logical:
+
+"I have talked to you of my work and my travels during the past five
+or six years. I have told you that I was a cow-puncher on a Western
+range; that I drifted East, and took up art. Did I ever tell you one
+word of my life prior to that? Do you know of a single episode or
+instance preceding these few fragmentary chapters? Do you know who, or
+what I was seven years ago?"
+
+Steele was dazed. His eyes were studiously fixed on the gnarled roots
+and twisted hole of a scrub oak that hung out over the edge of things
+with stubborn and distorted tenacity.
+
+"No," he heard the other say, "you don't, and I don't."
+
+Again, there was a pause. The sun was setting at their backs, but off
+to the east the hills were bright in the reflection that the western
+sky threw across the circle of the horizon. Already, somewhere below
+them, a prematurely tuneful whippoorwill was sending out its night
+call.
+
+Steele looked up, and saw the throat of the other work convulsively,
+though the lips grimly held the set, contradictory smile.
+
+"The very name I wear is the name, not of my family, but of my race.
+R. A. Saxon, Robert Anglo Saxon or Robert Anonymous Saxon--take your
+choice. I took that because I felt that I was not stealing it."
+
+"Go on," prompted Steele.
+
+"You have heard of those strange practical jokes which Nature
+sometimes--not often, only when she is preternaturally cruel--plays on
+men. They have pathological names for it, I believe--loss of memory?"
+
+Steele only nodded.
+
+"I told you that I rode the range on the Anchor-cross outfit. I did
+not tell you why. It was because the Anchor-cross took me in when I
+was a man without identity. I don't know why I was in the Rocky
+Mountains. I don't know what occurred there, but I do know that I was
+picked up in a pass with a fractured skull. I had been stripped almost
+naked. Nothing was left as a clew to identity, except this----"
+
+Saxon handed the other a rusty key, evidently fitting an
+old-fashioned lock.
+
+"I always carry that with me. I don't know where it will fit a door,
+or what lies behind that door. I only know that it is in a fashion the
+key that can open my past; that the lock which it fits bars me off
+from all my life except a fragment."
+
+Steele mechanically returned the thing, and Saxon mechanically slipped
+it back into his pocket.
+
+"I know, too, that a scar I wear on my right hand was not fresh when
+those many others were. That, also, belongs to the veiled years.
+
+"Some cell of memory was pressed upon by a splinter of bone, some
+microscopic atom of brain-tissue was disturbed--and life was erased. I
+was an interesting medical subject, and was taken to specialists who
+tried methods of suggestion. Men talked to me of various things:
+sought in a hundred ways to stimulate memory, but the reminder never
+came. Sometimes, it would seem that I was standing on the verge of
+great recollections--recollections just back of consciousness--as a
+forgotten name will sometimes tease the brain by almost presenting
+itself yet remaining elusive."
+
+Steele was leaning forward, listening while the narrator talked on
+with nervous haste.
+
+"I have never told this before," Saxon said. "Slowly, the things I had
+known seemed to come back. For example, I did not have to relearn to
+read and write. All the purely impersonal things gradually retrieved
+themselves, but, wherever a fact might have a tentacle which could
+grasp the personal--the ego--that fact eluded me."
+
+"How did you drift into art?" demanded Steele.
+
+"That is it: I drifted into it. I had to drift. I had no compass, no
+port of departure or destination. I was a derelict without a flag or
+name."
+
+"At the Cincinnati Academy, where I first studied, one of the
+instructors gave me a hint. He felt that I was struggling for
+something which did not lie the way of his teaching. By that time, I
+had acquired some little efficiency and local reputation. He told me
+that Marston was the master for me to study, and he advised me to go
+further East where I could see and understand his work. I came, and
+saw, 'The Sunset in Winter.' You know the rest."
+
+"But, now," Steele found himself speaking with a sense of relief,
+"now, you are Robert A. Saxon. You have made yourself from unknown
+material, but you have made yourself a great painter. Why not be
+satisfied to abandon this unknown past as the past has abandoned you?"
+
+"Wait," the other objected, with the cold emphasis of a man who will
+not evade, or seek refuge in specious alternatives.
+
+"Forget to-night who I am, and to-morrow I shall have no assurance
+that the police are not searching for me. Why, man, I may have been a
+criminal. I have no way of knowing. I am hand-tied. Possibly, I have a
+wife and family waiting for me somewhere--needing me!"
+
+His breath came in agitated gasps.
+
+"I am two men, and one of them does not know the other. Sometimes, it
+threatens me with madness--sometimes, for a happy interval, I almost
+forget it. At first, it was insupportable, but the vastness of the
+prairie and the calm of the mountain seemed to soothe me into sanity,
+and give me a grip on myself. The starlight in my face during nights
+spent in the saddle--that was soothing; it was medicine for my sick
+brain. These things at least made me physically perfect. But, since
+yesterday is sealed, I must remain to some extent the recluse. The
+sort of intercourse we call society I have barred. That is why I am
+anxious for your cabin, rather than your clubs and your
+entertainments."
+
+"You didn't have to tell me," said Steele slowly, "but I'm glad you
+did. I and my friends are willing to gauge your past by your present.
+But I'm glad of your confidence."
+
+Saxon raised his face, and his eyes wore an expression of
+gratification.
+
+"Yes, I'm glad I told you. If I should go out before I solve it, and
+you should ever chance on the answer, I'd like my own name over
+me--and both dates, birth as well as death. My work is, of course, to
+learn it all--if I can; and I hope--" he forced a laugh--"when I meet
+the other man, he will be fit to shake hands with."
+
+"Listen," Steele spoke eagerly. "How long has it been?"
+
+"Over six years."
+
+"Then, why not go on and round out the seven? Seven years of absolute
+disappearance gives a man legal death. Let the old problem lie, and go
+forward as Robert Saxon. That is the simplest way."
+
+The other shook his head.
+
+"That would be an evasion. It would prove nothing. If I discover
+responsibilities surviving from the past, I must take them up."
+
+"What did the physicians say?"
+
+"They didn't know." Saxon shook his head. "Perhaps, some strong
+reminder may at some unwarned moment open the volume where it was
+closed; perhaps, it will never open. To-morrow morning, I may awaken
+Robert Saxon--or the other man." He paused, then added quietly: "Such
+an unplaced personality had best touch other lives as lightly as it
+can."
+
+Steele went silently over, and cranked the machine. As he straightened
+up, he asked abruptly:
+
+"Would you prefer calling off this dinner?"
+
+"No." The artist laughed. "We will take a chance on my remaining
+myself until after dinner, but as soon as convenient----"
+
+"To-morrow," promised Steele, "we go to the cabin."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Perhaps, the same futile vanity that led Mr. Bellton to import the
+latest sartorial novelties from the _Rue de la Paix_ for the adornment
+of his person made him fond of providing foreign notables to give
+color to his entertainments.
+
+Mr. Bellton was at heart the _poseur_, but he was also the fighter.
+Even when he carried the war of political reform into sections of the
+town where the lawless elements had marked him for violence, he went
+stubbornly in the conspicuousness of ultra-tailoring. Though he loved
+to address the proletariat in the name of brotherhood, he loved with a
+deeper passion the exclusiveness of presiding as host at a board where
+his guests included the "best people."
+
+Senor Ribero, who at home used the more ear-filling entitlement of
+Senor Don Ricardo de Ribero y Pierola, was hardly a notable, yet he
+was a new type, and, even before the ladies had emerged from their
+cloak-room and while the men were apart in the grill, the host felt
+that he had secured a successful ingredient for his mixture of
+personal elements.
+
+After the fashion of Latin-American diplomacy, educated in Paris and
+polished by great latitude of travel, the attache had the art of small
+talk and the charm of story-telling. To these recommendations, he
+added a slender, almost military carriage, and the distinction of
+Castilian features.
+
+A punctured tire had interrupted the homeward journey of Steele and
+Saxon, who had telephoned to beg that the dinner go on, without
+permitting their tardiness to delay the more punctual.
+
+The table was spread in a front room with a balcony that gave an
+outlook across the broad lawn and the ancient trees which bordered the
+sidewalk. At the open windows, the May air that stirred the curtains
+was warm enough to suggest summer, and new enough after the lately
+banished winter to seem wonderful--as though the rebirth of nature had
+wrought its miracle for the first time.
+
+Ribero was the only guest who needed presentation, and, as he bowed
+over the hand of each woman, it was with an almost ornate
+ceremoniousness of manner.
+
+Duska Filson, after the spontaneous system of her opinions and
+prejudices, disliked the South American. To her imaginative mind,
+there was something in his jetlike darkness and his quick, almost
+tigerish movements that suggested the satanic. But, if the impression
+she received was not flattering to the guest, the impression she made
+was evidently profound. Ribero glanced at her with an expression of
+extreme admiration, and dropped his dark lashes as though he would
+veil eyes from which he could not hope to banish flattery too fulsome
+for new acquaintanceship.
+
+The girl found herself seated with the diplomat at her right, and a
+vacant chair at her left. The second vacant seat was across the round
+table, and she found herself sensible of a feeling of quarantine with
+an uncongenial companion, and wondering who would fill the empty space
+at her left. The name on the place card was hidden. She rather hoped
+it would be Saxon. She meant to ask him why he did not break away
+from the Marston influence that handicapped his career, and she
+believed he would entertain her. Of course, George Steele was an old
+friend and a very dear one, but this was just the point: he was not
+satisfied with that, and in the guise of lovers only did she ever find
+men uninteresting. It would, however, be better to have George make
+love than to be forced to talk to this somewhat pompous foreigner.
+
+"I just met and made obeisance to the new Mrs. Billie Bedford,"
+declared Mr. Bellton, starting the conversational ball rolling along
+the well-worn groove of gossip. "And, if she needs a witness, she may
+call on me to testify that she's as radiant in the part of Mrs. Billie
+as she was in her former role of Mrs. Jack."
+
+Miss Buford raised her large eyes. With a winter's popularity behind
+her, she felt aggrieved to hear mentioned names that she did not know.
+Surely, she had met everybody.
+
+"Who is Mrs. Bedford?" she demanded. "I don't think I have ever met
+her. Is she a widow?"
+
+Bellton laughed across his consomme cup. "Of the modern school," he
+enlightened. "There were 'no funeral baked meats to furnish forth the
+marriage feast.' Matrimonially speaking, this charming lady plays in
+repertoire."
+
+"What has become of Jack Spotswood?" The older Miss Preston glanced up
+inquiringly. "He used to be everywhere, and I haven't heard of him for
+ages."
+
+"He's still everywhere," responded Mr. Bellton, with energy;
+"everywhere but here. You see, the papers were so busy with Jack's
+affairs that they crowded Jack out of his own life." Mr. Bellton
+smiled as he added: "And so he went away."
+
+"I wonder where he is now. He wasn't such a bad sort," testified Mr.
+Cleaver, solemnly. "Jack's worse portion was his better half."
+
+"Last heard," informed Mr. Bellton, "he was seen in some town in South
+America--the name of which I forget."
+
+Senor Ribero had no passport of familiarity into local personalities,
+and he occupied the moment of his own conversational disengagement in
+a covert study of the face and figure beside him. Just now, the girl
+was looking away at the indolently stirring curtains with an
+expression of detachment. Flippant gossip was distasteful to her, and,
+when the current set that way, she drew aside, and became the
+non-participant.
+
+Ribero read rightly the bored expression, and resolved that the topic
+must be diverted, if Miss Filson so wished.
+
+"One meets so many of your countrymen in South America," he suggested,
+"that one might reasonably expect them to lose interest as types, yet
+each of them seems to be the center of some gripping interest. I
+remember in particular one episode--"
+
+The recital was cut short by the entrance of Steele and Saxon. Ribero,
+the only person present requiring introduction, rose to shake hands.
+
+[Illustration: {Saxon and Ribero meet}]
+
+The attache was trained in diplomacy, and the rudiments of diplomacy
+should teach the face to become a mask when need be, yet, as his eyes
+met those of Saxon, he suddenly and involuntarily stiffened. For just
+a moment, his outstretched hand hesitated with the impulse to draw
+back. The lips that had parted in a casual smile hardened rigidly, and
+the eyes that rested on the face of Steele's celebrity were so
+intently focused that they almost stared. The byplay occupied only a
+moment, and, as Ribero had half-turned from the table to greet those
+entering at his back, it escaped the notice of everyone except Saxon
+himself. The newcomer felt the momentary bar of hostility that had
+been thrown between them and as quickly withdrawn. The next moment, he
+was shaking the extended hand, and hearing the commonplace:
+
+"Much pleased, senor."
+
+Ribero felt a momentary flash of shame for the betrayal of such
+undiplomatic surprise, and made amends with added courtesy when he
+spoke.
+
+The artist, dropping into his seat at the side of Miss Filson, felt a
+flush of pleasure at his position. For the instant, the other man's
+conduct became a matter of negligible importance, and, when she turned
+to him with a friendly nod and smile, he forgot Ribero's existence.
+
+"Mr. Ribero," announced Mr. Bellton, "was just about to tell us an
+interesting story when you two delinquents came in. I'm sure he still
+has the floor."
+
+The diplomat had forgotten what he had been saying. He was covertly
+studying the features of the man just beyond Miss Filson. The face was
+turned toward the girl, giving him a full view, and it was a steady,
+imperturbable face. Now, introduced as raconteur, he realized that he
+must say something, and at the moment, with a flash of inspiration, he
+determined to relate a bit of history that would be of interest at
+least to the narrator. It was not at all the story he might have told
+had he been uninterrupted, but it was a story that appealed to his
+diplomatic taste, because he could watch the other face as he told it
+and see what the other face might betray. This newcomer had jarred him
+from his usual poise. Now, he fancied it was the other's turn to be
+startled.
+
+"It was," he said casually, "the narrowest escape from death that I
+have seen--and the man who escaped was an American."
+
+As Saxon raised his eyes, with polite interest, to those of the
+speaker, he became aware that they held for him a message of almost
+sardonic challenge. He felt that the story-teller was only ostensibly
+addressing the table; that the man was talking at him, as a prosecutor
+talks at the defendant though he may direct himself to the jury. The
+sense that brought this realization was perhaps telepathic. To the
+other eyes and ears, there were only the manner of the raconteur and
+the impersonal tone of generality.
+
+"It occurred in Puerto Frio," said the South American, reminiscently.
+He paused for a moment, and smiled at Saxon, as though expecting a
+sign of confusion upon the mention of the name, but he read only
+courteous interest and impenetrability.
+
+"This countryman of yours," he went on smoothly, his English touched
+and softened by the accent of the foreigner, "had indulged in the
+dangerous, though it would seem alluring, pastime of promoting a
+revolution. Despite his unscrupulous character, he was possessed of an
+engaging personality, and, on brief acquaintance, I, for one, liked
+him. His skill and luck held good so long that it was only when the
+insurgents were at the gates of the capital that a summary
+court-martial gave him the verdict of death. I have no doubt that by
+the laws of war it was a just award, yet so many men are guilty of
+peddling revolutions, and the demand for such wares is so great in
+some quarters, that he had my sympathy." The speaker bowed slightly,
+as though conceding a point to a gallant adversary. It chanced that he
+was looking directly at Saxon as he bowed.
+
+The painter became suddenly conscious that he was according an
+engrossed attention, and that the story-teller was narrowly watching
+his fingers as they twisted the stem of his sauterne glass. The
+fingers became at once motionless.
+
+"He bore himself so undeniably well when he went out to his place
+against a blank wall in the plaza, escorted by the firing squad,"
+proceeded Senor Ribero evenly, "that one could not withhold
+admiration. The picture remains with me. The sun on the yellow
+cathedral wall ... a vine heavy with scarlet blossoms like splashes of
+blood ... and twenty paces away the firing squad with their Mausers."
+
+Once more, the speaker broke off, as though lost in retrospection of
+something well-remembered. Beyond the girl's absorbed gaze, he saw
+that of the painter, and his dark eyes for an instant glittered with
+something like direct accusation.
+
+"As they arranged the final details, he must have reflected somewhat
+grimly on the irony of things, for at that very moment he could hear
+the staccato popping of the guns he had smuggled past the vigilance of
+the customs. The sound was coming nearer--telling him that in a
+half-hour his friends would be victorious--too late to save him."
+
+As Ribero paused, little Miss Buford, leaning forward across the
+table, gave a sort of gasp.
+
+"He was tall, athletic, gray-eyed," announced the attache
+irrelevantly; "in his eyes dwelt something of the spirit of the
+dreamer. He never faltered."
+
+The speaker lifted his sauterne glass to his lips, and sipped the wine
+deliberately.
+
+"The _teniente_ in command inquired if he wished to pray," Ribero
+added then, "but he shook his head almost savagely. 'No, damn you!' he
+snapped out, as though he were in a hurry about it all, 'Go on with
+your rat-killing. Let's have it over with.'"
+
+The raconteur halted in his narrative.
+
+"Please go on," begged Duska, in a low voice. "What happened?"
+
+The foreigner smiled.
+
+"They fired." Then, as he saw the slight shudder of Duska's white
+shoulder, he supplemented: "But each soldier had left the task for the
+others.... Possibly, they sympathized with him; possibly, they
+sympathized with the revolution; possibly, each of the six secretly
+calculated that the other five would be sufficient. _Quien sabe?_ At
+all events, he fell only slightly wounded. One bullet--" he spoke
+thoughtfully, letting his eyes drop from Saxon's face to the
+table-cloth where Saxon's right hand lay--"one bullet pierced his
+right hand from back to front."
+
+Then, a half-whimsical smile crossed Ribero's somewhat saturnine
+features, for Miss Filson had dropped her napkin on Saxon's side, and,
+when the painter had stooped to recover it, he did not again replace
+the hand on the table.
+
+"Before he could be fired on a second time," concluded the diplomat
+with a shrug, "a new _presidente_ was on his way to the palace. Your
+countryman was saved."
+
+If the hero of Ribero's narrative was a malefactor, at least he was a
+malefactor with the sympathy of Mr. Bellton's dinner-party, as was
+attested by a distinctly audible sigh of relief at the end of the
+story. But Senor Ribero was not quite through.
+
+"It is not, after all, the story that discredits your countryman," he
+explained, "but the sequel. Of course, he became powerful in the new
+regime. It was when he was lauded as a national hero that his high
+fortunes intoxicated him, and success rotted his moral fiber.
+Eventually, he embezzled a fortune from the government which he had
+assisted to establish. There was also a matter of--how shall I
+say?--of a lady. Then, a duel which was really an assassination. He
+escaped with blood on his conscience, presumably to enjoy his stolen
+wealth in his own land."
+
+"I have often wondered," pursued Ribero, "whether, if that man and I
+should ever be thrown together again, he would know me ... and I have
+often wished I could remember him only as the brave adventurer--not
+also as the criminal."
+
+As he finished, the speaker was holding Saxon with his eyes, and had a
+question in his glance that seemed to call for some expression from
+the other. Saxon bowed with a smile.
+
+"It is an engrossing story."
+
+"I think," said Duska suddenly, almost critically, "the first part was
+so good that it was a pity to spoil it with the rest."
+
+Senor Ribero smiled enigmatically into his wine-glass.
+
+"I fear, senorita, that is the sad difference between fiction and
+history. My tale is a true one."
+
+"At all events," continued the girl with vigor, "he was a brave man.
+That is enough to remember. I think it is better to forget the rest."
+
+It seemed to Ribero that the glance Saxon flashed on her was almost
+the glance of gratitude.
+
+"What was his name?" she suddenly demanded.
+
+"He called himself--at that time--George Carter," Ribero said slowly,
+"but gentlemen in the unrecognized pursuits quite frequently have
+occasion to change their names. Now, it is probably something else."
+
+After the dinner had ended, while the guests fell into groups or
+waited for belated carriages, Saxon found himself standing apart, near
+the window. It was open on the balcony, and the man felt a sudden wish
+for the quiet freshness of the outer air on his forehead. He drew back
+the curtain, and stepped across the low sill, then halted as he
+realized that he was not alone.
+
+The sputtering arc-light swinging over the street made the intervening
+branches and leaves of the sidewalk sycamores stand out starkly black,
+like a ragged drop hung over a stage.
+
+The May moon was only a thin sickle, and the other figure on the
+darkly shadowed balcony was vaguely defined, but Saxon at once
+recognized, in its lithe slenderness and grace of pose, Miss Filson.
+
+"I didn't mean to intrude," he hastily apologized. "I didn't know you
+were here."
+
+She laughed. "Would that have frightened you?" she asked.
+
+She was leaning on the iron rail, and the man took his place at her
+side.
+
+"I came with the Longmores," she explained, "and their machine hasn't
+come yet. It's cool here--and I was thinking--"
+
+"You weren't by any chance thinking of Babylon?" he laughed, "or
+Macedonia?"
+
+She shook her head. "Mr. Ribero's story sticks in my mind. It was so
+personal, and--I guess I'm a moody creature. Anyway, I find myself
+thinking of it."
+
+There was silence for a space, except for the laughter that floated up
+from the verandah below them, where a few of the members sat smoking,
+and the softened clicking of ivory from the open windows of the
+billiard-room. The painter's fingers, resting on the iron rail, closed
+over a tendril of clambering moon-flower vine, and nervously twisted
+the stem.
+
+With an impulsive movement, he leaned forward. His voice was eager.
+
+"Suppose," he questioned, "suppose you knew such a man--can you
+imagine any circumstances under which you could make excuses for
+him?"
+
+She stood a moment weighing the problem. "It's a hard question," she
+replied finally, then added impulsively: "Do you know, I'm afraid I'm
+a terrible heathen? I can excuse so much where there is courage--the
+cold sort of chilled-steel courage that he had. What do you think?"
+
+The painter drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his moist
+forehead, but, before he could frame his answer, the girl heard a
+movement in the room, and turned lightly to join her chaperon.
+
+Following her, Saxon found himself saying good-night to a group that
+included Ribero. As the attache shook hands, he held Saxon's somewhat
+longer than necessary, seeming to glance at a ring, but really
+studying a scar.
+
+"You are a good story-teller, Mr. Ribero," said Saxon, quietly.
+
+"Ah," countered the other quickly, "but that is easy, senor, where one
+has so good a listener. By the way, senor, did you ever chance to
+visit Puerto Frio?"
+
+The painter shook his head.
+
+"Not unless in some other life--some life as dead as that of the
+pharaohs."
+
+"Ah, well--" the diplomat turned away, still smiling--"some of the
+pharaohs are remarkably well preserved."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Steele himself had not been a failure at his art. There was in him no
+want of that sensitive temperament and dream-fire which gives the
+artist, like the prophet, a better sight and deeper appreciation than
+is accorded the generality. The only note missing was the necessity
+for hard application, which might have made him the master where he
+was satisfied to be the dilettante. The extreme cleverness of his
+brush had at the outset been his handicap, lulling the hard sincerity
+of effort with too facile results. Wealth, too, had drugged his
+energies, but had not crippled his abilities. If he drifted, it was
+because drifting in smooth seas is harmless and pleasant, not because
+he was unseaworthy or fearful of stormier conditions. In Saxon, he had
+not only recognized a greater genius, but found a friend, and with the
+insouciance of a graceful philosophy he reasoned it out to his own
+contentment. Each craft after its own uses! Saxon was meant for a
+greater commerce. His genius was intended to be an argosy, bearing
+rich cargo between the ports of the gods and those of men. If, in the
+fulfillment of that destiny, the shallop of his own lesser talent and
+influence might act as convoy and guide, luring the greater craft into
+wider voyaging, he would be satisfied. Just now, that guidance ought
+to be away from the Marston influence where lay ultimate danger and
+limitation. He was glad that where people discussed Frederick Marston
+they also discussed his foremost disciple. Marston himself had loomed
+large in the star-chart of painting only a dozen years ago, and was
+now the greatest of luminaries. His follower had been known less than
+half that long. If he were to surpass the man he was now content to
+follow, he must break away from Marston-worship and let his maturer
+efforts be his own--his ultimate style his own. Prophets and artists
+have from the beginning of time arisen from second place to a
+preeminent first--pupils have surpassed their teachers. He had hoped
+that these months in a new type of country and landscape would
+slowly, almost insensibly, wean Saxon away from the influence that had
+made his greatness and now in turn threatened to limit its scope.
+
+The cabin to which he brought his guest was itself a reflection of
+Steele's whim. Fashioned by its original and unimaginative builders
+only as a shelter, with no thought of appearances, it remained, with
+its dark logs and white "chinking," a thing of picturesque beauty. Its
+generous stone chimneys and wide hearths were reminders of the ancient
+days. Across its shingled roof, the sunlight was spotted with shadows
+thrown down from beeches and oaks that had been old when the Indian
+held the country and the buffalo gathered at the salt licks. Vines of
+honeysuckle and morning-glory had partly preempted the walls. Inside
+was the odd mingling of artistic junk that characterizes the den of
+the painter.
+
+Saxon's enthusiasm had been growing that morning since the automobile
+had left the city behind and pointed its course toward the line of
+knobs. The twenty-mile run had been a panorama sparkling with the life
+of color, tempered with tones of richness and soft with haunting
+splendor. Forest trees, ancient as Druids, were playing at being young
+in the almost shrill greens of their leafage. There were youth and
+opulence in the way they filtered the sun through their gnarled
+branches with a splattering and splashing of golden light. Blossoming
+dogwood spread clusters of white amid endless shades and conditions of
+green, and, when the view was not focused into the thickness of
+woodland interiors, it offered leagues of yellow fields and tender
+meadows stretching off to soberer woods in the distance. Back of all
+that were the hills, going up from the joyous sparkle of the middle
+distance to veiled purple where they met the bluest of skies. Saxon's
+fingers had been tingling for a brush to hold and his lids had been
+unconsciously dropping, that his eyes might appraise the colors in
+simplified tones and values.
+
+At last, they had ensconced themselves, and a little later Saxon
+emerged from the cabin disreputably clad in a flannel shirt and
+briar-torn, paint-spotted trousers. In his teeth, he clamped a
+battered briar pipe, and in his hand he carried an equally battered
+sketching-easel and paint-box.
+
+Steele, smoking a cigar in a hammock, looked up from an art journal at
+the sound of a footstep on the boards.
+
+"Did you see this?" he inquired, holding out the magazine. "It would
+appear that your eccentric demi-god is painting in Southern Spain. He
+continues to remain the recluse, avoiding the public gaze. His genius
+seems to be of the shrinking type. Here's his latest sensation as it
+looks to the camera."
+
+Saxon took the magazine, and studied the half-tone reproduction.
+
+"His miracle is his color," announced the first disciple, briefly.
+"The black and white gives no idea. As to his personality, it seems to
+be that of the _poseur_--almost of the snob. His very penchant for
+frequent wanderings incognito and revealing himself only through his
+work is in itself a bid for publicity. He arrogates to himself the
+attributes of traveling royalty. For my master as the man, I have
+small patience. It's the same affectation that causes him to sign
+nothing. The arrogant confidence that no one can counterfeit his
+stroke, that signature is superfluous."
+
+Steele laughed.
+
+"Why not show him that some one can do it?" he suggested. "Why not
+send over an unsigned canvas as a Marston, and drag him out of his
+hiding place to assert himself and denounce the impostor?"
+
+"Let him have his vanities," Saxon said, almost contemptuously. "So
+long as the world has his art, what does it matter?" He turned and
+stepped from the low porch, whistling as he went.
+
+The stranger strolled along with a free stride and confident bearing,
+tempted by each vista, yet always lured on by other vistas beyond.
+
+At last, he halted near a cluster of huge boulders. Below him, the
+creek reflected in rippled counterpart the shimmer of overhanging
+greenery. Out of a tangle of undergrowth beyond reared two slender
+poplars. The middle distance was bright with young barley, and in the
+background stretched the hills in misty purple.
+
+There, he set up his easel, and, while his eyes wandered, his fingers
+were selecting the color tubes with the deft accuracy of the pianist's
+touch on the keys.
+
+For a time, he saw only the thing he was to paint; then, there rose
+before his eyes the face of a girl, and beyond it the sinister visage
+of the South American. His brow darkened. Always, there had lurked in
+the background of his thoughts a specter, some Nemesis who might at
+any moment come forward, bearing black reminders--possible
+accusations. At last, it seemed the specter had come out of the
+shadow, and taken the center of the stage, and in the spotlight he
+wore the features of Senor Ribero. He had intended questioning Ribero,
+but had hesitated. The thing had been sudden, and it is humiliating to
+go to a man one has never met before to learn something of one's self,
+when that man has assumed an attitude almost brutally hostile from the
+outset. The method must first be considered, and, when early that
+morning he had inquired about the diplomat, it had been to learn that
+a night train had taken the man to his legation in Washington. He
+must give the problem in its new guise reflection, and, meanwhile, he
+must live in the shadow of its possible tragedy.
+
+There was no element of the coward's procrastination in Saxon's
+thoughts. Even his own speculation as to what the other man might have
+been, had never suggested the possibility that he was a craven.
+
+He held up his hand, and studied the scar. The bared forearm, under
+the uprolled sleeve, was as brown and steady as a sculptor's work in
+bronze.
+
+Suddenly, he heard a laugh at his back, a tuneful laugh like a trill
+struck from a xylophone, and came to his feet with a realization of a
+blue gingham dress, a girlish figure, a sunbonnet and a huge cluster
+of dogwood blossoms. The sunbonnet and dogwood branches seemed
+conspiring to hide all the face except the violet eyes that looked out
+from them. Near by stood a fox terrier, silently and alertly regarding
+him, its head cocked jauntily to the side.
+
+But, even before she had lowered the dogwood blossoms enough to reveal
+her face, the lancelike uprightness of her carriage brought
+recognition and astonishment.
+
+"Do you mind my staring at you?" she demanded, innocently. "Isn't
+turn-about fair play?"
+
+"But, Miss Filson," he stammered, "I--I thought you lived in town!"
+
+"Then, George didn't tell you that we were to be the closest sort of
+neighbors?" The merriment of her laugh was spontaneous. She did not
+confide to Saxon just why Steele's silence struck her as highly
+humorous. She knew, however, that the place had originally recommended
+itself to its purchaser by reason of just that exact circumstance--its
+proximity.
+
+The man took a hasty step forward, and spoke with the brusqueness of a
+cross-examiner:
+
+"No. Why didn't he tell me? He should have told me! He--" He halted
+abruptly, conscious that his manner was one of resentment for being
+led, unwarned, into displeasing surroundings, which was not at all
+what he meant. Then, as the radiant smile on the girl's face--the
+smile such as a very little girl might have worn in the delight of
+perpetrating an innocent surprise--suddenly faded into a pained
+wonderment, he realized the depth of his crudeness. Of course, she
+could not know that he had come there to run away, to seek asylum. She
+could not guess, that, in the isolation of such a life as his
+uncertainty entailed, associates like herself were the most hazardous;
+that, because she seemed to him altogether wonderful, he distrusted
+his power to quarantine his heart against her artless magnetism. As he
+stood abashed at his own crassness, he wanted to tell her that he
+developed these crude strains only when he was thrown into touch with
+so fine grained a nature as her own; that it was the very sense of his
+own pariah-like circumstance. Then, before she had time to speak, came
+a swift artistic leaping at his heart. He should have known that she
+would be here! It was her rightful environment! She belonged as
+inherently under blossoming dogwood branches as the stars belong
+beyond the taint of earth-smoke. She was a dryad, and these were her
+woods. After all, how could it matter? He had run away bravely. Now,
+she was here also, and the burden of responsibility might rest on the
+woodsprites or the gods or his horoscope or wherever it belonged. As
+for himself, he would enjoy the present. The future was with destiny.
+Of course, friendship is safe so long as love is barred, and of course
+it would be only friendship! Does the sun shine anywhere on trellised
+vines with a more golden light than where the slopes of Vesuvius bask
+just below the smoking sands? He, too, would enjoy the radiance, and
+risk the crater.
+
+She stood, not angry, but a trifle bewildered, a trifle proud in her
+attitude of uptilted chin. In all her little autocratic world, her
+gracious friendliness had never before met anything so like rebuff.
+
+Then, having resolved, the man felt an almost boyish reaction to
+light-hearted gayety. It was much the same gay abandonment that comes
+to a man who, having faced ruin until his heart and brain are sick,
+suddenly decides to squander in extravagant and riotous pleasure the
+few dollars left in his pocket.
+
+"Of course, George should have told me," he declared. "Why, Miss
+Filson, I come from the world where things are commonplace, and here
+it all seems a sequence of wonders: this glorious country, the miracle
+of meeting you again--after--" he paused, then smilingly added--"after
+Babylon and Macedonia."
+
+"From the way you greeted me," she naively observed, "one might have
+fancied that you'd been running away ever since we parted in Babylon
+and Macedon. You must be very tired."
+
+"I _am_ afraid of you," he avowed.
+
+She laughed.
+
+"I know you are a woman-hater. But I was a boy myself until I was
+seventeen. I've never quite got used to being a woman, so you needn't
+mind."
+
+"Miss Filson," he hazarded gravely, "when I saw you yesterday, I
+wanted to be friends with you so much that--that I ran away. Some day,
+I'll tell you why."
+
+For a moment, she looked at him with a puzzled interest. The light of
+a smile dies slowly from most faces. It went out of his eyes as
+suddenly as an electric bulb switched off, leaving the features those
+of a much older man. She caught the look, and in her wisdom said
+nothing--but wondered what he meant.
+
+Her eyes fell on the empty canvas. "How did you happen to begin art?"
+she inquired. "Did you always feel it calling you?"
+
+He shook his head, then the smile came back.
+
+"A freezing cow started me," he announced.
+
+"A what?" Her eyes were once more puzzled.
+
+"You see," he elucidated, "I was a cow-puncher in Montana, without
+money. One winter, the snow covered the prairies so long that the
+cattle were starving at their grazing places. Usually, the breeze from
+the Japanese current blows off the snow from time to time, and we can
+graze the steers all winter on the range. This time, the Japanese
+current seemed to have been switched off, and they were dying on the
+snow-bound pastures."
+
+"Yes," she prompted. "But how did that--?"
+
+"You see," he went on, "the boss wrote from Helena to know how things
+were going. I drew a picture of a freezing, starving cow, and wrote
+back, 'This is how.' The boss showed that picture around, and some
+folk thought it bore so much family resemblance to a starving cow that
+on the strength of it they gambled on me. They staked me to an
+education in illustrating and painting."
+
+"And you made good!" she concluded, enthusiastically.
+
+"I hope to make good," he smiled.
+
+After a pause, she said:
+
+"If you were not busy, I'd guide you to some places along the creek
+where there are wonderful things to see."
+
+The man reached for his discarded hat.
+
+"Take me there," he begged.
+
+"Where?" she demanded. "I spoke of several places."
+
+"To any of them," he promptly replied; "better yet, to all of them."
+
+She shook her head dubiously.
+
+"I ought not to begin as an interruption," she demurred.
+
+"On the contrary," he argued confidently, "the good general first
+acquaints himself with his field."
+
+An hour later, standing at a gap in a tangle of briar, where the
+paw-paw trees grew thick, he watched her crossing the meadow toward
+the roof of her house which topped the foliage not far away. Then, he
+held up his right hand, and scrutinized the scar, almost invisible
+under the tan. It seemed to him to grow larger as he looked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Horton House, where Duska Filson made her home with her aunt and
+uncle, was a half-mile from the cabin in which the two painters were
+lodged. That was the distance reckoned via driveway and turnpike, but
+a path, linking the houses, reduced it to a quarter of a mile. This
+"air line," as Steele dubbed it, led from the hill where the cabin
+perched, through a blackberry thicket and paw-paw grove, across a
+meadow, and then entered, by a picket gate and rose-cumbered fence,
+the old-fashioned garden of the "big house."
+
+Before the men had been long at their summer place, the path had
+become as well worn as neighborly paths should be. To the gracious
+household at Horton House, they were "the boys." Steele had been on
+lifelong terms of intimacy, and the guest was at once taken into the
+family on the same basis as the host.
+
+"Horton House" was a temple dedicated to hospitality. Mrs. Horton,
+its delightful mistress, occasionally smiled at the somewhat
+pretentious name, but it had been "Horton House" when the Nashville
+stage rumbled along the turnpike, and the picturesque little village
+of brick and stone at its back had been the "quarters" for the slaves.
+It would no more do to rechristen it than to banish the ripened old
+family portraits, or replace the silver-laden mahogany sideboard with
+less antique things. The house had been added to from time to time,
+until it sprawled a commodious and composite record of various eras,
+but the name and spirit stood the same.
+
+Saxon began to feel that he had never lived before. His life, in so
+far as he could remember it, had been varied, but always touched with
+isolation. Now, in a family not his own, he was finding the things
+which had hitherto been only names to him and that richness of
+congenial companionship which differentiates life from existence.
+While he felt the wine-like warmth of it in his heart, he felt its
+seductiveness in his brain. The thought of its ephemeral quality
+brought him moments of depression that drove him stalking away alone
+into the hills to fight things out with himself. At times, his
+canvases took on a new glow; at times, he told himself he was painting
+daubs.
+
+About a week after their arrival, Mrs. Horton and Miss Filson came
+over to inspect the quarters and to see whether bachelor efforts had
+made the place habitable.
+
+Duska was as delighted as a child among new toys. Her eyes grew
+luminous with pleasure as she stood in the living-room of the "shack"
+and surveyed the confusion of canvases, charcoal sketches and studio
+paraphernalia that littered its walls and floor. Saxon had hung his
+canvases in galleries where the juries were accounted sternly
+critical; he had heard the commendation of brother artists generously
+admitting his precedence. Now, he found himself almost flutteringly
+anxious to hear from her lips the pronouncement, "Well done."
+
+Mrs. Horton, meanwhile, was sternly and beneficently inspecting the
+premises from living-room to pantry, with Steele as convoy, and Saxon
+was left alone with the girl.
+
+As he brought canvas after canvas from various unturned piles and
+placed them in a favorable light, he found one at whose vivid glow and
+masterful execution, his critic caught her breath in a delighted
+little gasp.
+
+It was a thing done in daring colors and almost blazing with the glare
+of an equatorial sun. An old cathedral, partly vine-covered, reared
+its yellowed walls and towers into a hot sky. The sun beat cruelly
+down on the cobbled street while a clump of ragged palms gave the
+contrasting key of shade.
+
+Duska, half-closing her eyes, gazed at it with uptilted chin resting
+on slender fingers. For a time, she did not speak, but the man read
+her delight in her eyes. At last, she said, her voice low with
+appreciation:
+
+"I love it!"
+
+Turning away to take up a new picture, he felt as though he had
+received an accolade.
+
+"It might have been the very spot," she said thoughtfully, "that Senor
+Ribero described in his story."
+
+Saxon felt a cloud sweep over the sunshine shed by her praise. His
+back was turned, but his face grew suddenly almost gray.
+
+The girl only heard him say quietly:
+
+"Senor Ribero spoke of South America. This was in Yucatan."
+
+When the last canvas had been criticized, Saxon led the girl out to
+the shaded verandah.
+
+"Do you know," she announced with severe directness, "when I know you
+just a little better, I'm going to lecture you?"
+
+"Lecture me!" His face mirrored alarm. "Do it now--then, I sha'n't
+have it impending to terrorize better acquaintance."
+
+She gazed away for a time, her eyes clouding with doubt. At last, she
+laughed.
+
+"It makes me seem foolish," she confessed, "because you know so much
+more than I do about the subject of this lecture--only," she added
+with conviction, "the little I know is right, and the great deal you
+know may be wrong."
+
+"I plead guilty, and throw myself on the mercy of the court." He made
+the declaration in a tone of extreme abjectness.
+
+"But I don't want you to plead guilty. I want you to reform."
+
+Not knowing the nature of the reform required, Saxon remained
+discreetly speechless.
+
+"You are the first disciple of Frederick Marston," she said, going to
+the point without preliminaries. "You don't have to be anybody's
+disciple. I don't know a great deal about art, but I've stood before
+Marston's pictures in the galleries abroad and in this country. I love
+them. I've seen your pictures, too, and you don't have to play tag
+with Frederick Marston."
+
+For a moment, Saxon sat twisting his pipe in his fingers. His silence
+might almost have been an ungracious refusal to discuss the matter.
+
+"Oh, I know it's sacrilege," she said, leaning forward eagerly, her
+eyes deep in their sincerity, "but it's true."
+
+The man rose and paced back and forth for a moment, then halted before
+her. When he spoke, it was with a ring like fanaticism in his voice.
+
+"There is no Art but Art, and Marston is her prophet. That is my Koran
+of the palette." For a while, she said nothing, but shook her head
+with a dissenting smile, which carried up the corners of her lips in
+maddeningly delicious fashion. Then, the man went on, speaking now
+slowly and in measured syllables:
+
+"Some day--when I can tell you my whole story--you will know what
+Marston means to me. What little I have done, I have done in stumbling
+after him. If I ever attain his perfection, I shall still be as you
+say only the copyist--yet, I sometimes think I would rather be the
+true copyist of Marston than the originator of any other school."
+
+She sat listening, the toe of one small foot tapping the floor below
+the short skirt of her gown, her brow delightfully puckered with
+seriousness. A shaft of sun struck the delicate color of her cheeks,
+and discovered coppery glints in her brown hair. She was very slim and
+wonderful, Saxon thought, and out beyond the vines the summer seemed
+to set the world for her, like a stage. The birds with tuneful
+delirium provided the orchestration.
+
+"I know just how great he is," she conceded warmly; "I know how
+wonderfully he paints. He is a poet with a brush for a pen. But
+there's one thing he lacks--and that is a thing you have."
+
+The man raised his brows in challenged astonishment.
+
+"It's the one thing I miss in his pictures, because it's the one thing
+I most admire--strength, virility." She was talking more rapidly as
+her enthusiasm gathered headway. "A man's pictures are, in a way,
+portraits of his nature. He can't paint strong things unless he is
+strong himself."
+
+Saxon felt his heart leap. It was something to know that she believed
+his canvases reflected a quality of strength inherent to himself.
+
+"You and your master," she went on, "are unlike in everything except
+your style. Can you fancy yourself hiding away from the world because
+you couldn't face the music of your own fame? That's not modesty--it's
+insanity. When I was in Paris, everybody was raving about some new
+pictures from his brush, but only his agent knew where he actually
+was, or where he had been for years."
+
+"For the man," he acceded, "I have as small respect as you can have,
+but for the work I have something like worship! I began trying to
+paint, and I was groping--groping rather blindly after something--I
+didn't know just what. Then, one day, I stood before his 'Winter
+Sunset.' You know the picture?" She nodded assent. "Well, when I saw
+it, I wanted to go out to the Metropolitan entrance, and shout Eureka
+up and down Fifth Avenue. It told me what I'd been reaching through
+the darkness of my novitiate to grasp. It seemed to me that art had
+been revealed to me. Somehow," the man added, his voice falling
+suddenly from its enthused pitch to a dead, low one, "everything that
+comes to me seems to come by revelation!"
+
+Into Duska's eyes came quick light of sympathy. He had halted before
+her, and now she arose impulsively, and laid a light hand for a moment
+on his arm.
+
+"I understand," she agreed. "I think that for most artists to come as
+close as you have come would be triumph enough, but you--" she looked
+at him a moment with a warmth of confidence--"you can do a great deal
+more." So ended her first lesson in the independence of art, leaving
+the pupil's heart beating more quickly than at its commencement.
+
+In the days that followed, as May gave way to June and the dogwood
+blossoms dropped and withered to be supplanted by flowering locust
+trees, Saxon confessed to himself that he had lost the first battle of
+his campaign. He had resolved that this close companionship should be
+platonically hedged about; that he would never allow himself to cross
+the frontier that divided the realm of friendship from the hazardous
+territory of love. Then, as the cool, unperfumed beauty of the dogwood
+was forgotten for the sense-steeping fragrance of the locust, he knew
+that he was only trying to deceive himself. He had really crossed this
+forbidden frontier when he passed through the gate that separated the
+grandstand at Churchill Downs from the club-house inclosure. With the
+realization came the resolution of silence. He was a man whose life
+might at any moment renew itself in untoward developments. Until he
+could drag the truth from the sphinx that guarded his secret, his love
+must be as inarticulate as was his sphinx. He spent harrowing
+afternoons alone, and swore with many solemn oaths that he would
+never divulge his feelings, and, when he sought about for the most
+sacred and binding of vows, he swore by his love for Duska.
+
+Because of these things, he sometimes shocked and startled her with
+sporadic demonstrations of the brusquerie into which he withdrew when
+he felt too potential an impulse urging him to the other extreme. And
+she, not understanding it, yet felt that there was some riddle behind
+it all. It pained and puzzled her, but she accepted it without
+resentment--belying her customary autocracy. While she had never gone
+into the confessional of her heart as he had done, these matters
+sometimes had the power of making her very miserable.
+
+His happiest achievements resulted from sketching trips taken to
+points she knew in the hills. He had called her a dryad when she first
+appeared in the woods, and he had been right, for she knew all the
+twisting paths in the tangle of the knobs, unbroken and virgin save
+where the orchards of peach-growers had reclaimed bits of sloping
+soil. One morning at the end of June, they started out together on
+horseback, armed with painting paraphernalia, luncheon and rubber
+ponchos in the event of rain. For this occasion, she had saved a coign
+of vantage she knew, where his artist's eye might swing out from a
+shelving cliff over miles of checkered valley and flat, and league
+upon league of cloud and sky. She led the way by zigzag hill roads
+where they caught stinging blows from back-lashing branches and up
+steep, slippery acclivities. It was one of the times when Saxon was
+drinking the pleasant nectar of to-day, refusing to think of
+to-morrow. She sang as she rode in advance, and he followed with the
+pleasure of a man to whom being unmounted brings a sense of
+incompleteness. He knew that he rode no better than she--and he knew
+that he could ride. In his ears was the exuberance of the birds
+saluting the morning, and in his nostrils the loamy aroma stirred by
+their horses' hoofs from the steeping fragrance of last year's leaves.
+At the end was a view that brought his breath in deep draughts of
+delight.
+
+For two hours, he worked, and only once his eyes left the front. On
+that occasion, he glanced back to see her slim figure stretched with
+childlike and unconscious grace in the long grass, her eyes gazing
+unblinkingly and thoughtfully up to the fleece that drifted across the
+blue of the sky. Clover heads waved fragrantly about her, and one
+long-stemmed blossom brushed her cheek. She did not see him, and the
+man turned his gaze back to the canvas with a leap in his pulses.
+After that, he painted feverishly. Finally, he turned to find her at
+his elbow.
+
+"What is the verdict?" he demanded.
+
+She looked with almost tense eyes. Her voice was low and thrilled with
+wondering delight.
+
+"There is something," she said slowly, "that you never caught before;
+something wonderful, almost magical. I don't know what it is."
+
+With a swift, uncontrollable gesture, he bent a little toward her. His
+face was the face of a man whose heart is in insurrection. His voice
+was impassioned.
+
+"_I_ know what it is," he cried. Then, as she read his look, her
+cheeks crimsoned, and it would have been superfluous for him to have
+added, "Love." He drew back almost with a start, and began to scrape
+the paint smears from his palette. He had quelled the insurrection. At
+least in words, he had not broken his vow.
+
+For a moment, the girl stood silent. She felt herself trembling; then,
+taking refuge in childlike inconsequence, she peered over the edge of
+the cliff.
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed as though the last few moments had not been lived
+through, "there is the most wonderfulest flower!" Her voice was
+disappointment-laden. "And it's just out of reach."
+
+Saxon had regained control of himself. He answered with a composure
+too calm to be genuine and an almost flippant note that rang false.
+
+"Of course. The most wonderfulest things are always just out of reach.
+The edelweiss grows only among the glaciers, and the excelsior crop
+must be harvested on inaccessible pinnacles."
+
+He came and looked over the edge, stopping close to her shoulder. He
+wanted to demonstrate his regained command of himself. A delicate
+purple flower hung on the cliff below as though it had been placed
+there to lure men over the edge.
+
+He looked down the sheer drop, appraised with his eye the frail
+support of a jutting root, then slipped quietly over, resting by his
+arms on the ledge of rock and groping for the root with his toe.
+
+With a short, gasping exclamation, the girl bent forward and seized
+both his elbows. Her fingers clutched him with a strength belied by
+their tapering slenderness.
+
+"What are you doing?" she demanded.
+
+She was kneeling on the ledge, and in her eyes, only a few inches from
+his own, he read, not only alarm, but back of that in the depths of
+the pupils something else. It might have been the reflection of what
+she had a few moments before read in his own. He could feel the soft
+play of her breath on his forehead, and his heart pounded so wildly
+that it seemed to him he must raise his voice to be heard above it.
+Yet, his words and smile were sane.
+
+"I am going to gather flowers," he assured her. "You see," he added
+with an irrelevant whimsicality, "I want to see if the unattainable
+is really beyond me."
+
+"If you go," she said with ominous quietness of voice, "I shall come,
+too."
+
+The man clambered back to the ledge. "I'm not going," he announced.
+
+For a time, neither spoke. Each, with a consciousness of being much
+shaken, was seeking about for the safe ground of commonplace. The
+man's face had suddenly become almost drawn. He was conscious of
+having been too close to the edge in more ways than one, and with the
+consciousness came the old sense of necessity for silence. He was
+approaching one of the moods that puzzled the girl: the attitude of
+fighting her off; the turtle's churlish defense of drawing into
+himself.
+
+It was Duska who spoke first. She laughed as she said lightly:
+
+"For a man who is a great artist, you are really very young and very
+silly."
+
+His voice was hard.
+
+"I'm worse than that," he acceded.
+
+For a moment more, there was awkward silence; then, Duska asked
+simply:
+
+"Aren't you going to paint any more?"
+
+He was gazing at the canvas moodily, almost savagely.
+
+"No," he answered shortly; "if I were to touch it now, I should ruin
+it."
+
+The girl said nothing. She half-turned away from him, and her lips set
+themselves tightly.
+
+As he began packing the impedimenta, storm-pregnant clouds rolled
+swiftly forth over the valley, and emptied themselves in a deluge on
+the two wanderers. The girl, riding under dripping trees, her poncho
+and "nor'wester" shining like metal under the slanting lines of rain,
+went on ahead. In her man's saddle, she sat almost rigidly erect, and
+the gauntleted hand that held the reins of the heavy cavalry bridle
+clutched them with unconscious tautness of grip. Saxon's face was a
+picture of struggle, and neither spoke until they had come to the road
+at the base of the hill where two horses could go abreast. Then, he
+found himself quoting:
+
+    "Her hand was still on her sword hilt, the spur was still on
+            her heel,
+    She had not cast her harness of gray war-dinted steel;
+    High on her red-splashed charger, beautiful, bold and browned,
+    Bright-eyed out of the battle, the Young Queen rode to be
+            crowned."
+
+He did not realize that he had repeated the lines aloud, until she
+turned her face and spoke with something nearer to bitterness than he
+had ever heard in her voice:
+
+"Rode to be crowned--did you say?" And she laughed unhappily.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+For more than a week after the ride to the cliff, Duska withdrew
+herself from the orbit in which Saxon revolved, and the man, feeling
+that she wished to dismiss him, in part at least, used the "air line"
+much less frequently than in the days that had been. Once, when Steele
+had left the cabin early to dine at the "big house," Saxon protested
+that he must stay and write letters. He slipped away, however, in the
+summer starlight, and took one of the canoes from the boat-house on
+the river. He drove the light craft as noiselessly and gloomily as a
+funeral barge along the shadow of the bank, the victim of utter
+misery, and his blackness of mood was intensified when he saw a second
+canoe pass in mid-channel, and recognized Steele's tenor in the
+drifting strains of a sentimental song. There was no moon, and the
+river was only a black mirror for the stars. The tree-grown banks were
+blacker fringes of shadow, but he could make out a slender figure
+wielding the stern paddle with an easy grace which he knew was
+Duska's. His sentiment was in no wise jealousy, but it was in every
+wise heart-hunger.
+
+When they did meet, she was cordial and friendly, but the old intimate
+regime had been disturbed, and for the man the sun was clouded. He was
+to send a consignment of pictures to his Eastern agent for exhibition
+and sale, and he wished to include several of the landscapes he had
+painted since his arrival at the cabin. Finding creative work
+impossible, he devoted himself to that touching up and varnishing
+which is largely mechanical, and made frequent trips to town for the
+selection of frames.
+
+So much of his time had been spent at Horton House that unbroken
+absence would have been noticeable. His visits were, however, rarer,
+and on one occasion Mrs. Horton made an announcement which he found
+decidedly startling.
+
+"I have been wanting to take a trip to Cuba early in the fall, and
+possibly go on to Venezuela where some old friends are in the
+diplomatic service," she said, "but Mr. Horton pleads business, and I
+can't persuade Duska to go with me."
+
+At once, Steele had taken up the project with enthusiasm, asking to
+be admitted to the party and beginning an outline of plans.
+
+Saxon found himself shuddering at the idea of the girl's going to the
+coast where perhaps he himself had a criminal record. He had
+procrastinated too long. He had secretly planned his own trip of
+self-investigation for a time when the equatorial heat had begun to
+abate its midsummer ferocity. Evidently, he must hasten his departure.
+But the girl's answer in part reassured him.
+
+"It doesn't appeal, Aunty. Why not get the Longmores? They are always
+ready to go touring. They've exhausted the far East, and are weeping
+for new worlds."
+
+Saxon went back early that night, and once more tramped the woods.
+Steele lingered, and later, while the whippoorwills were calling and a
+small owl plaintively lamenting, he and Duska sat alone on the
+white-columned verandah.
+
+"Duska," he said suddenly, "is there no chance for me--no little
+outside chance?"
+
+She looked up, and shook her head slowly.
+
+"I wish I could say something else, George," she answered earnestly,
+"because I love you as a very dearest brother and friend, but that is
+all it can ever be."
+
+"Is there no way I can remake or remold myself?" he urged. "I have
+held the Platonic attitude all summer, but to-night makes all the old
+uncontrollable thoughts rise up and clamor for expression. Is there no
+way?"
+
+"George"--her voice was very soft--"it hurts me to hurt you--but I'd
+have to lie to you if I said there was a way. There can't be--ever."
+
+"Is there any--any new reason?" he asked.
+
+For a moment, she hesitated in silence, and the man bent forward.
+
+"I shouldn't have asked that, Duska--I don't ask it," he hastened to
+amend. "Whether there is a new reason or just all the old ones, is
+there any way I can help--any way, leaving myself out of it, of
+course?"
+
+Again, she shook her head.
+
+"I guess there's no way anyone can help," she said.
+
+Back at the cabin, Steele found his guest moodily pacing the verandah.
+The glow of his pipe bowl was a point of red against the black. The
+Kentuckian dropped into a chair, and for a time neither spoke.
+
+At last, Steele said slowly:
+
+"Bob, I have just asked Duska if I had a chance."
+
+The other man wheeled in astonishment. Steele had indeed maintained
+his Platonic pose so well that the other had not suspected the fire
+under what he believed to be an extinct crater. His own feeling had
+been the one thing he had not confided. They had never spoken to each
+other of Duska in terms of love.
+
+"You!" he said, dully. "I didn't know--"
+
+Steele rose. With his hand on the door-knob, he paused.
+
+"Bob," he said, "the answer was the old one. It's also been, 'No.'
+I've had my chance. Of course, I really knew it all the while, and yet
+I had to ask once more. I sha'n't ask again. It hurts her--and I want
+to see her happy." He turned and went in, closing the door behind him.
+
+But Duska was far from happy, however much Steele and others might
+wish to see her so. She spent much time in solitary rides and walks.
+She knew now that she loved Saxon, and she knew that he had shown in
+every wordless way that he loved her, yet could she be mistaken? Would
+he ever speak, since he had not spoken at the cliff? Her own eyes had
+held a declaration, and she had read in his that he understood the
+message. His silence at that time must be taken to mean silence for
+all time.
+
+Saxon had reached his conclusion. He knew that he had hurt her pride,
+had rejected his opportunity. But that might be a transient grief for
+her. For him, it would of course be permanent. Men may love at twenty,
+and recover and love again, even to the number of many times, but to
+live to the age which he guessed his years would total, and then love
+as he did, was irremediable. For just that reason, he must remain
+silent, and must go away. To enter her life by the gate she seemed
+willing to open for him would mean the taking into that sacred
+inclosure of every hideous possibility that clouded his own future. He
+must not enter the gate, and, in order to be sure that a second mad
+impulse would not drive him through it, he must put distance between
+himself and the gate.
+
+On one point, he temporized. He was eager to do one piece of work
+that should be his masterpiece. The greatest achievement of his art
+life must be her portrait. He wanted to paint it, not in the
+conventional evening-gown in which she seemed a young queen among
+women, but in the environment that he liked to think was her own by
+divine right. It was the dryad that he sought to put on canvas.
+
+He asked her with so much genuine pleading in his voice that she
+smilingly consented, and the sittings began in the old-fashioned
+garden at Horton House. She was posed under a spread of branches and
+in such a position that the sun struck down through the leaves,
+kissing into color her cheeks and eyes and hair. It was a pose that
+called for a daring palette, one which, if he succeeded in getting on
+his canvas what he felt, would give a result whereon he might well
+rest his reputation. But to him it meant more than just that, for it
+was giving expression to what he saw through his love of art and his
+art of love.
+
+The hours given to the first sittings were silent hours, but that was
+not remarkable. Saxon always worked in silence, though there were
+times when he painted with gritted teeth because of thoughts he read
+in the face he was studying--thoughts which the model did not know her
+face revealed. At times, Mrs. Horton sat in the shade near by, and
+watched the hand that nursed the canvas with its brush, the steady,
+bare forearm that needed no mahlstick for support and the eyes that
+were narrowed to slits as he studied his tones and wide as he painted.
+Sometimes, Steele lingered near with a novel which he read aloud, but
+it happened that in the final sittings there was no one save painter
+and model.
+
+It was now late in July, and the canvas had begun to take form with a
+miraculous quality and glow. Perhaps, the man himself did not realize
+that he could never again paint such a portrait, or any landscape that
+would be comparable with it. Some men write love-letters that are
+wonderful heart documents, but they write them in black and white,
+with words. Saxon was not only writing a love-letter, but was painting
+all that his resolve did not let him say. He was putting into the work
+pent-up love of such force that it was almost bursting his heart.
+Here on canvas as through some wonderful safety-valve, he was
+passionately converting it all into the vivid eloquence of color.
+
+It had been his fancy, since the picture had become something more
+than a strong, preliminary sketch, that Duska should not see it until
+it neared completion, and she, wishing to have her impression one
+unspoiled by foretastes, had assented to the idea. Each day after the
+posing ended, and while he rested, and let her rest, the face of the
+canvas was covered with another which was blank. Finally came the time
+to ask her opinion. The afternoon light had begun to change with the
+hint of lengthening shadows. The out-door world was aglow with
+gracious weather and the air had the wonderful, almost pathetic
+softness that sometimes comes to Kentucky for a few days in July,
+bringing, as it seems, a fragment strayed out of Indian Summer and
+lost in the mid-heat of the year.
+
+The man stood back and covered the portrait, then, when the girl had
+seated herself before the easel, he stepped forward, and laid his
+hand on the covering. He hesitated a moment, and his fingers on the
+blank canvas trembled. He was unveiling the effort of his life, and to
+him she was the world. If he had failed! Then, with a deft movement,
+he lifted the concealing canvas, and waited.
+
+For a moment, the girl looked with bated breath, then something
+between a groan and a stifled cry escaped her. She turned her eyes to
+him, and rose unsteadily from her seat. Her hands went to her breast,
+and she wavered as though she would fall. Saxon was at her side in a
+moment, and, as he supported her, he felt her arm tremble.
+
+"Are you ill?" he asked, in a frightened voice.
+
+She shook her head, and smiled. She had read the love-letters, and she
+had read, too, what silence must cost him. Other persons might see
+only wonderful art in the portrait, but she saw all the rest, and,
+because she saw it, silence seemed futile.
+
+"It is a miracle!" she whispered.
+
+The man stood for a moment at her side, then his face became gray,
+and he half-wheeled and covered it with his hands.
+
+The girl took a quick step to his side, and her young hands were on
+his shoulders.
+
+"What is it, dear?" she asked.
+
+With an exclamation that stood for the breaking of all the dykes he
+had been building and fortifying and strengthening through the past
+months, he closed his arms around her, and crushed her to him.
+
+For a moment, he was oblivious of every lesser thing. The past, the
+future had no existence. Only the present was alive and vital and in
+love. There was no world but the garden, and that world was flooded
+with the sun and the light of love. The present could not conceivably
+give way to other times before or after. It was like the hills that
+looked down--unchangeable to the end of things!
+
+Nothing else could count--could matter. The human heart and human
+brain could not harbor meaner thoughts. She loved him. She was in his
+arms, therefore his arms circled the universe. Her breath was on his
+face, and life was good.
+
+Then came the shock of realization. His sphinx rose before him--not a
+sphinx that kept the secrets of forty dead centuries, but one that
+held in cryptic silence all the future. He could not offer a love
+tainted with such peril without explaining how tainted it was. Now, he
+must tell her everything.
+
+"I love you," he found himself repeating over and over; "I love you."
+
+He heard her voice, through singing stars:
+
+"I love you. I have never said that to anyone else--never until now.
+And," she added proudly, "I shall never say it again--except to you."
+
+In his heart rose a torrent of rebellion. To tell her now--to poison
+her present moment, wonderful with the happiness of surrender--would
+be cruel, brutal. He, too, had the right to his hour of happiness, to
+a life of happiness! In the strength of his exaltation, it seemed to
+him that he could force fate to surrender his secret. He would settle
+things without making her a sharer in the knowledge that peril
+shadowed their love. He would find a way!
+
+Standing there with her close to his heart, and her own palpitating
+against his breast, he felt more than a match for mere facts and
+conditions. It seemed ridiculous that he had allowed things to bar his
+way so long. Now, he was thrice armed, and must triumph!
+
+"I know now why the world was made," he declared, joyfully. "I know
+why all the other wonderful women and all the other wonderful loves
+from the beginning of time have been! It was," he announced with the
+supreme egotism of the moment, "that I might compare them with this."
+
+And so the resolve to be silent was cast away, and after it went the
+sudden resolve to tell everything. Saxon, feeling only triumph, did
+not realize that he had, in one moment, lost his second and third
+battles.
+
+An hour later, they strolled back together toward the house. Saxon was
+burdened with the canvas on which he had painted his masterpiece. They
+were silent, but walking on the milky way, their feet stirring nothing
+meaner than star-dust. On the verandah, Steele met them, and handed
+his friend a much-forwarded letter, addressed in care of the
+Louisville club where he had dined. It bore the stamp of a South
+American Republic.
+
+It was not until he had gone to his room that night that the man had
+time to glance at it, or even to mark its distant starting point.
+Then, he tore open the envelope, and read this message:
+
+    "My Erstwhile Comrade:
+
+    "Though I've had no line from you in these years I don't
+    flatter myself that you've forgotten me. It has come to my
+    hearing through certain channels--subterranean, of
+    course--that your present name is Saxon and that you've
+    developed genius and glory as a paint-wizard.
+
+    "It seems you are now a perfectly respectable artist!
+    Congratulations--also bravo!
+
+    "My object is to tell you that I've tried to get word to you
+    that despite appearances it was not I who tipped you off to
+    the government. That is God's truth and I can prove it. I
+    would have written before, but since you beat it to God's
+    Country and went West your whereabouts have been a well-kept
+    secret. I am innocent, as heaven is my witness! Of course, I
+    am keeping mum.
+
+                                                  "H. S. R."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+A short time ago, Saxon had felt stronger than all the forces of fate.
+He had believed that circumstances were plastic and man invincible.
+Now, as he bent forward in his chair, the South American letter
+hanging in limp fingers and the coal-oil lamp on the table throwing
+its circle of light on the foreign postmark and stamp of the envelope,
+he realized that the battle was on. The forces of which he had been
+contemptuous were to engage him at once, with no breathing space
+before the combat. Viewing it all in this light, he felt the qualms of
+a general who encounters an aggressive enemy before his line is drawn
+and his battle front arranged.
+
+He had so entirely persuaded himself that his duty was clear and that
+he must not speak to the girl of love that now, when he had done so,
+his entire plan of campaign must be revised, and new problems must be
+considered. When he had been swept away on the tide that carried him
+to an avowal, it had been with the vague sense of realization that,
+if he spoke at all, he must tell the whole story. He had not done so,
+and now came a new question: Had he the right to tell the story until,
+in so far as possible, he had probed its mystery? Suppose his worst
+fears proved themselves. The certainty would be little harder to
+confess than the presumption and the suspense. Suppose, on the other
+hand, the fighting chance to which every man clings should, after all,
+acquit him? Would it not be needless cruelty to inflict on her the
+fears that harried his own thoughts? Must he not try first to arm
+himself with a definite report for, or against, himself?
+
+After all, he argued weakly, or perhaps it was the devil's advocate
+that whispered the insidious counsel, there might be a mistake. The
+man of Ribero's story might still be some one else. He had never felt
+the instincts of murder. Surely, he had not been the embezzler, the
+libertine, the assassin! But, in answer to that argument, his colder
+logic contended there might have been to his present Dr. Jekyll a Mr.
+Hyde of the past. The letter he held in his hand of course meant
+nothing more than that Ribero had talked to some one. It might be
+merely the fault of some idle gossip in a Latin-American cafe, when
+the claret flowed too freely. The writer, this unknown "H. S. R.," had
+probably taken Ribero's testimony at its face value. Then, out of the
+page arose insistently the one sentence that did mean something more,
+the new link in a chain of definite conclusion. "Since you beat it to
+God's Country and went West--" That was the new evidence this
+anonymous witness had contributed. He had certainly gone West!
+
+Assuredly, he must go to South America, and prosecute himself. To do
+this meant to thrust himself into a situation that held a hundred
+chances, but there was no one else who could determine it for him. It
+was not merely a matter of collecting and sifting evidence. It was
+also a test of subjecting his dormant memory to the stimulus of place
+and sights and sounds and smells. When he stood at the spot where
+Carter had faced his executioners, surely, if he were Carter, he would
+awaken to self-recognition. He would slip away on some pretext, and
+try out the issue, and then, when he spoke to Duska, he could speak
+in definite terms. And if he were the culprit? The question came back
+as surely as the pendulum swings to the bottom of the arc, and rested
+at the hideous conviction that he must be the malefactor. Then, Saxon
+rose and paced the floor, his hand convulsively crushing the letter
+into a crumpled wad.
+
+Well, he would not come back! If that were his world, he would not
+reenter it. He was willing to try himself--to be his own prosecutor,
+but, if the thing spelled a sentence of disgrace, he reserved the
+right to be also his own executioner.
+
+Then, the devil's advocate again whispered seductively into his
+perplexity.
+
+Suppose he went and tested the environment, searching conscience and
+memory--and suppose no monitor gave him an answer. Would he not then
+have the right to assume his innocence? Would he not have the right to
+feel certain that his memory, so stimulated and still inactive, was
+not only sleeping, but dead? Would he not be justified in dismissing
+the fear of a future awakening, and, as Steele had suggested, in
+going forward in the person of Robert A. Saxon, abandoning the past as
+completely as he had perhaps abandoned previous incarnations?
+
+So, for the time, he stilled his fears, and under his brush the
+canvases became more wonderful than they had ever been. He had Duska
+at his side, not only in the old intimacy, but in the new and more
+wonderful intimacy that had come of her acknowledged love. He would
+finish the half-dozen pictures needed to complete the consignment for
+the Eastern and European exhibits, then he would start on his journey.
+
+A week later, Saxon took Duska to a dance at the club-house on the top
+of one of the hills of the ridge, and, after she had tired of dancing,
+they had gone to a point where the brow of the knob ran out to a
+jutting promontory of rock. It was a cape in the dim sea of night mist
+which hung upon, and shrouded, the flats below. Beyond the reaches of
+silver gray, the more distant hills rose in mystic shadow-shapes of
+deep cobalt. There were stars overhead, but they were pale in the
+whiter light of the moon, and all the world was painted, as the moon
+will paint it, in silvers and blues.
+
+Back of them was the softened waltz-music that drifted from the
+club-house and the bright patches of color where the Chinese lanterns
+swung among the trees.
+
+As they talked, the man felt with renewed force that the girl had
+given him her love in the wonderful way of one who gives but once, and
+gives all without stint or reserve. It was as though she had presented
+him unconditionally with the key to the archives of her heart, and
+made him possessor of the unspent wealth of all the Incas.
+
+Suddenly, he realized that his plan of leaving her without
+explanation, on a quest that might permit no return, was meeting her
+gift with half-confidence and deception. What he did with himself now,
+he did with her property. He was not at liberty to act without her
+full understanding and sympathy in his undertakings. The plan was one
+of infinite brutality.
+
+He must tell her everything, and then go. He struck a match for his
+cigar, to give himself a moment of arranging his words, and, as he
+stood shielding the light against a faintly stirring breeze, the
+miniature glare fell on her delicately chiseled lips and nose and
+chin. Her expression made him hesitate. She was very young, very
+innocently childlike and very happy. To tell her now would be like
+spoiling a little girls' party. It must be told soon, but not while
+the dance music was still in their ears and the waxy smell of the
+dance candles still in their nostrils.
+
+When he left her at Horton House, he did not at once return to the
+cabin. He wanted the open skies for his thoughts, and there was no
+hope of sleep.
+
+He retraced his steps from the road, and wandered into the
+old-fashioned garden. At last, he halted by the seat where he had
+posed her for the portrait. The moon was sinking, and the shadows of
+the garden wall and trees and shrubs fell in long, fantastic angles
+across the silvered earth. The house itself was dark except where the
+panes of her window still glowed. Standing between the tall stalks of
+the hollyhocks, he held his watch up to the moon. It was half-past two
+o'clock.
+
+Then, he looked up and started with surprise as he saw her standing
+in the path before him. At first, he thought that his imagination had
+projected her there. Since she had left him at the stairs, the picture
+she had made in her white gown and red roses had been vividly
+permanent, though she herself had gone.
+
+But, now, her voice was real.
+
+"Do you prowl under my windows all night, kind sir?" she laughed,
+happily. "I believe you must be almost as much in love as I am."
+
+The man reached forward, and seized her hand.
+
+"It's morning," he said. "What are you doing here?"
+
+"I couldn't sleep," she assured him. Then, she added serenely: "Do you
+suppose that the moon shines like this every night, or that I can
+always expect times like these? You know," she taunted, "it was so
+hard to get you to admit that you cared that it was an achievement. I
+must be appreciative, mustn't I? You are an altogether reserved and
+cautious person."
+
+He seized her in his arms with neither reserve nor caution.
+
+"Listen," he said in an impassioned voice, "I have no right to touch
+you. In five minutes, you will probably not even let me speak to you.
+I had no right to speak. I had no right to tell you that I loved you!"
+
+She did not draw away. She only looked into his eyes very solemnly.
+
+"You had no right?" she repeated, in a bewildered voice. "Don't you
+love me?"
+
+"You don't have to ask that," he avowed. "You know it. Your own heart
+can answer such questions."
+
+"Then," she decreed with womanlike philosophy, "you had a right to say
+so--because I love you, and that is settled."
+
+"No," he expostulated, "I tell you I did not have the right. You must
+forget it. You must forget everything." He was talking with mad
+impetuosity.
+
+"It is too late," she said simply. "Forget!" There was an indignant
+ring in her words. "Do you think that I could forget--or that, if I
+could, I would? Do you think it is a thing that happens every day?"
+
+From a tree at the fence line came the softly lamenting note of a
+small owl, and across the fields floated the strident shriek of a
+lumbering night freight.
+
+To Saxon's ears, the inconsequential sounds came with a painful
+distinctness. It was only his own voice that seemed to him muffled in
+a confusion of roaring noises. His lips were so dry that he had to
+moisten them with his tongue.
+
+To hesitate, to temporize, even to soften his recital, would mean
+another failure in the telling of it. He must plunge in after his old
+method of directness, even brutality, without preface or palliation.
+
+Here, at all events, brutality were best. If his story appalled and
+repelled her, it would be the blow that would free her from the
+thraldom of the love he had unfairly stolen. If she turned from him
+with loathing, at least anger would hurt her less than heartbreak.
+
+"Do you remember the story Ribero so graphically told of the
+filibuster and assassin and the firing squad in the plaza?" As he
+spoke, Saxon knew with a nauseating sense of certainty that his brain
+had never really doubted his identity. He had futilely argued with
+himself, but it was only his eagerness of wish that had kept clamoring
+concerning the possibility of a favorable solution. All the while, his
+reason had convicted him. Now, as he spoke, he felt sure, as sure as
+though he could really remember, and he felt also his unworthiness to
+speak to her, as though it were not Saxon, but Carter, who held her in
+his arms. He suddenly stepped back and held her away at arms' length,
+as though he, Saxon, were snatching her from the embrace of the other
+man, Carter. Then, he heard her murmuring:
+
+"Yes, of course I remember."
+
+"And did you notice his look of astonishment when I came? Did you
+catch the covert innuendoes as he talked--the fact that he talked at
+me--that he was accusing me--my God! recognizing me?"
+
+The girl put up her hands, and brushed the hair back from her
+forehead. She shook her head as though to shake off some cloud of
+bewilderment and awaken herself from the shock of a nightmare. She
+stood so unsteadily that the man took her arm, and led her to the
+bench against the wall. There, she sank down with her face in her
+hands. It seemed a century, but, when she looked up again, her face,
+despite its pallor in the moonlight, was the face of one seeking
+excuses for one she loves, one trying to make the impossible jibe with
+fact.
+
+"I suppose you did not catch the full significance of that narrative.
+No one did except the two of us--the unmasker and the unmasked. Later,
+he studied a scar on my hand. It's too dark to see, but you can feel
+it."
+
+He caught her fingers in his own. They were icy in his hot clasp, as
+he pressed them against his right palm.
+
+"Tell me how it happened. Tell me that--that the sequel was a lie!"
+She imperiously commanded, yet there was under the imperiousness a
+note of pleading.
+
+"I can't," he answered. "He seemed to know the facts. I don't."
+
+Her senses were unsteady, reeling things, and he in his evening
+clothes was an axis of black and white around which the moonlit world
+spun drunkenly.
+
+Her voice was incredulous, far away.
+
+"You don't know?" she repeated, slowly. "You don't know what you
+did?"
+
+Then, for the first time, he remembered that he had not told her of
+the blind door between himself and the other years. He had presented
+himself only on a plea of guilty to the charge, without even the
+palliation of forgetfulness.
+
+Slowly steeling himself for the ordeal, he went through his story. He
+told it as he had told Steele, but he added to it all that he had not
+told Steele--all of the certainty that was building itself against his
+future out of his past. He presented the case step by step as a
+prosecutor might have done, adding bit of testimony after bit of
+testimony, and ending with the sentence from the letter, which told
+him that he had gone West. He had played the coward long enough. Now,
+he did not even mention the hope he had tried to foster, that there
+might be a mistake. It was all so horribly certain that those hopes
+were ghosts, and he could no longer call them from their graves. The
+girl listened without a word or an interruption of any sort.
+
+"And so," he said calmly at the end, "the possibility that I vaguely
+feared has come forward. The only thing that I know of my other life
+is a disgraceful thing--and ruin."
+
+There was a long, torturing silence as she sat steadily, almost
+hypnotically, gazing into his eyes.
+
+Then, a remarkable thing happened. The girl came to her feet with the
+old lithe grace that had for the moment forsaken her, leaving her a
+shape of slender distress. She rose buoyantly and laughed! With a
+quick step forward, she threw her arms around his neck, and stood
+looking into his drawn face.
+
+He caught at her arms almost savagely.
+
+"Don't!" he commanded, harshly. "Don't!"
+
+"Why?" Her question was serene.
+
+"Because it was Robert Saxon that you loved. You sha'n't touch Carter.
+I can't let Carter touch you." He was holding her wrists tightly, and
+pressing her away from him.
+
+"I have never touched Carter," she said, confidently. "They lied about
+it, dear. You were never Carter."
+
+In the white light, her upturned eyes were sure with confidence.
+
+"Now, you listen," she ordered. "You told me a case that your
+imagination has constructed from foundation to top. It is an ingenious
+case. Its circumstantial evidence is skilfully woven into conviction.
+They have hanged men on that sort of evidence, but here there is a
+court of appeals. I know nothing about it. I have only my woman's
+heart, but my woman's heart knows you. There is no guilt in you--there
+never has been. You have tortured yourself because you look like a man
+whose name is Carter."
+
+She said it all so positively, so much with the manner of a decree
+from the supreme bench, that, for a moment, the ghosts of hope began
+to rise and gather in the man's brain; for a moment, he forgot that
+this was not really the final word.
+
+He had crucified himself in the recital to make it easier for her to
+abandon him. He had told one side only, and she had seen only the
+force of what he had left unsaid. If that could be possible, it might
+be possible she was right. With the reaction came a wild momentary
+joyousness. Then, his face grew grave again.
+
+"I had sworn by every oath I knew," he told her, "that I would speak
+no word of love to you until I was no longer anonymous. I must go to
+Puerto Frio at once, and determine it."
+
+Her arms tightened about his neck, and she stood there, her hair
+brushing his face as though she would hold him away from everything
+past and future except her own heart.
+
+"No! no!" she passionately dissented. "Even if you were the man, which
+you are not, you are no more responsible for that dead life than for
+your acts in some other planet. You are mine now, and I am satisfied."
+
+"But, if afterward," he went on doggedly, "if afterward I should awake
+into another personality--don't you see? Neither you nor I, dearest,
+can compromise with doubtful things. To us, life must be a thing clean
+beyond the possibility of blot."
+
+She still shook her head in stubborn negation.
+
+"You gave yourself to me," she said, "and I won't let you go. You
+won't wake up in another life. I won't let you--and, if you do--" she
+paused, then added with a smile on her lips that seemed to settle
+matters for all time--"that is a bridge we will cross when we come to
+it--and we will cross it together."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+When he reached the cabin, Saxon found Steele still awake. The gray
+advance-light of dawn beyond the eastern ridges had grown rosy, and
+the rosiness had brightened into the blue of living day when an early
+teamster, passing along the turnpike, saw two men garbed in what he
+would have called "full-dress suits," still sitting over their cigars
+on the verandah of the hill shack. A losing love either expels a man
+into the outer sourness of resentment, or graduates him into a
+friendship that needs no further testing. Steele was not the type that
+goes into an embittered exile. His face had become somewhat fixed as
+he listened, but there had been no surprise. He had known already,
+and, when the story was ended, he was an ally.
+
+"There are two courses open to you," he said, when he rose at last
+from his seat, "the plan you have of going to South America, and the
+one I suggested of facing forward and leaving the past behind. If you
+do the first, whether or not you are the man they want, the
+circumstantial case is strong. You know too little of your past to
+defend yourself, and you are placing yourself in the enemy's hands.
+The result will probably be against you with equal certainty whether
+innocent or guilty."
+
+"Letting things lie," demurred Saxon, "solves nothing."
+
+"Why solve them?" Steele paused at his door. "It would seem to me that
+with her in your life you would be safe against forgetting your
+present at all events--and that present is enough."
+
+The summer was drawing to its close while Saxon still wavered. Unless
+he faced the charge that seemed impending near the equator, he must
+always stand, before himself at least, convicted. Yet, Duska was
+immovable in her decision, and Steele backed her intuition with so
+many plausible, masculine arguments that he waited. He was packing and
+preparing the pictures that were to be shipped to New York. Some of
+them would be exhibited and sold there. Others, to be selected by his
+Eastern agent, would go on to the Paris market. He had included the
+landscape painted on the cliff, on the day when the purple flower
+lured him over the edge, and the portrait of the girl. These pictures,
+however, he specified, were only for exhibition, and were not under
+any circumstances to be sold.
+
+Each day, he insisted on the necessity of his investigation, and
+argued it with all the forcefulness he could command, but Duska
+steadfastly overruled him.
+
+Once, as the sunset dyed the west with the richness of gold and purple
+and orange and lake, they were walking their horses along a hill lane
+between pines and cedars. The girl's eyes were drinking in the color
+and abundant beauty, and the man rode silent at her saddle skirt. She
+had silenced his continual argument after her usual decisive fashion.
+Now, she turned her head, and demanded:
+
+"Suppose you went and settled this, would you be nearer your
+certainty? The very disproving of this suspicion would leave you where
+you were before Senor Ribero told his story."
+
+"It would mean this much," he argued. "I should have followed to its
+end every clew that was given me. I should have exhausted the
+possibilities, and I could then with a clear conscience leave the rest
+to destiny. I could go on feeling that I had a right to abandon the
+past because I had questioned it as far as I knew."
+
+She was resolute.
+
+"I should," he urged, "feel that in letting you share the danger I had
+at least tried to end it."
+
+She raised her chin almost scornfully, and her eyes grew deeper.
+
+"Do you think that danger can affect my love? Are we the sort of
+people who have no eyes in our hearts, and no hearts in our eyes, who
+live and marry and die, and never have a hint of loving as the gods
+love? I want to love you that way--audaciously--taking every chance.
+If the stars up there love, they love like that."
+
+Some days later, Mrs. Horton again referred to her wish to make the
+trip to Venezuela. To the man's astonishment, Duska appeared this time
+more than half in favor of it, and spoke as though she might after all
+reconsider her refusal to be her aunt's traveling companion. Later,
+when they were alone, he questioned her, and she laughed with the
+note of having a profound secret. At last, she explained.
+
+"I am interested in South America now," she informed him. "I wasn't
+before. I shouldn't think of letting you go there, but I guess I'm
+safe in Puerto Frio, and I might settle your doubts myself. You see,"
+she added judicially, "I'm the one person you can trust not to betray
+your secret, and yet to find out all about this mysterious Mr.
+Carter."
+
+Saxon was frankly frightened. Unless she promised that she would do
+nothing of the sort, he would himself go at once. He had waited in
+deference to her wishes, but, if the thing were to be recognized as
+deserving investigation at all, he must do it himself. He could not
+protect himself behind her as his agent. She finally assented, yet
+later Mrs. Horton once more referred to the idea of the trip as though
+she expected Duska to accompany her.
+
+Then it was that Saxon was driven back on strategy. The idea was one
+that he found it hard to accept, yet he knew that he could never gain
+her consent, and her suggestion proved that, though she would not
+admit it, at heart she realized the necessity of a solution. The
+hanging of his canvases for exhibition afforded an excuse for going to
+New York. On his arrival there, he would write to her, explaining his
+determination to take a steamer for the south, and "put it to the
+touch, to win or lose it all." There seemed to be no alternative.
+
+He did not take Steele into his confidence, because Steele agreed with
+Duska, and should be able to say, when questioned, that he had not
+been a party to the conspiracy. When Saxon stood, a few days later, on
+the step of an inbound train, the girl stood waving her sunbonnet,
+slenderly outlined against the green background of the woods beyond
+the flag-station. A sudden look of pain crossed the man's face, and he
+leaned far out for a last glimpse of her form.
+
+Steele saw Duska's smile grow wistful as the last car rounded the
+curve.
+
+"I can't quite accustom myself to it," he said, slowly: "this new girl
+who has taken the place of the other, of the girl who did not know how
+to love."
+
+"I know more about it," she declared, "than anybody else that ever
+lived. And I've only one life to give to it."
+
+Saxon's first mistake was born of the precipitate haste of love. He
+wrote the letter to Duska that same evening on the train. It was a
+difficult letter to write. He had to explain, and explain
+convincingly, that he was disobeying her expressed command only
+because his love was not the sort that could lull itself into false
+security. If fate held any chance for him, he would bring back
+victory. If he laid the ghost of Carter, he would question his sphinx
+no further.
+
+The writing was premature, because he had to stop in Washington and
+seek Ribero. He had some questions to ask. But, at Washington, he
+learned that Ribero had been recalled by government. Then, hurrying
+through his business in New York, Saxon took the first steamer
+sailing. It happened to be by a slow line, necessitating several
+transfers.
+
+It was characteristic of Duska that, when she received the letter
+hardly a day after Saxon's departure, she did not at once open it,
+but, slipping it, dispatch-like, into her belt, she called the
+terrier, and together they went into the woods. Here, sitting among
+the ferns with the blackberry thicket at her back and the creek
+laughing below, she read and reread the pages.
+
+For a while, she sat stunned, her brow drawn; then, she said to the
+terrier in a voice as nearly plaintive as she ever allowed it to be:
+
+"I don't like it. I don't want him ever to go away--and yet--" she
+tossed her head upward--"yet, I guess I shouldn't have much use for
+him if he didn't do just such things."
+
+The terrier evidently approved the sentiment, for he cocked his head
+gravely to the side, and slowly wagged his stumpy tail.
+
+But the girl did not remain long in idleness. For a time, her forehead
+was delicately corrugated under the stress of rapid thinking as she
+sat, her fingers clasped about her updrawn knees, then she rose and
+hurried to Horton House. There were things to be done and done at
+once, and it was her fashion, once reaching resolution, to act
+quickly.
+
+It was necessary to take Mrs. Horton into her full confidence, because
+it was necessary that Mrs. Horton should be ready to go with her, as
+fast as trains and steamers could carry them, to a town called Puerto
+Frio in South America, and South America was quite a long way off.
+Mrs. Horton had known for weeks that something more was transpiring
+than showed on the surface. She had even inferred that there was "an
+understanding" between her niece and the painter, and this inference
+she had not found displeasing. The story that Duska told did astonish
+her, but under her composure of manner Mrs. Horton had the ability to
+act with prompt decision. Mr. Horton knew only part, but was
+complacent, and saw no reason why a trip planned for a later date
+should not be "advanced on the docket," and it was so ordered.
+
+Steele, of course, already knew most of the story, and it was he who
+kept the telephone busy between the house and the city ticket-offices.
+While the ladies packed, he was acquiring vast information as to
+schedules and connections. He learned that they could catch an
+outgoing steamer from New Orleans, which would probably put them at
+their destination only a day or two behind Saxon. Incidentally, in
+making these arrangements, Steele reserved accommodations for himself
+as well as Mrs. Horton and her niece.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With the American coast left behind, Saxon's journey through the
+Caribbean, even with the palliation of the trade-winds, was
+insufferably hot. The slenderly filled passenger-list gave the slight
+alleviation of an uncrowded ship. Those few travelers whose
+misfortunes doomed them to such a cruise at such a time, lay
+listlessly under the awnings, and watched the face of the water grow
+bluer, bluer, bluer to the hot indigo of the twentieth parallel, where
+nothing seemed cool enough for energy or motion except the flying fish
+and the pursuing gull.
+
+There were several days of this to be endured, and the painter,
+thinking of matters further north and further south, found no delight
+in its beauty. He would stand, deep in thought, at the bow when day
+died and night was born without benefit of twilight, watching the disk
+of the sun plunge into the sea like a diver. It seemed that Nature
+herself was here sudden and passionate in matters of life and death.
+He saw the stars come out, low-hanging and large, and the water blaze
+with phosphorescence wherever a wave broke, brilliantly luminous where
+the propeller churned the wake. It was to him an ominous beauty,
+fraught with crowding portents of ill omen.
+
+The entering and leaving of ports became monotonous. Each was a
+steaming village of hot adobe walls, corrugated-iron custom houses and
+sweltering, ragged palms. At last, at a town no more or less appealing
+than the others, just as the ear-splitting whistle screeched its last
+warning of departure, a belated passenger came over the side from a
+frantically-driven row-boat. The painter was looking listlessly out at
+the green coast line, and did not notice the new arrival.
+
+The newcomer followed his luggage up the gangway to the deck, his
+forehead streaming perspiration, his none-too-fresh gray flannels
+splashed with salt water. At the top, he shook the hand of the second
+officer, with the manner of an old acquaintance.
+
+"I guess that was close!" he announced, as he mopped his face with a
+large handkerchief, and began fanning himself with a stained Panama
+hat. "Did the--the stuff get aboard all right at New York?"
+
+The officer looked up, with a quick, cautious glance about him.
+
+"The machinery is stowed away in the hold," he announced.
+
+"Good," replied the newcomer, energetically. "That machinery must be
+safeguarded. It is required in the development of a country that needs
+developin'. Do I draw my usual stateroom? See the purser? Good!"
+
+The tardy passenger was tall, a bit under six feet, but thin almost to
+emaciation. His face was keen, and might have been handsome except
+that the alertness was suggestive of the fox or the weasel--furtive
+rather than intelligent. The eyes were quick-seeing and roving; the
+nose, aquiline; the lips, thin. On them sat habitually a
+half-satirical smile. The man had black hair sprinkled with gray, yet
+he could not have been more than thirty-six or seven.
+
+"I'll just run in and see the purser," he announced, with his tireless
+energy. Saxon, turning from the hatch, caught only a vanishing glimpse
+of a tall, flannel-clad figure disappearing into the doorway of the
+main saloon, as he himself went to his stateroom to freshen himself up
+for dinner.
+
+As the painter emerged from his cabin a few minutes before the call of
+the dinner-bugle, the thin man was lounging against the rail further
+aft.
+
+Saxon stood for a moment drinking in the grateful coolness that was
+creeping into the air with the freshening of the evening breeze.
+
+The stranger saw him, and started. Then, he looked again, with the
+swift comprehensiveness that belonged to his keen eyes, and stepped
+modestly back into the protecting angle where he could himself be
+sheltered from view by the bulk of a tarpaulined life-boat. When Saxon
+turned and strolled aft, the man closely followed these movements,
+then went into his own cabin.
+
+That evening, at dinner, the new passenger did not appear. He dined in
+his stateroom, but later, as Saxon lounged with his own thoughts on
+the deck, the tall American was never far away, though he kept always
+in the blackest shadow thrown by boats or superstructure on the
+moonlit deck. If Saxon turned suddenly, the other would flatten
+himself furtively and in evident alarm back into the blackness. He had
+the manner of a man who is hunted, and who has recognized a pursuer.
+
+Saxon, ignorant even of the other's presence, had no knowledge of the
+interest he was himself exciting. Had his curiosity been aroused to
+inquiry, he might have learned that the man who had recently come
+aboard was one Howard Stanley Rodman. It is highly improbable,
+however, that he would have discovered the additional fact that the
+"stuff" Rodman had asked after as he came aboard was not the
+agricultural implements described in its billing, but revolutionary
+muskets to be smuggled off at sunrise to-morrow to the coast village
+La Punta, five miles above Puerto Frio.
+
+Not knowing that a conspirator was hiding away in a cabin through fear
+of him, Saxon was of course equally unconscious of having as shipmate
+a man as dangerous as the cornered wolf to one who stands between
+itself and freedom.
+
+La Punta is hardly a port. The shipping for this section of the east
+coast goes to Puerto Frio, and Saxon had not come out of his cabin
+the next morning when Rodman left. The creaking of crane chains
+disturbed his sleep, but he detected nothing prophetic in the sound.
+To have done so, he must have understood that the customs officer at
+this ocean flag station was up to his neck in a revolutionary plot
+which was soon to burst; that the steamship line, because of interests
+of its own which a change of government would advance, had agreed to
+regard the rifles in the hold as agricultural implements, and that Mr.
+Rodman was among the most expert of traveling salesmen for revolutions
+and organizers of _juntas_. To all that knowledge, he must then have
+added the quality of prophecy. It is certain, however, that, had he
+noted the other's interest in himself and coupled with that interest
+the coincidence that the initials of the furtive gentleman's name on
+the purser's list were "H. S. R.," he would have slept still more
+brokenly.
+
+If he had not looked Mr. Rodman up on the list, Mr. Rodman had not
+been equally delinquent. The name Robert A. Saxon had by no means
+escaped his attention.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Puerto Frio sits back of its harbor, a medley of corrugated iron
+roofs, adobe walls and square-towered churches. Along the water front
+is a fringe of ragged palms. At one end of the semicircle that breaks
+the straight coast line, a few steamers come to anchorage; at the
+other rise jugged groups of water-eaten rocks, where the surf runs
+with a cannonading of breakers, and tosses back a perpetual lather of
+infuriated spray. From the mole, Saxon had his first near view of the
+city. He drew a long inhalation of the hot air, and looked anxiously
+about him.
+
+He had been asking himself during the length of his journey whether a
+reminder would be borne in on his senses, and awaken them to a throb
+of familiarity. He had climbed the slippery landing stairs with the
+oppressing consciousness that he might step at their top into a new
+world--or an old and forgotten world. Now, he drew to one side, and
+swept his eyes questioningly about.
+
+Before him stretched a broad open space, through which the dust
+swirled hot and indolent. Beyond lay the Plaza of Santo Domingo, and
+on the twin towers of its church two crosses leaned dismally askew. A
+few barefooted natives slouched across the sun-refracting square,
+their shadows blue against the yellow heat. Saxon's gaze swung
+steadily about the radius of sight, but his brain, like a paralyzed
+nerve, touched with the testing-electrode, gave no reflex--no
+response.
+
+There was a leap at his heart which became hope as his cab jolted on
+to the Hotel Frances y Ingles over streets that awoke no convicting
+memories. He set out almost cheerfully for the American Legation to
+present the letters of introduction he had brought from New York and
+to tell his story. Thus supplied with credentials and facts, the
+official might be prepared to assist him.
+
+His second step--the test upon which he mainly depended--involved a
+search for a yellow cathedral wall, surrounded with red flowers and
+facing an open area. There, Saxon wanted to stand, for a moment,
+against the masonry, with the sounds of the street in his ears and the
+rank fragrance of the vine in his nostrils. There he would ask his
+memory, under the influence of these reminders, the question the
+water-front had failed to answer.
+
+That wandering, however, should be reserved for the less conspicuous
+time of night. He would spend the greater part of the day, since his
+status was so dubious, in the protection of his room at the hotel.
+
+If night did not answer the question, he would go again at sunrise,
+and await the early glare on the wall, since that would exactly
+duplicate former conditions. The night influences would be softer,
+less cruel--and less exact, but he would go first by darkness and
+reconnoiter the ground--unless his riddle were solved before.
+
+The American Legation, he was informed, stood as did his hostelry, on
+the main Plaza, only a few doors distant and directly opposite the
+palace of the President.
+
+He was met by Mr. Partridge, the secretary of legation. The minister
+was spending several days at Miravista, but was expected back that
+evening, or to-morrow morning at the latest. In the meantime, if the
+secretary could be of service to a countryman, he would be glad. The
+secretary was a likable young fellow with frank American eyes. He
+fancied Saxon's face, and was accordingly cordial.
+
+"There is quite a decent club here for Anglo-Saxon exiles," announced
+Mr. Partridge. "Possibly, you'd like to look in? I'm occupied for the
+day, but I'll drop around for you this evening, and make you out a
+card."
+
+Saxon left his letters with the secretary to be given to the chief on
+arrival, and returned to the "Frances y Ingles."
+
+He did not again emerge from his room until evening, and, as he left
+the _patio_ of the hotel for his journey to the old cathedral, the
+moon was shining brightly between the shadows of the adobe walls and
+the balconies that hung above the pavements. As he went out through
+the street-door, Mr. Howard Stanley Rodman glanced furtively up from a
+corner table, and tossed away a half-smoked cigarette.
+
+The old cathedral takes up a square. In the niches of its outer wall
+stand the stone effigies of many saints. Before its triple,
+iron-studded doors stretches a tiled terrace. At its right runs a
+side-street, and, attracted by a patch of clambering vine on the
+time-stained walls, where the moon fell full upon them, Saxon turned
+into the byway. At the far end, the facade rose blankly, fronting a
+bare drill-ground, and there he halted. The painter had not counted on
+the moon. Now, as he took his place against the wall, it bathed him in
+an almost effulgent whiteness. The shadows of the abutments were inky
+in contrast, and the disused and ancient cannon, planted at the curb
+for a corner post, stood out boldly in relief. But the street was
+silent and, except for himself, absolutely deserted.
+
+For a time, he stood looking outward. From somewhere at his back, in
+the vaultlike recesses of the building, drifted the heavy pungency of
+incense burning at a shrine.
+
+His ears were alert for the sounds that might, in their drifting
+inconsequence, mean everything. Then, as no reminder came, he closed
+his eyes, and wracked his imagination in concentrated thought as a
+monitor to memory. He groped after some detail of the other time, if
+the other time had been an actual fragment of his life. He strove to
+recall the features of the officer who commanded the death squad, some
+face that had stood there before him on that morning; the style of
+uniforms they wore. He kept his eyes closed, not only for seconds, but
+for minutes, and, when in answer to his focused self-hypnotism and
+prodding suggestion no answer came, there came in its stead a torrent
+of joyous relief.
+
+Then, he heard something like a subdued ejaculation, and opened his
+eyes upon a startling spectacle.
+
+Leaning out from the shadow of an abutment stood a thin man, whose
+face in the moon showed a strange mingling of savagery and terror. It
+was a face Saxon did not remember to have seen before. The eyes
+glittered, and the teeth showed as the thin lips were drawn back over
+them in a snarling sort of smile. But the most startling phase of the
+tableau, to the man who opened his eyes upon it without warning, was
+the circumstance of the unknown's pressing an automatic pistol
+against his breast. Saxon's first impression was that he had fallen
+prey to a robber, but he knew instinctively that this expression was
+not that of a man bent on mere thievery. It had more depth and evil
+satisfaction. It was the look of a man who turns a trick in an
+important game.
+
+As the painter gazed at the face and figure bending forward from the
+abutment's sooty shadow like some chimera or gargoyle fashioned in the
+wall, his first sentiment was less one of immediate peril than of
+argument with himself. Surely, so startling a denouement should serve
+to revive his memory, if he had faced other muzzles there!
+
+When the man with the pistol spoke, it was in words that were
+illuminating. The voice was tremulous with emotion, probably nervous
+terror, yet the tone was intended to convey irony, and was partly
+successful.
+
+"I presume," it said icily, "you wished to enjoy the sensation of
+standing at that point--this time with the certainty of walking away
+alive. It must be a pleasant reminiscence, but one never can tell."
+The thin man paused, and then began afresh, his voice charged with a
+bravado that somehow seemed to lack genuineness.
+
+"Last time, you expected to be carried away dead--and went away
+living. This time, you expected to walk away in safety, and, instead,
+you've got to die. Your execution was only delayed." He gave a short,
+nervous laugh, then his voice came near breaking as he went on almost
+wildly: "I've got to kill you, Carter. God knows I don't want to do
+it, but I must have security! This knowledge that you are watching me
+to drop on me like a hawk on a rat, will drive me mad. They've told me
+up and down both these God-forsaken coasts, from Ancon to Buenos
+Ayres, from La Boca to Concepcion, that you would get me, and now it's
+sheer self-defense with me. I know you never forgave a wrong--and God
+knows that I never did you the wrong you are trying to revenge. God
+knows I am innocent."
+
+Rodman halted breathless, and stood with his flat chest rising and
+falling almost hysterically. He was in the state when men are most
+irresponsible and dangerous.
+
+Meanwhile, a pistol held in an unsteady hand, its trigger under an
+uncertain finger, emphasized a situation that called for electrical
+thinking. To assert a mistake in identity would be ludicrous. Saxon
+was not in a position to claim that. The other man seemed to have
+knowledge that he himself lacked. Moreover, that knowledge was the
+information which Saxon, as self-prosecutor, must have. The only
+course was to meet the other's bravado with a counter show of bravado,
+and keep him talking. Perhaps, some one would pass in the empty
+street.
+
+"Well," demanded Rodman between gasping breaths, "why in hell don't
+you say something?"
+
+Saxon began to feel the mastery of the stronger man over the weaker,
+despite the fact that the weaker supplemented his inferiority with a
+weapon.
+
+"It appears to me," came the answer, and it was the first time Rodman
+had heard the voice, now almost velvety, "it appears to me that there
+isn't very much for me to say. You seem to be in the best position to
+do the talking."
+
+"Yes, damn you!" accused the other, excitedly. "You are always the
+same--always making the big pyrotechnic display! You have grandstanded
+and posed as the debonair adventurer, until it's come to be second
+nature. That won't help now!" The thin man's braggadocio changed
+suddenly to something like a whine.
+
+"You know I'm frightened, and you're throwing a bluff. You're a fool
+not to realize that it's because I'm so frightened that I am capable
+of killing you. I've craned my neck around every corner, and jumped at
+every shadow since that day--always watching for you. Now, I'm going
+to end it. I see your plan as if it were printed on a glass pane.
+You've discovered my doings, and, if you left here alive, you'd inform
+the government."
+
+Here, at least, Saxon could speak, and speak truthfully.
+
+"I don't know anything, or care anything, about your plans," he
+retorted, curtly.
+
+"That's a damned lie!" almost shrieked the other man. "It's just your
+style. It's just your infernal chicanery. I wrote you that letter in
+good faith, and you tracked me. You found out where I was and what I
+was doing. How you learned it, God knows, but I suppose it's still
+easy for you to get into the confidence of the _juntas_. The moment I
+saw you on the boat, the whole thing flashed on me. It was your fine
+Italian brand of work to come down on the very steamer that carried my
+guns--to come ashore just at the psychological moment, and turn me
+over to the authorities on the exact verge of my success! Your brand
+of humor saw irony in that--in giving me the same sort of death you
+escaped. But it's too late. Vegas has the guns in spite of you!
+There'll be a new president in the palace within three days." The
+man's voice became almost triumphant. He was breathing more normally
+once again, as his courage gained its second wind.
+
+Saxon was fencing for time. Incidentally, he was learning profusely
+about the revolution of to-morrow, but nothing of the revolution of
+yesterday.
+
+"I neither know, nor want to know, anything about your dirty work," he
+said, shortly. "Moreover, if you think I'm bent on vengeance, you are
+a damned fool to tell me."
+
+Rodman laughed satirically.
+
+"Oh, I'm not so easy as you give me credit for being. You are trying
+to 'kiss your way out,' as the thieves put it. You're trying to talk
+me out of killing you, but do you know why I'm willing to tell you all
+this?" He halted, then went on tempestuously. "I'll tell you why. In
+the first place, you know it already, and, in the second place, you'll
+never repeat any information after to-night. It's idiotic perhaps, but
+my reason for not killing you right at the start is that I've got a
+fancy for telling you the true facts, whether you choose to believe
+them or not. It will ease my conscience afterward."
+
+Saxon stood waiting for the next move, bracing himself for an
+opportunity that might present itself, the pistol muzzle still pointed
+at his chest.
+
+"I'm not timid," went on the other. "You know me. Howard Rodman,
+speakin' in general, takes his chances. But I am afraid of you, more
+afraid than I am of the devil in hell. I know I can't bluff you. I
+saw you stand against this wall with the soldiers out there in front,
+and, since you can't be frightened off, you must be killed." The man's
+voice gathered vehemence as he talked, and his face showed growing
+agitation. "And the horrible part is that it's all a mistake, that I'd
+rather be friends with you, if you'd let me. I never was informant
+against you."
+
+He paused, exhausted by his panic and his flow of words. Saxon, with a
+strong effort, collected his staggered senses.
+
+"Why do you think I come for vengeance?" he asked.
+
+"Why do I think it?" The thin man laughed bitterly. "Why, indeed? What
+except necessity or implacable vengeance could drive a man to this
+God-forsaken strip of coast? And you--you with money enough to live
+richly in God's country, you whose very face in these boundaries
+invites imprisonment or death! What else could bring you? But I knew
+you'd come--and, so help me God, I'm innocent."
+
+A sudden idea struck Saxon. This might be the cue to draw on the
+frightened talker without self-revelation.
+
+"What do you want me to believe were the real facts?" he demanded,
+with an assumption of the cold incredulity that seemed expected of
+him.
+
+The other spoke eagerly.
+
+"That morning when General Ojedas' forces entered Puerto Frio, and the
+government seized me, you were free. Then, I was released, and you
+arrested. You drew your conclusions. Oh, they were natural enough.
+But, before heaven, they were wrong!"
+
+Saxon felt that, until he had learned the full story, he must remain
+the actor. Accordingly, he allowed himself a skeptical laugh. Rodman,
+stung by the implied disbelief, took up his argument again:
+
+"You think I'm lying. It sounds too fishy! Of course, it was my
+enterprise. It was a revolution of my making. You were called in as
+the small lawyer calls in the great one. I concede all that. For me to
+have sacrificed you would have been infamous, but I didn't do it. I
+had been little seen in Puerto Frio. I was not well known. I had
+arranged it all from the outside while you had been in the city. You
+were less responsible, but more suspected. You remember how carefully
+we planned--how we kept apart. You know that even you and I met only
+twice, and that I never even saw your man, Williams."
+
+Through the bitterness of conviction, a part of Saxon's brain seemed
+to be looking on impersonally and marveling, almost with amusement, at
+the remarkable position in which he found himself. Here stood a man
+before him with a pistol pressed close to his chest, threatening
+execution, denouncing, cursing, yet all the while giving evidence of
+terror, almost pleading with his victim to believe his story! It was
+the armed man who was frightened, who dreaded the act he declared he
+was about to commit. And, as Saxon stood listening, it dawned upon
+him, in the despair of the moment, that it was a matter of small
+concern to himself whether or not the other fired. The story he had
+heard had already done the injury. The bullet would be less cruel....
+Rodman went on:
+
+"I bent every effort to saving you, but Williams had confessed. He
+was frightened. It was his first experience. He didn't know of my
+connection with the thing. So help me God, that is the true version."
+
+The story sickened Saxon, coming to him as it did in a form he could
+no longer disbelieve. He raised his hands despairingly. At last, he
+heard the other's voice again.
+
+"When the scrap ended, and you were in power, I had gone. I was afraid
+to come back. I knew what you would think, and then, after you left
+the country, I couldn't find where you had gone."
+
+"You may believe me or not," the painter said apathetically, "but I
+have forgotten all that. I have no resentment, no wish for vengeance.
+I had not even suspected you. I give you my word on that."
+
+"Of course," retorted Rodman excitedly, "you'd say that. You're
+looking down a gun-barrel. You're talking for your life. Of course,
+you'd lie."
+
+Then, the revolutionist did a foolish and unguarded thing. He came a
+step nearer, and pressed the muzzle closer against Saxon's chest, his
+own eyes glaring into those of his captive. The movement threw Saxon's
+hands out of his diminished field of sight. In an instant, the painter
+had caught the wrist of the slighter man in a grip that paralyzed the
+hand, and forced it aside. The pistol fell from the nerveless fingers,
+and dropped clattering to the flagstones. As it struck, Saxon swept it
+backward with his foot.
+
+Rodman leaped frantically backward, and stood for a moment rearranging
+his crumpled cuff with the dazed manner of a man who hopes for no
+quarter. His lower jaw dropped, and he remained trembling, almost
+idiotic of mien. Then, as Saxon picked up the weapon and stood
+fingering its trigger, the filibuster drew himself up really with
+dignity. He stretched out both empty hands, and shrugged his
+shoulders.
+
+The fear of an enemy silently stalking him had filled his days with
+terror. Now that he regarded death as certain, his cowardice dropped
+away like a discarded cloak.
+
+"I don't ask much," he said simply; "only, for God's sake kill me
+here! Don't surrender me to the government! At least, let the other
+fellows know that I was dead before their plans were betrayed."
+
+"I told you," said Saxon in a dull voice, "that I had no designs on
+you. I meant it! I told you I had forgotten. I meant it!"
+
+As he spoke, Saxon's head dropped forward on his chest, and he stood
+breathing heavily. The moonlight, falling full on his face, showed
+such heart-broken misery as might have belonged to the visage of some
+unresting ghost in an Inferno. His eyes were the eyes of utter
+despair, and the hand that held the pistol hung limp at his side, the
+weapon lying loose in its palm. Rodman stood wide-eyed before him. Had
+he already been killed and returned to life, he could hardly have been
+more astonished, and, when Saxon at last raised his face and spoke
+again, the astonishment was greater than ever.
+
+"Take your gun," said the painter, raising his hand slowly, and
+presenting the weapon stock first. "If you want to kill me--go ahead."
+
+Rodman, for an instant, suspected some subterfuge; then, looking into
+the eyes before him, he realized that they were too surcharged with
+sadness to harbor either vengeance or treachery. He could not fathom
+the meaning, but he realized that from this man he had nothing to
+fear. He slowly reached out his hand, and, when he had taken the
+pistol, he put it away in his pocket.
+
+Saxon laughed bitterly.
+
+"So, that's the answer!" he muttered.
+
+Without a word, the painter turned, and walked toward the front of the
+cathedral; without a word, Rodman fell in by his side, and walked with
+him. When they had gone a square, Saxon was again himself except for a
+stonily set face. Rodman was wondering how to apologize. Carter had
+never been a liar. If Carter said he had no thought of vengeance, it
+was true, and Rodman had insulted him with the surmise.
+
+Finally, the thin man inquired in a different and much softer voice:
+
+"What are you doing in Puerto Frio?"
+
+"It has nothing to do with revenge or punishment," replied Saxon, "and
+I don't want to hear intrigues."
+
+A quarter of an hour later, they reached the main plaza, Rodman still
+mystified and Saxon walking on aimlessly at his side. He had no
+definite destination. Nothing mattered. After a long silence, Rodman
+demanded:
+
+"Aren't you taking a chance--risking it in Puerto Frio?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+There was another pause, broken at last by Rodman:
+
+"Take this from me. Get at once in touch with the American legation,
+and keep in touch! Stand on your good behavior. You may get away with
+it." He interrupted himself abruptly with the question: "Have you been
+keeping posted on South American affairs of late?"
+
+"I don't know who is President," replied Saxon.
+
+"Well, I'll tip you off. The only men who held any direct proof
+about--about the $200,000 in gold that left about the same time you
+did"--Saxon winced--"went into oblivion with the last revolution. Time
+is a great restorer, and so many similar affairs have intervened that
+you are probably forgotten. But, if I were you, I would get through
+my affairs early and--beat it. It's a wise boy that is not where he
+is, when he's wanted by some one he doesn't want."
+
+Saxon made no reply.
+
+"Say," commented the irrepressible revolutionist, as they strolled
+into the arcade at the side of the main plaza, "you've changed a bit
+in appearance. You're a bit heavier, aren't you?"
+
+Saxon did not seem to hear.
+
+The plaza was gay with the life of the miniature capital. Officers
+strolled about in their brightest uniforms, blowing cigarette smoke
+and ogling the senoritas, who looked shyly back from under their
+mantillas.
+
+From the band-stand blared the national air. Natives and foreigners
+sauntered idly, taking their pleasure with languid ease. But Rodman
+kept to the less conspicuous sides and the shadows of the arcade, and
+Saxon walked with him, unseeing and deeply miserable.
+
+Between the electric glare of the plaza and the first arc-light of the
+_Calle Bolivar_ is a corner comparatively dark. Here, the men met two
+army officers in conversation. Near them waited a handful of
+soldiers. As the Americans came abreast, an officer fell in on either
+side of them.
+
+"Pardon, senors," said one, speaking in Spanish with extreme
+politeness, "but it is necessary that we ask you to accompany us to
+the Palace."
+
+The soldiers had fallen in behind, following. Now, they separated, and
+some of them came to the front, so that the two men found themselves
+walking in a hollow square. Rodman halted.
+
+"What does this signify?" he demanded in a voice of truculent
+indignation. "We are citizens of the United States!"
+
+"I exceedingly deplore the inconvenience," declared the officer. "At
+the Palace, I have no doubt, it will be explained."
+
+"I demand that we be taken first to the United States Legation,"
+insisted Rodman.
+
+The officer regretfully shook his head. "Doubtless, senors," he
+assured them, "your legation will be immediately communicated with. I
+have no authority to deviate from my orders."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+At the Palace, the Americans were separated. Saxon was ushered into a
+small room, barely furnished. Its one window was barred, and the one
+door that penetrated its thick wall was locked from the outside. It
+seemed incredible that under such stimulus his memory should remain
+torpid. This must be an absolute echo from the past--yet, he could not
+remember. But Rodman remembered--and evidently the government
+remembered.
+
+About the same hour, Mr. Partridge called at the "Frances y Ingles,"
+where he learned that Senor Saxon had gone out. He called again late
+in the evening. Saxon had not returned.
+
+The following morning, the Hon. Charles Pendleton, Envoy Extraordinary
+and Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States of America, read
+Saxon's letters of introduction. The letters sufficiently established
+the standing of the artist to assure him his minister's interest.
+Partridge was dispatched to the hotel to bring the traveler to the
+legation. Partridge came back within the hour, greatly perturbed.
+Having found that Saxon had not returned during the night, and knowing
+the customs of the country, he had spent a half-hour in investigating
+by channels known to himself. He learned, at the end of much
+questioning and cross-questioning, that the senor, together with
+another gentleman evidently also an _Americano del Nordo_, had passed
+the street-door late in the evening, with military escort.
+
+Mr. Partridge hastened to his legation at a rate of speed subversive
+of all Puerto Frio traditions. In Puerto Frio, haste is held to be an
+affront to dignity, and dignity is esteemed.
+
+The Hon. Charles Pendleton listened to his subordinate's report with
+rising choler.
+
+His diplomacy was of the aggressive type, and his first duty was that
+of making the protecting pinions of the spread eagle stretch wide
+enough to reach every one of those entitled to its guardianship.
+
+Saxon and Rodman had the night before entered the frowning walls of
+the Palace through a narrow door at the side. The American minister
+now passed hastily between files of presented arms. Inside, he learned
+that his excellency, _el Presidente_, had not yet finished his
+breakfast, but earnestly desired his excellency, _el ministro_, to
+share with him an alligator pear and cup of coffee.
+
+In the suave presence of the dictator, the minister's choler did not
+cease. Rather, it smoldered while he listened perfunctorily to
+flattering banalities. He had struck through intermediary stages; had
+passed over the heads of departments and holders of portfolios, to
+issue his ultimatum to the chief executive. Yet, in approaching his
+subject, he matched the other's suavity with a pleasantness that the
+dictator distrusted. The dark face of the autocrat became grave until,
+when Mr. Pendleton reached the issue, it was deeply sympathetic,
+surprised and attentive.
+
+"I am informed that some one--I can not yet say who--wearing your
+excellency's uniform, seized an American citizen of prominence on the
+streets of Puerto Frio last evening."
+
+The President was shocked and incredulous.
+
+"Impossible!" he exclaimed with deep distress; then, again:
+"Impossible!"
+
+From the diplomat's eloquent sketching of the situation, it might have
+been gathered that the United States war department stood anxiously
+watching for such affronts, and that the United States war department
+would be very petulant when notification of the incident reached it.
+Mr. Pendleton further assured his excellency, _el Presidente_, that it
+would be his immediate care to see that such notification had the
+right of way over the Panama cable.
+
+"I have information," began the dictator slowly, "that two men
+suspected of connection with an insurgent _junta_ have been arrested.
+As to their nationality, I have received no details. Certainly, no
+American citizen has been seized with my consent. The affair appears
+grave, and shall be investigated. Your excellency realizes the
+necessity of vigilance. The revolutionist forfeits his nationality."
+He spread his hands in a vague gesture.
+
+"Mr. Robert Saxon," retorted the minister, "should hardly be a
+suspect. The fact that he was not a guest at my legation, and for the
+time a member of my family, was due only to the accident of my absence
+from the city on his arrival yesterday."
+
+With sudden bustle, the machinery of the Palace was set in motion. Of
+a surety, some one had blundered, and "some one" should be condignly
+punished!
+
+It was a very irate gentleman, flushed from unwonted exertion in the
+tropics, who was ushered at last into Saxon's room. It was a very much
+puzzled and interested gentleman who stood contemplatively studying
+the direct eyes of the prisoner a half-hour later.
+
+Saxon had told Mr. Pendleton the entire narrative of his quest of
+himself, and, as he told it, the older man listened without a question
+or interruption, standing with his eyes fixed on the teller, twisting
+an unlighted cigar in his fingers.
+
+"Mr. Saxon, I am here to safeguard the interests of Americans. Our
+government does not, however, undertake to chaperon filibustering
+expeditions. It becomes necessary to question you."
+
+There followed a brief catechism in which the replies seemed to
+satisfy the questioner. When he came to the incident of his meeting
+with Rodman, Saxon paused.
+
+"As to Rodman," he said, "who was arrested with me, I have no
+knowledge that would be evidence. I know nothing except from the
+hearsay of his recital."
+
+Mr. Pendleton raised his hand.
+
+"I am only questioning you as to yourself. This other man, Rodman,
+will have to prove his innocence. I'm afraid I can't help him.
+According to their own admissions, they know nothing against you
+beyond the fact that you were seen with him last night."
+
+Saxon came to his feet, bewildered.
+
+"But the previous matter--the embezzlement?" he demanded. "Of course,
+I had nothing to do with this affair. It was that other for which I
+was arrested."
+
+The envoy laughed.
+
+"You punched cows six years ago. You cartooned five years ago, and you
+have painted landscapes ever since. I presume, if it became necessary,
+you could prove an alibi for almost seven years?"
+
+Saxon nodded. He fancied he saw the drift of the argument. It was to
+culminate in the same counsel that Steele had given. He would be
+advised to allow the time to reach the period when his other self
+should be legally dead.
+
+Mr. Pendleton paced the floor for a space, then came back and halted
+before the cot, on the edge of which the prisoner sat.
+
+"I have been at this post only two years, but I am, of course,
+familiar with the facts of that case." He paused, then added with
+irrelevance: "It may be that you bear a somewhat striking resemblance
+to this particularly disreputable conspirator. Of course, that's
+possible, but--"
+
+"But highly improbable," admitted Saxon.
+
+"Oh, you are not that man! That can be mathematically demonstrated,"
+asserted Mr. Pendleton suddenly. "I was only reflecting on the
+fallibility of circumstantial evidence. I am a lawyer, and once, as
+district attorney, I convicted a man on such evidence. He's in the
+penitentiary now, and it set me wondering if--"
+
+But Saxon stood dumfounded, vainly trying to speak. His face was
+white, and he had seized the envoy by the arm with a grip too
+emphatic for diplomatic etiquette.
+
+"Do you know what you are saying?" he shouted. "I am not that man! How
+do you know that?"
+
+"I know it," responded Mr. Pendleton calmly, "because the incident of
+the firing-squad occurred five years ago--and the embezzlement only
+four years back."
+
+Saxon remained staring in wide-eyed amazement. He felt his knees grow
+suddenly weak, and the blood cascaded through the arteries of his
+temples. Then, he turned, and, dropping again to the edge of the cot,
+covered his face with his hands.
+
+"You see," explained Mr. Pendleton, "there is only one ground upon
+which any charge against you can be reinstated--an impeachment of your
+evidence as to how you have put in the past five years. And," he
+smilingly summarized, "since the case comes before this court solely
+on your self-accusation, since you have journeyed some thousands of
+miles merely to prosecute yourself, I regard your evidence on that
+point as conclusive."
+
+Later, the envoy, with his arm through that of the liberated
+prisoner, walked out past deferential sentries into the Plaza.
+
+"And, now, the blockade being run," he amiably inquired, "what are
+your plans?"
+
+"Plans!" exclaimed Saxon scornfully; "plans, sir, is plural. I have
+only one: to catch the next boat that's headed north. Why," he
+explained, "there is soon going to be an autumn in the Kentucky hills
+with all the woods a blaze of color."
+
+The minister's eyes took on a touch of nostalgia.
+
+"I guess there's nothing much the matter with the autumn in Indiana,
+either," he affirmed.
+
+They walked on together at a slow gait, for the morning sun was
+already beginning to beat down as if it were focused through a
+burning-glass.
+
+"And say," suggested Mr. Pendleton at last, "if you ever get to a
+certain town in Indiana called Vevay, which is on some of the more
+complete maps, walk around for me and look at the Davis building. You
+won't see much--only a hideous two-story brick, with a metal roof and
+dusty windows, but my shingle used to hang out there--and it's in
+God's country!"
+
+Before they had reached the legation, Saxon remembered that his plans
+involved another detail, and with some secrecy he sought the cable
+office, and wrote a message to Duska. Its composition consumed a
+half-hour, yet he felt it was not quite the masterpiece the occasion
+demanded. It read:
+
+"Arrived yesterday. Slept in jail. Out to-day. Am not he."
+
+The operator, counting off the length with his pencil, glanced up
+thoughtfully.
+
+"It costs a dollar a word, sir," he vouchsafed.
+
+But Saxon nodded affluently, for he knew that the _City of Rio_ sailed
+north that afternoon, and he did not know that her sister ship, the
+_Amazon_, with Duska on board, was at this moment nosing its way south
+through the tepid water--only twenty-four hours away.
+
+As the _City of Rio_ wound up her rusty anchor chains that afternoon,
+Saxon was jubilantly smoking his pipe by the rail.
+
+In the launch just putting off from the steamer's side stood the Hon.
+Mr. Pendleton, waving his hat, and Jimmy Partridge wildly shouting,
+"Give my regards to Broadway!" The minister's flag, which had floated
+over the steamer while the great personage was on board, was just
+dipping, and Saxon's hand was still cramped under the homesick
+pressure of the farewell grips.
+
+Suddenly, the traveler had a feeling of a presence at his elbow, and,
+turning, was profoundly astonished to behold again the complacent
+visage of Mr. Rodman.
+
+"You see, I still appear to be among those present," announced the
+filibuster, with some breeziness of manner. "It's true that I stand
+before you, 'my sweet young face still haggard with the anguish it has
+worn,' but I'm here, which is, after all, the salient feature of the
+situation. Say, what did you do to them?"
+
+"I?" questioned Saxon. "I did nothing. The minister came and took me
+out of their Bastile."
+
+"Well, say, he must have thrown an awful scare into them." Mr. Rodman
+thoughtfully stroked his chin with a thin forefinger. "He must have
+intimidated them unmercifully and brutally. They stampeded into my
+wing of the Palace, and set me free as though they were afraid I had
+the yellow-fever. 'Wide they flung the massive portals'--all that sort
+of thing. Now, what puzzles me is, why did they do it? They had the
+goods on me--almost. However, I'm entirely pleased." Rodman laughed as
+he lighted a cigar, and waved his hand with mock sentiment toward the
+shore. "And I had put the rifles through, too," he declared,
+jubilantly. "I'd turned them over to the _insurrecto_ gentleman in
+good order. Did they clamor for your blood about the $200,000?"
+
+"Rodman," said Saxon slowly, "I hardly expect you to believe it, but
+that was a case of mistaken identity. I'm not the man you think. I was
+never in Puerto Frio before."
+
+Rodman let the cigar drop from his astonished lips, and caught wildly
+after it as it fell overboard.
+
+"What?" he demanded, at last. "How's that?"
+
+"It was a man who looked like me," elucidated Saxon.
+
+"You are damned right--he looked like you!" Rodman halted, amazed into
+silence. At last, he said: "Well, you have got the clear nerve! What's
+the idea, anyhow. Don't you trust me?"
+
+The artist laughed.
+
+"I hardly thought you would credit it," he said. "After all, that
+doesn't make much difference. The point is, my dear boy, _I_ know it."
+
+But Rodman's debonair smile soon returned. He held up his hand with a
+gesture of acceptance.
+
+"What difference does it make? A gentleman likes to change his
+linen--why not his personality? I dare say it's a very decent
+impulse."
+
+For a moment, Saxon looked up with an instinctive resentment for the
+politely phrased skepticism of the other. Then, his displeasure
+changed to a smile. He had, for a moment, felt the same doubt when Mr.
+Pendleton brought his verdict. Rodman had none of the facts, and a
+glance at the satirical features showed that it would be impossible
+for this unimaginative adventurer to construe premises to a seemingly
+impossible conclusion. He was the materialist, and dealt in palpable
+appearances. After all, what did it matter? He had made his effort,
+and would, as he had promised Duska, vex his Sphinx with no more
+questioning. He would go on as Robert Saxon, feeling that he had done
+his best with conscientious thoroughness. It was, after all, only
+cutting the Gordian knot in his life. After a moment, he looked up.
+
+"Which way do you go?" he inquired.
+
+The other man shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I go back to Puerto Frio--after the blow-off."
+
+"After the blow-off?" Saxon repeated, in interrogation.
+
+"Sure!" Rodman stretched his thin hand shoreward, and dropped his
+voice. "Take a good look at yon fair city," he laughed, "for, before
+you happen back here again, it may have fallen under fire and sword."
+
+The soldier of fortune spoke with some of the pride that comes to the
+man who feels he is playing a large game, whether it be a game of
+construction or destruction, or whether, as is oftener the case, it be
+both destruction and construction.
+
+The painter obediently looked back at the adobe walls and cross-tipped
+towers.
+
+"Puerto Frio has been very good to me," he said, in an enigmatical
+voice.
+
+But Rodman was thinking too much of his own plans to notice the
+comment.
+
+"Do you see the mountain at the back of the city?" he suddenly
+demanded. "That's San Francisco. Do you see anything queer about it?"
+
+The artist looked at the peak rearing its summit against the hot blue
+overhead, and saw only a sleeping tropical background for the indolent
+tropical panorama stretching at its base.
+
+"Well--" Rodman dropped his voice yet lower--"if you had a pair of
+field glasses and studied the heights, you could see a few black
+specks that are just now disused guns. By day after to-morrow, or, at
+the latest, one day more, each of those specks will be a crater, and
+the town will be under a shower of solid shot. There's some class to
+work that can turn as mild a mannered hill as that into a
+volcano--no?"
+
+Saxon stood gazing with fascination.
+
+"Meanwhile," he heard the other comment, "shipboard is good enough for
+yours truly--because, as you know, shipboard is neutral ground for
+political offenders--and the next gentleman who occupies the Palace
+will be a friend who owes me something."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Saxon denied himself the lure of the deck that evening. Though he
+would probably be close behind his messages in arriving, he was
+devoting himself to a full narration embodied in a love-letter.
+
+He bent over the task in the closeness of the dining saloon, with such
+absorption that he did not rise to investigate even when, with a
+protracted shrieking of whistles, there came sudden cessation from the
+jarring throb of screw-shaft and engines. Then, the _City of Rio_ came
+to a full stop. He vaguely presumed that another important port had
+been reached, and did not suspect that the vessel lay out of sight of
+land, and that a second steamer, southbound, had halted on signal, and
+lay likewise motionless, her lights glittering just off the starboard
+bow.
+
+When, almost two hours later, he had folded the last of many pages,
+and gone on deck for a breath before turning in, the engines were
+once more noisily throbbing, and he saw only the bulk and lights of
+another vessel pointed down-world under steam.
+
+But, as usual, Rodman, gentleman of multifarious devices, was not
+letting facts escape him. Indeed, it was at Rodman's instance that two
+mail ships, the _City of Rio_ and the _Amazon_, had marked time for an
+hour and a half. In the brewing of affairs, Rodman was just now an
+important personage, and the commanders of these lines were under
+instructions from their offices to regard his requests as orders, and
+to obey them with due respect and profound secrecy. The shifting of
+administrations at Puerto Frio meant certain advantages in the way of
+concessions to gentlemen in Wall Street whose word, with these
+steamers, was something more than influential.
+
+Mr. Rodman had been rowed across from the _Rio_ to the _Amazon_, and
+he had taken with him the hand-luggage that made his only impedimenta.
+In Mr. Rodman's business, it was important to travel light. If he
+found Senor Miraflores among the passengers of the _Amazon_, it was
+his intention to right-about-face, and return south again.
+
+Senor Miraflores had been in the States as the secret and efficient
+head of that _junta_ which Rodman served. He had very capably directed
+the shipping of rifles and many _sub-rosa_ details that must be
+handled beyond the frontier, when it is intended to change governments
+without the knowledge or consent of armed and intrenched incumbents.
+The home-coming of Senor Miraflores must of necessity be
+unostentatious, since his arrival would be the signal for the
+conversion of the quiet steeps of San Francisco into craters.
+
+Rodman knew that, if the senor were on board the _Amazon_, his name
+would not be on the sailing-list, and his august personality would be
+cloaked in disguise. His point of debarkation would be some secluded
+coast village where fellow conspirators could hide him. His advent
+into the capital itself would not be made at all unless made at the
+head of an invading army, and, if so made, he would remain as minister
+of foreign affairs in the cabinet of General Vegas, to whom just now,
+as to himself, the city gates were closed.
+
+But Senor Miraflores had selected a more cautious means of entry than
+the ship, which might bear travelers who knew him. Rodman spent an
+hour on the downward steamer. He managed to see the face of every
+passenger, and even investigated the swarthy visages in the steerage.
+He asked of some tourists casual questions as to destination, and
+chatted artlessly, then went over the side again, and was rowed back
+across the intervening strip of sea. Immediately upon his departure
+overside, the _Amazon_ proceeded on her course, and five minutes later
+the _City of Rio_ was also under way.
+
+The next morning, after a late breakfast, Saxon was lounging at the
+rail amidship. He had ceased looking backward, and all his gaze was
+for the front. Ahead of him, the white superstructure, the white-duck
+uniform of the officer pacing the bridge, the whiteness of the
+holystoned deck, all stood boldly out against the deep cobalt of the
+gently swelling sea. Saxon was satisfied with life, and, when he saw
+Rodman sauntering toward him, he looked up with a welcoming nod.
+
+"Hello, Carter--I mean Saxon." The gun-smuggler corrected his form of
+address with a laugh.
+
+The breezy American was a changed and improved man. The wrinkled gray
+flannels had given way to natty white duck. His Panama hat was new and
+of such quality that it could be rolled and drawn through a ring as
+large as a half-dollar. He was shaven to an extreme pinkness of face.
+As Saxon glanced up, his eyes wearing tell-tale recognition of the
+transformation, the thin man laughed afresh.
+
+"Notice the difference, don't you?" he genially inquired, rolling a
+cigarette. "The gray grub is splendidly changed into the snow-white
+butterfly. I'm a very flossy bug, eh, Saxon?"
+
+The painter admitted the soft self-impeachment with a qualification.
+
+"I begin to think you are a very destructive one."
+
+"I am," announced Rodman, calmly. "I could spin you many a yarn of
+intrigue, but for the fact that, since you began wearing a halo
+instead of a hat, you have become too sanctified to listen."
+
+"Inasmuch," smilingly suggested the painter, "as we might yet be
+languishing in the _cuartel_ except for the fact that I was able to
+give so good an account of myself, I don't see that you have any
+reasonable quarrel with my halo."
+
+Rodman raised his brows.
+
+"Oh, I never lost sight of the fact that you had some reason for the
+saint role, and, as you say, I was in on the good results. But, now
+that you are flitting northward, what's the idea of keeping your ears
+stopped?"
+
+"They are open," declared Mr. Saxon graciously; "you are at liberty to
+tell me anything you like, but only what you like. I'm not thirsting
+for criminal confessions."
+
+"That's all right, but you--" Rodman broke off, and his lips twisted
+into ironical good humor--"no, I apologize--I mean, a fellow who
+looked remarkably like you used to be so deeply versed in
+international politics that I think this new adventure would appeal to
+you. Ever remember hearing of one Senor Miraflores?"
+
+Saxon shook his head, whereupon Rodman laughed with great
+sophistication. Carter had known Senor Miraflores quite well, and
+Rodman knew that Carter had known him.
+
+"Very consistent acting," he approved. "You're a good comedian. In the
+Chinese theaters, they put flour on the comedian's nose to show that
+he's not a tragedian, but you don't need the badge. You're all right.
+You know how to get a laugh. But this isn't dramatic criticism. It's
+wars and rumors of wars."
+
+The adventurer drew a long puff from his cigarette, inhaled it deeply,
+and stood idly watching the curls of outward-blown smoke hanging in
+the hot air, before he went on.
+
+"Well, Miraflores has once more been at the helm. Of course, in the
+lower commissions of the _insurrecto_ organization, we have the usual
+assortment of foreign officers, odds and ends, but the chief
+difference between this enterprise and the other one--the one Carter
+knew about--is the fact that we have some artillery, and that, when we
+start things going, we can come pretty near battering down the old
+town."
+
+Rodman proceeded to sketch the outlines of the conspiracy. It was
+much the stereotyped arrangement with a few variations. Two regiments
+in the city barracks, suspected of disloyalty, had been practically
+disarmed by the President, but these troops had been secretly rearmed
+with a part of the guns brought in by Rodman, and would be ready to
+rise at the signal, together with several other disaffected
+commands--not for the government, but against it.
+
+The mountain of San Francisco is really not a mountain at all, but a
+foot hill of the mountains. Yet, it looks down on the city of Puerto
+Frio as Marathon on the sea, and here are guns trained inward as well
+as outward. These guns can shell the capital into ruins in the space
+of a few hours; then, they can hurl their projectiles further, and
+play havoc with the environs. Also, they can guard the city from the
+approach that lies along the roads from the interior. A commander who
+holds San Francisco stands at the door of Puerto Frio with a latch-key
+in his hand. The revolutionists under Vegas had arranged their attack
+on the basis of unwarned assault. The Dictator had indeed some
+apprehensions, but they were fears for the future--not for the
+immediate present. The troops garrisoned on San Francisco, ostensibly
+the loyal legion of the Dictator's forces, were in reality watching
+the outward approaches only as doors through which they were to
+welcome friends. The guns that were trained and ready to belch fire on
+signal from Vegas, were the guns trained inward on the city, and, when
+they opened, the main plaza would resemble nothing so much as the far
+end of a bowling alley when an expert stands on the foul-line, and the
+palace of the President would be the kingpin for their gunnery. The
+_insurrecto_ forces were to enter San Francisco without resistance,
+and the opening of its crater was to be the signal for hurling through
+the streets of the city itself those troops that had been secretly
+armed with the smuggled weapons, completing the confusion and throwing
+into stampeding panic the demoralized remnants upon which the
+government depended.
+
+Unless there were a traitor in very exclusive and carefully guarded
+councils, there would hardly be a miscarriage of the plans.
+
+Saxon stood idly listening to these confidences. Nothing seemed
+strange to him, and least of all the entire willingness of the
+conspirator to tell him things that involved life and death for men
+and governments. He knew that, in spite of all he had said, or could
+say, to the other man, he was the former ally in crime. He had thought
+at first that Rodman would ultimately discover some discrepancy in
+appearance which would undeceive him, but now he realized that the
+secret of the continued mistake was an almost miraculous resemblance,
+and the fact that the other man had, in the former affair, met him in
+person only twice, and that five years ago.
+
+"And so," went on Rodman in conclusion, "I'm here adrift, waiting for
+the last act. I thought Miraflores might possibly be on the _Amazon_
+last night, and so, while you sat dawdling over letter-paper and pen,
+little Howard Stanley was up and doing. I went across to the other
+boat, and made search, but it was another case of nothing transpiring.
+Miraflores was too foxy to go touring so openly."
+
+Saxon felt that some comment was expected from him, yet his mind was
+wandering far afield from the doings of _juntas_. All these seemed as
+unreal as scenes from an extravagantly staged musical comedy. What
+appeared to him most real at that moment was the picture of a slim
+girl walking, dryad-like, through the hills of her Kentucky homeland,
+and the thought that he would soon be walking with her.
+
+"It looks gloomy for the city," he said, abstractedly.
+
+"Say," went on Rodman, "do you know that the only people on that boat
+booked for Puerto Frio were three fool American tourists, and that, of
+the three, two were women? Now, what chance have those folks got to
+enjoy themselves? Do you think Puerto Frio, say day after to-morrow,
+will make a hit with them?" The informant laughed softly to himself,
+but Saxon was still deep in his own thoughts. It suddenly struck him
+with surprised discovery that the view from the deck was beautiful.
+And Rodman, also, felt the languid invitation of the sea air, and it
+made him wish to talk. So, unmindful of a self-absorbed listener, he
+went on garrulously.
+
+"You know, I felt like quoting to them, 'Into the jaws of death, into
+the mouth of hell, sailed the three tourists,' but that would have
+been to tip off state secrets. If people will fare forth for
+adventure, I guess they've got to have it."
+
+"Do you suppose," asked Saxon perfunctorily, "they'll be in actual
+danger?"
+
+"Danger!" repeated the filibuster with sarcasm. "Danger, did you say?
+Oh, no, of course not. It will be a pink tea! You know that town as
+well as I do. You know there are two places in it where American
+visitors can stop--the _Frances y Ingles_, where you were, and the
+American Legation. By day after to-morrow, that plaza will be the
+bull's-eye for General Vegas's target-practice. General Vegas has a
+mountain to rest his target-gun on, and it's loaded with shell. Oh,
+no, there won't be any danger!"
+
+"Wasn't there some pretext on which you could warn them off?" inquired
+the painter.
+
+Rodman shook his head.
+
+"You see, I have to be careful in my talk. I might say too much. As it
+was, I knocked the town to the fellow all I could. But he seemed
+hell-bent on getting there, and getting there quick. He was a fool
+Kentuckian, and you can't head off a bull-headed Kentuckian with
+subtleties or hints. I've met one or two of them before. And there was
+a girl along who seemed as anxious to get there as he was. That girl
+was all to the good!"
+
+Saxon leaned suddenly forward.
+
+"A Kentuckian?" he demanded. "Did you hear his name?"
+
+"Sure," announced Mr. Rodman. "Little Howard Stanley picks up
+information all along the way. The chap was named George Steele,
+and----"
+
+But the speaker broke off in his story, to stand astounded at the
+conduct of his auditor.
+
+"And the girl!" shouted Saxon. "Her name?"
+
+"Her name," replied the intriguer, "was Miss Filson."
+
+Suddenly, the inattention of the other had fallen away, and he had
+wheeled, his jaw dropping. For an instant, he stood in an attitude of
+bewildered shock, gripping the support of the rail like a
+prize-fighter struggling against the groggy blackness of the knock-out
+blow.
+
+Saxon stood such a length of time as it might have required for the
+referee to count nine over him, had the support he gripped been that
+of the prize-ring instead of the steamer's rail. Then, he stepped
+forward, and gripped Rodman's arm with fingers that bit into the
+flesh.
+
+"Rodman," he said in a low voice that was almost a whisper, between
+his labored breathings, "I've got to talk to you--alone. There's not a
+minute to lose. Come to my stateroom."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Below, in the narrow confines of the cabin, Saxon paced back and forth
+excitedly as he talked. For five minutes, he did not pause, and the
+other man, sitting on the camp-stool in a corner of the place,
+followed him with eyes much as a lion-tamer, shut in a cage with his
+uncertain charge, keeps his gaze bent on the animal. As he listened,
+Rodman's expression ran a gamut from astonishment, through sympathy,
+and into final distrust. At last, Saxon ended with:
+
+"And, so, I've got to get them away from there. I've got to get back
+to that town, and you must manage it. For God's sake, don't delay!"
+The painter had not touched on the irrelevant point of his own
+mystery, or why the girl had followed him. That would have been a
+story the other would not have believed, and there was no time for
+argument and futile personalities. The slow northward fifteen knots
+had all at once become a fevered racing in the wrong direction, and
+each throb of the shafts in the engine-room seemed to hurl him madly
+through space away from his goal.
+
+When he halted in his narrative, the other man looked sternly up, and
+his sharp features were decisively set.
+
+"Suppose I should get you there," he began swiftly. "Suppose it were
+possible to get back in time, what reason have I to trust you? Suppose
+I were willing to trust you absolutely, what right have I--a mere
+agent of a cause that's bigger than single lives--to send you back
+there, where a word from you would spoil everything? My God, man,
+there are thousands of people there who are risking their lives to
+change this government. Hundreds of them must die to do it. For
+months, we have worked and planned, covering and secreting every
+detail of our plotting. We have all taken our lives in our hands. Now,
+a word of warning, an indiscreet act, the changing of the garrison on
+San Francisco, and where would we be? Every platoon that follows Vegas
+and Miraflores marches straight into a death-trap! The signal is
+given, and every man goes to destruction as swift as a bat out of
+hell. That's what you are asking me to do--to play traitor to my
+cause. And you calmly tell me I must do it simply because you've got
+friends in town."
+
+The man came to his feet with an excited gesture of anger.
+
+"You know that in this business no man can trust his twin brother, and
+you ask me to trust you to the extent of laying in your hands
+everything I've worked for--the lives of an army!" His tones rose to a
+climax of vehemence: "And that's what you ask!"
+
+"You know you can trust me," began Saxon, conscious of the feeble
+nature of his argument. "You didn't have to tell me. I didn't ask your
+confidence. I warned you not to tell me."
+
+"Maybe I was a damned fool, and maybe you were pretty slick, playing
+me along with your bait of indifference," retorted Rodman, hotly. "How
+am I to know whom you really mean to warn? You insist that I shall
+harbor a childlike faith in you, yet you won't trust me enough to quit
+your damned play-acting. You call on me to believe in you, yet you lie
+to me, and cling to your smug alias. You won't confess who you are,
+though you know I know it. No, Mr. Carter, I must decline."
+
+Saxon stood white and rigid. Every moment wasted in argument imperiled
+more deeply the girl and the friends he must save, for whose hazarded
+lives he was unwittingly responsible. Yet, he could do nothing except
+with Rodman's assistance. The only chance lay in convincing him, and
+that must be done at any cost. This was no time for selecting methods.
+
+"I don't have to tell a syllable of your plans," he contended,
+desperately. "They will go with me without asking the reason. I have
+only to see them. You have my life in your hands: you can go with me.
+You can disarm me, and keep me in view every moment of the time. You
+can kill me at the first false move. You can----"
+
+"Cut out the tommy-rot," interrupted Rodman, with fierce bluntness. "I
+can do better than that, and you know it. My word on this ship goes
+the same as if I were an admiral. I can say to the captain that you
+assaulted me, and it will be my testimony against yours. I can have
+you put in irons, and thrown down in the hold, and, by God, I'm going
+to do it!" The man moved toward the cabin bell, and halted with his
+finger near the button. "Now, damn you! my platform is _Vegas y
+Libertad_, and I'm not the sucker I may have seemed. If this is a
+trick of yours, you aren't going to have the chance to turn it."
+
+"Give me a moment," pleaded Saxon. He realized with desperation that
+every word the other spoke was true, that he was helpless unless he
+could be convincing.
+
+"Listen, Rodman," he hurried on, ready to surrender everything else if
+he could carry his own point. "For God's sake, listen to me! You
+trusted me in the first place. I could have left the boat at any
+point, and wired back!" He looked into the face of the other man so
+steadily and with such hypnotic intensity that his own eyes were the
+strongest argument of truth he could have put forward.
+
+"You say I have distrusted you, that I have not admitted my identity
+as Carter. I don't care a rap for my life. I'm not fighting for that
+now. I have no designs on you or your designs. Let me put a
+hypothetical question: Suppose you had come to a point where your
+past life was nothing more to you than the life of another man--a man
+you hated as your deadliest enemy; suppose you lived in a world that
+was as different from the old one as though it had never existed;
+suppose a woman had guided you into that new world, would you, or
+would you not, turn your back on the old? Suppose you learned as
+suddenly as I learned, from you, on deck, that that woman was in
+danger, would you, or would you not, go to her?"
+
+Men rarely find the most eloquent or convincing words when they stand
+at sudden crises, but usually men's voices and manners at such times
+can have a force of convincing veracity that means more. Possibly, it
+may have been the hypnotic quality of Saxon's eyes, but, whatever it
+was, Rodman found it impossible to disbelieve him when he spoke in
+this fashion. In the plaza, he had suddenly turned the scales and held
+power of life and death over Rodman, and his only emotion had been
+that of heart-broken misery. Carter had been, like Rodman himself, the
+intriguer, but he had always been trustworthy with his friends. He had
+been violent, bitter, avenging, but never mean in small ways. That
+had been one of the reasons why Rodman, once convinced that the danger
+of vengeance was ended, had remained almost passionately anxious to
+prove to the other that he himself had not been a traitor. Carter had
+been the Napoleonic adventurer, and Rodman only the pettier type. For
+Carter, he held a sort of hero-worship. Rodman's methods were those of
+chicane, but rightly or wrongly he believed that he could read the
+human document.
+
+If this other man were telling the truth, and if love of a woman were
+his real motive, he could be stung into fury with a slur. If that were
+only a pretext, the other would not allow his resentment to imperil
+his plans--he would repress it, or simulate it awkwardly.
+
+"So," he commented satirically, "it's the good-looking young female
+that's got you buffaloed, is it? The warrior has been taken into camp
+by the squaw." The tone held deliberate intent to insult.
+
+Saxon's lips compressed themselves into a dangerously straight line,
+and his face whitened to the temples. As he took a step forward, the
+slighter man stepped quickly back, and raised a hand with a gesture of
+explanation. Saxon had evidently told the truth. The revolutionist had
+satisfied himself, and his somewhat erratic method of judging results
+had been to his own mind convincing. And, at the same moment, Saxon
+halted. He realized that he stood in a position where questions of
+life and death, not his own, were involved. His anger was driving him
+dangerously close to action that would send crashing to ruin the one
+chance of winning an effective ally. He half-turned with something
+like a groan.
+
+He was called out of his stupor of anxiety by the voice of the other.
+Rodman had been thinking fast. He would take a chance, though not such
+a great chance as it would seem. Indeed, in effect, he would be taking
+the other prisoner. He would in part yield to the request, but in the
+method that occurred to him he would have an ample opportunity of
+studying the other man under conditions which the other man would not
+suspect. He would have Saxon at all times in his power and under his
+observation while he set traps for him. If his surmise of sincerity
+proved false, he could act at once as he chose, before Saxon would
+have the opportunity to make a dangerous move. He would seem to do a
+tremendously hazardous thing in the name of friendship, but all the
+while he would have the cards stacked. If at the proper moment he
+still believed in the other, he would permit the man, under
+supervision, to save these friends. If not, Rodman would still be
+master of the situation. Besides, he had been seriously disappointed
+in not meeting Miraflores. He had felt that there might yet be
+advantages in coming closer to the theater of the drama than this
+vessel going north, though he must still remain under the protection
+of a foreign flag.
+
+"So, you are willing to admit that your proper name is Mr. Carter?" he
+demanded, coolly.
+
+"I am willing to admit anything, if I can get to Puerto Frio and
+through the lines," responded Saxon, readily.
+
+"If I take you back, you will go unarmed, under constant supervision,"
+stipulated Rodman. "You will have to obey my orders, and devise some
+pretext for enticing your friends away, without telling them the true
+reason. I shall be running my neck into a noose perhaps. I have no
+right to run that of _Vegas y Libertad_ into a noose as well. Are
+those terms satisfactory?"
+
+"Absolutely!" Saxon let more eagerness burst from his lips than he had
+intended.
+
+"Then, come with me to the captain." Suddenly, Rodman wheeled, and
+looked at the other man with a strange expression. "Do you know why
+I'm doing this? It's a fool reason, but I want to prove to you that
+I'm not the sort that would be apt to turn an ally over to his
+executioners. That's why."
+
+Five minutes later, the two stood in the captain's cabin, and Saxon
+noted that the officer treated Rodman with a manner of marked
+deference.
+
+"Is Cartwright's steam yacht still at Mollera?" demanded the soldier
+of fortune, incisively.
+
+"It's held there for emergencies," replied the officer.
+
+"It's our one chance! Mr. Saxon and myself must get to Puerto Frio at
+once. When do we strike Mollera?" Rodman consulted his watch.
+
+"In an hour."
+
+"Have us put off there. Send a wireless to the yacht to have steam up,
+and arrange for clearance. Put on all steam ahead for Mollera."
+
+It was something, reflected Saxon, to have such toys to play with as
+this thin ally of his could, for the moment at least, command.
+
+"Now, I fully realize," said Rodman, as they left the captain's cabin
+together, "that I'm embarking on the silliest enterprise of a
+singularly silly career. But I'm no quitter. Cartwright," he
+explained, "is one of the owners of the line. He's letting his yacht
+be used for a few things where it comes in handy."
+
+There was time to discuss details on the way down the coast in the
+_Phyllis_. The yacht had outwardly all the idle ease of a craft
+designed merely for luxurious loafing over smooth seas, but Cartwright
+had built it with one or two other requisite qualities in mind. The
+_Phyllis_ could show heels, if ever matters came to a chase, to
+anything less swift than a torpedo-boat destroyer. Her mastheads were
+strung with the parallel wires that gave her voice in the Marconi
+tongue, and Saxon had no sooner stepped over the side than he realized
+that the crew recognized in Mr. Rodman a person to be implicitly
+obeyed.
+
+If Rodman had seemed to be won over with remarkable suddenness to
+Saxon's request that he undertake a dangerous rescue, it was now
+evident to the painter that the appearance had been in part deceiving.
+Here, he was more at Rodman's mercy than he had been on the steamer.
+If Rodman's word had indeed been as he boasted, that of an admiral on
+the _City of Rio_, it was, on the _Phyllis_, that of an admiral on his
+own flagship. By a thousand little, artful snares thrown into their
+discussions of ways and means, Rodman sought to betray the other into
+any utterance or action that might show underlying treachery, and,
+before the yacht had eaten up the route back to the strip of coast
+where the frontier stretched its invisible line, he had corroborated
+his belief that the artist was telling the truth. Had he not been
+convinced, Rodman had only to speak, and every man from the skipper
+to the Japanese cabin boy would have been obedient to his orders.
+
+"We will not try to get to Puerto Frio harbor," explained Rodman. "It
+would hardly be safe. We shall steam past the city, and anchor at
+Bellavista, five miles beyond. Bellavista is a seaside resort, and
+there a boat like this will attract less attention. Also, the
+consulate is better suited to our needs as to the formalities of
+entering and leaving port. There, we will take horses, and ride to
+town. I'll read the signs, and, if things look safe, we can get in,
+collect your people, and get out again at once. They can go with us to
+the yacht, and, if you like fireworks, we can view them from a safe
+distance."
+
+La Punta, as they passed, lay sleepy by her beach, her tattered palms
+scarcely stirring their fronds in the breathless air. Later, Puerto
+Frio went alongside, as quiet and untouched with any sense of
+impending disturbance as the smaller town. Behind the scattered
+outlying houses, the incline went up to the base of San Francisco,
+basking in the sun. The hill was a huge, inert barrier between the
+green and drab of the earth and the blue of the sky. Saxon drew a
+long breath as he watched it in the early morning when they passed. It
+was difficult to think of even an artificial volcano awakening from
+such profound slumber and indolence.
+
+"You'd better go below, and get ready for the ride. We go horseback.
+Got any riding togs?" Rodman spoke rapidly, in crisp brevities. "No?
+Well, I guess we can rig you out. Cartwright has all sorts of things
+on board. Change into them quick. You won't need anything else. This
+is to be a quick dash."
+
+When the anchor dropped off Bellavista, Saxon stood in a fever of
+haste on deck, garbed in riding-clothes that almost fitted him, though
+they belonged to Cartwright or some of the guests who had formerly
+been pleasuring on the yacht.
+
+As their motor-boat was making its way shoreward over peacefully
+glinting water, the painter ran his hand into his coat-pocket for a
+handkerchief. He found that he had failed to provide himself. The
+other pockets were equally empty, save for what money had been loose
+in his trousers-pocket when he changed, and the old key he always
+carried there. These things he had unconsciously transferred by mere
+force of habit. Everything else he had left behind. He felt a mild
+sense of annoyance. He had wanted, on meeting her, to hand Duska the
+letter he had written on the night that their ships passed, but haste
+was the watchword, and one could not turn back for such trifles as
+pocket furnishings.
+
+Rodman proved the best of guides. He knew a liveryman from whom
+Argentine ponies could be obtained, and led the way at a brisk canter
+out the smooth road toward the capital.
+
+For a time, the men rode in silence between the _haciendas_, between
+scarlet clustered vines, clinging with heavy fragrance to adobe walls,
+and the fringed spears of palms along the cactus-lined roadsides.
+
+Hitherto, the man's painting sense had lain dormant. Now, despite his
+anxiety and the nervous prodding of his heels into the flanks of his
+vicious little mount, he felt that he was going toward Duska, and with
+the realization came satisfaction. For a time, his eyes ceased to be
+those of the man hurled into new surroundings and circumstances, and
+became again those of Frederick Marston's first disciple.
+
+They rode before long into the country that borders the town. Rodman's
+eyes were fixed with a fascinated gaze on the quiet summit of San
+Francisco. He had himself no definite knowledge when the craters might
+open, and as yet he had seen no sign of war. The initial note must of
+course come drifting with the first wisp of smoke and the first
+detonation from the mouths of those guns.
+
+At the outskirts of the town, they turned a sharp angle hidden behind
+high monastery walls, and found themselves confronted by a squad of
+native soldiery with fixed bayonets.
+
+With an exclamation of surprise, Rodman drew his pony back on its
+flanks. For a moment, he leaned in his saddle, scrutinizing the men
+who had halted him. There was, of course, no distinction of uniforms,
+but he reasoned that no government troops would be guarding that road,
+because, as far as the government knew, there was no war. He leaned
+over and whispered:
+
+"_Vegas y Libertad._"
+
+The sergeant in command saluted with a grave smile, and drew his men
+aside, as the two horsemen rode on.
+
+"Looks like it's getting close," commented Rodman shortly. "We'd
+better hurry."
+
+Where the old market-place stands at the junction of the _Calle
+Bolivar_ with a lesser street, Rodman again drew down his pony, and
+his cheeks paled to the temples. From the center of the city came the
+sudden staccato rattle of musketry. The plotter threw his eyes up to
+the top of San Francisco, visible above the roofs, but the summit of
+San Francisco still slept the sleep of quiet centuries. Then, again,
+came the clatter from the center of the town, and again the sharp
+rattle of rifle fire ripped the air. There was heavy fighting
+somewhere on ahead.
+
+"Good God!" breathed the thin man. "What does it mean?"
+
+The two ponies stood in the narrow street, and the air began to grow
+heavier with the noise of volleys, yet the hill was silent.
+
+Rodman rattled his reins on the pony's neck, and rode apathetically
+forward. Something had gone amiss! His dreams were crumbling. At the
+next corner, they drew to one side. A company of troops swept by on
+the double-quick. They had been in action. Their faces streamed with
+sweat, and many were bleeding. A few wounded men were being carried by
+their comrades. Rodman recognized _Capitan_ Morino, and shouted
+desperately; but the officer shook his head wildly, and went on.
+
+Then, they saw a group of officers at the door of a crude cafe. Among
+them, Rodman recognized Colonel Martinez, of Vegas' staff, and Colonel
+Murphy of the Foreign Legion, yet they stood here idle, and their
+faces told the story of defeat. The filibuster hurled himself from the
+saddle, and pushed his way to the group, followed by Saxon.
+
+"What does it mean, Murphy?" he demanded, breathlessly. "What in all
+hell can it mean?"
+
+Murphy looked up. He was wrapping his wrist with a handkerchief, one
+end of which he held between his teeth. Red spots were slowly
+spreading on the white of the bandage.
+
+"Sure, it means hell's broke loose," replied the soldier of fortune,
+with promptness. Then, seeing Saxon, he shot him a quick glance of
+recognition. The eyes were weary, and showed out of a face pasted with
+sweat and dust.
+
+"Hello, Carter," he found time to say. "Glad you're with us--but it's
+all up with our outfit."
+
+This time, Saxon did not deny the title.
+
+"What happened?" urged Rodman, in a frenzy of anxiety. The roaring of
+rifles did not seem to come nearer, except for detached sounds of
+sporadic skirmishing. The central plaza and its environs were holding
+the interest of the combatants.
+
+"Sure, it means there was a leak. When the boys marched up to San
+Francisco, they were met with artillery fire. It had been tipped off,
+and the government had changed the garrison." The Irish adventurer,
+who had led men under half a dozen tatterdemalion flags, smiled
+sarcastically. "Sure, it was quite simple!"
+
+"And where is the fighting?" shouted Rodman, as though he would hold
+these men responsible for his shattered scheme of empire.
+
+"Everywhere. Vegas was in too deep to pull out. The government
+couldn't shell its own capital, and so it's street to street
+scrappin' now. But we're licked unless--" He halted suddenly, with the
+gleam of an inspired idea in his eyes. The leader of the Foreign
+Legion was sitting on a table. Saxon noted for the first time that,
+besides the punctured wrist, he was disabled with a broken leg.
+
+"Unless what?" questioned Colonel Martinez. That officer was pallid
+under his dark skin from loss of blood. One arm was bandaged tightly
+against his side.
+
+"Unless we can hold them for a time, and get word to the diplomatic
+corps to arbitrate. A delay would give us a bit of time to pull
+ourselves together."
+
+Martinez, shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Impossible," he said, drearily.
+
+"Wait. Pendleton, the American minister, is dean of the corps. Carter
+here is practically a stranger in town these days, and he's got nerve.
+I know him. As an American, he might possibly make it to the legation.
+Carter, will you try to get through the streets to the American
+Legation? Will you?"
+
+Saxon had leaped forward. He liked the direct manner of this man, and
+the legation was his destination.
+
+"It's a hundred to one shot, Carter, that ye can't do it." Murphy's
+voice, in its excitement, dropped into brogue. "Will ye try? Will ye
+tell him to git th' diplomats togither, and ask an armistice? Ye know
+our countersign, '_Vegas y Libertad_.'"
+
+But Saxon had already started off in the general direction of the main
+plaza. For two squares, he met no interference. For two more, he
+needed no other passport than the countersign, then, as he turned a
+corner, it seemed to him that he plunged at a step into a reek of
+burnt powder and burning houses. There was a confused vista of men in
+retreat, a roar that deafened him, and a sudden numbness. He dropped
+to his knees, attempted to rise to his feet, then seemed to sink into
+a welcome sleep, as he stretched comfortably at length on the pavement
+close to a wall, a detachment of routed _insurrectos_ sweeping by him
+in full flight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+The passing of the fugitive _insurrectos_; their mad turning at bay
+for one savage rally; their wavering and breaking; their disorganized
+stampede spurred on by a decimating fire and the bayonet's point:
+these were all incidents of a sudden squall that swept violently
+through the narrow street, to leave it again empty and quiet. It was
+empty except for the grotesque shapes that stretched in all the
+undignified awkwardness of violent death and helplessness, feeding
+thin lines of red that trickled between the cobblestones. It was
+silent except for echoes of the stubborn fighting coming from the
+freer spaces of the plazas and _alamedas_, where the remnants of the
+invading force clung to their positions behind improvised barricades
+with the doggedness of men for whom surrender holds no element of hope
+or mercy.
+
+Into the canyon-like street where the frenzy of combat had blazed up
+with such a sudden spurt and burned itself out so quickly, Saxon had
+walked around the angle of a wall, just in time to find himself
+precipitated into one of the fiercest incidents of the bloody
+forenoon.
+
+Vegas and Miraflores had not surrendered. Everywhere, the insistent
+noise told that the opposing forces were still debating every block of
+the street, but in many outlying places, as in this _calle_, the
+revolutionists were already giving back. The attacking army had
+counted on launching a blow, paralyzing in its surprise, and had
+itself encountered surprise and partial preparedness. It had set its
+hope upon a hill, and the hill had failed. A prophet might already
+read that _Vegas y Libertad_ was the watchword of a lost cause, and
+that its place in history belonged on a page to be turned down.
+
+But the narrow street in which Saxon lay remained quiet. An occasional
+balcony window would open cautiously, and an occasional head would be
+thrust out to look up and down its length. An occasional shape on the
+cobbles would moan painfully, and shift its position with the return
+of consciousness, or grow more grotesque in the stiffness of death as
+the hours wore into late afternoon, but the great iron-studded
+street-doors of the houses remained barred, and no one ventured along
+the sidewalks.
+
+Late in the day, when the city still echoed to the snapping of
+musketry, and deeper notes rumbled through the din, as small
+field-pieces were brought to bear upon opposing barricades, the thing
+that Saxon had undertaken to bring about occurred of its own
+initiative. Word reached the two leaders that the representatives of
+the foreign powers requested an armistice for the removal of the
+wounded and a conference at the American Legation, looking toward
+possible adjustment. Both the government and the _insurrecto_
+commanders grasped at the opportunity to let their men, exhausted with
+close-fighting, catch a breathing space, and to remove from the zone
+of fire those who lay disabled in the streets.
+
+Then, as the firing subsided, some of the bolder civilians ventured
+forth in search for such acquaintances as had been caught in the
+streets between the impact of forces in the unwarned battle. For this
+hour, at least, all men were safe, and there were some with matters to
+arrange, who might not long enjoy immunity.
+
+Among them was Howard Rodman, who followed up the path he fancied
+Saxon must have taken. Rodman was haggard and distrait. His plans were
+all in ruins, and, unless an amnesty were declared, he must be once
+more the refugee. His belief that Saxon was really Carter led him into
+two false conclusions. First, he inferred from this premise that
+Saxon's life would be as greatly imperiled as his own, and it followed
+that he, being in his own words "no quitter," must see Saxon out of
+the city, if the man were alive. He presumed that in the effort to
+reach the legation Saxon had taken, as would anyone familiar with the
+streets, a circuitous course which would bring him to the "_Club
+Nacional_," from which point he could reach the house he sought over
+the roofs. He had no doubt that the American had failed in his
+mission, because, by any route, he must make his way through streets
+where he would encounter fighting.
+
+Rodman's search became feverish. There was little time to lose. The
+conference might be brief--and, after that, chaos! But fortune favored
+him. Chance led him into the right street, and he found the body.
+Being alone, he stood for a moment indecisive. He was too light a man
+to carry bodily the wounded friend who lay at his feet. He could
+certainly not leave the man, for his ear at the chest, his finger on
+the pulse, assured him that Saxon was alive. He had been struck by a
+falling timber from a balcony above, and the skull seemed badly hurt,
+probably fractured.
+
+As Rodman stood debating the dilemma, a shadow fell across the
+pavement. He turned with a nervous start to recognize at his back a
+newcomer, palpably a foreigner and presumably a Frenchman, though his
+excellent English, when he spoke, was only slightly touched with
+accent. The stranger dropped to his knee, and made a rapid
+examination, as Rodman had done. It did not occur to him at the moment
+that the man standing near him was an acquaintance of the other who
+lay unconscious at their feet.
+
+"The gentleman is evidently a non-combatant--and he is badly hurt,
+monsieur," he volunteered. "We most assuredly cannot leave him here to
+die."
+
+Rodman answered with some eagerness:
+
+"Will you help me to carry him to a place where he'll be safe?"
+
+"Gladly." The Frenchman looked about. "Surely, he can be cared for
+near here."
+
+But Rodman laid a persuasive hand on the other's arm.
+
+"He must be taken to the water front," he declared, earnestly. "After
+the conference, he would not be safe here."
+
+The stranger drew back, and stood for a moment twisting his dark
+mustache, while his eyes frowned inquiringly. He was disinclined to
+take part in proceedings that might have political after-effects. He
+had volunteered to assist an injured civilian, not a participant, or
+refugee. There were many such in the streets.
+
+"This is a matter of life and death," urged Rodman, rapidly. "This man
+is Mr. Robert Saxon. He had left this coast with a clean bill of
+health. I explain all this because I need your help. When he had made
+a part of his return journey, he learned by chance that the city was
+threatened, and that a lady who was very important to him was in
+danger. He hastened back. In order to reach her, he became involved,
+and used the _insurrecto_ countersign. Mr. Saxon is a famous artist."
+Rodman was giving the version of the story he knew the wounded man
+would wish to have told. He said nothing of Carter.
+
+At the last words, the stranger started forward.
+
+"A famous painter!" His voice was full of incredulous interest.
+"Monsieur, you can not by any possibility mean that this is Robert A.
+Saxon, the first disciple of Frederick Marston!" The man's manner
+became enthused and eager. "You must know, monsieur," he went on,
+"that I am Louis Herve, myself a poor copyist of the great Marston. At
+one time, I had the honor to be his pupil. To me, it is a pleasure to
+be of any service to Mr. Saxon. What are we to do?"
+
+"There is a small sailors' tavern near the mole," directed Rodman; "we
+must take him there. I shall find a way to have him cared for on a
+vessel going seaward. I have a yacht five miles away, but we can
+hardly reach it in time."
+
+"But medical attention!" demurred Monsieur Herve. "He must have that."
+
+Rodman was goaded into impatience by the necessity for haste. He was
+in no mood for debate.
+
+"Yes, and a trained nurse!" he retorted, hotly. "We must do the best
+we can. If we don't hurry, he will need an undertaker and a coroner.
+Medical attention isn't very good in Puerto Frio prisons!"
+
+The two men lifted Saxon between them, and carried the unconscious man
+toward the mole.
+
+Their task was like that of many others. They passed a sorry
+procession of litters, stretchers, and bodies hanging limply in the
+arms of bearers. No one paid the slightest attention to them, except
+an occasional sentry who gazed on in stolid indifference.
+
+At the tavern kept by the Chinaman, Juan, and frequented by the
+roughest elements that drift against a coast such as this, Rodman
+exchanged greetings with many acquaintances. There were several
+wounded officers of the Vegas contingent, taking advantage of the
+armistice to have their wounds dressed and discuss affairs over a
+bottle of wine. Evidently, they had come here instead of to more
+central and less squalid places, with the same idea that had driven
+Rodman. They were the rats about to leave the sinking ship--if they
+could find a way to leave.
+
+The tavern was an adobe building with a corrugated-iron roof and a
+large open _patio_, where a dismal fountain tinkled feebly, and one or
+two frayed palms stood dusty and disconsolate in the tightly trodden
+earth. About the walls were flamboyant portraits of saints. From a
+small perch in one corner, a yellow and green parrot squawked
+incessantly.
+
+But it was the life about the rough tables of the area that gave the
+picture its color and variety. Some had been pressed into service to
+support the wounded. About others gathered men in tattered uniforms;
+men with bandaged heads and arms in slings. Occasionally, one saw an
+alien, a sailor whose clothes declared him to have no place in the
+drama of the scene. These latter were usually bolstering up their
+bravado with _aguardiente_ against the sense of impending uncertainty
+that freighted the atmosphere.
+
+The Frenchman, sharing with Rodman the burden of the unconscious
+painter, instinctively halted as the place with its wavering shadows
+and flickering lights met his gaze at the door. It was a picture of
+color and dramatic intensity. He seemed to see these varied faces,
+upon which sat defeat and suffering, sketched on a broad canvas, as
+Marston or Saxon might have sketched them.
+
+Then, he laid Saxon down on a corner table, and stood watching his
+chance companion who recognized brother intriguers. Suddenly, Rodman's
+eyes brightened, and he beckoned his lean hand toward two men who
+stood apart. Both of them had faces that were in strong contrast to
+the swarthy Latin-American countenances about them. One was thin and
+blond, the other dark and heavy. The two came across the _patio_
+together, and after a hasty glance the slender man bent at once over
+the prostrate figure on the table. His deft fingers and manner
+proclaimed him the surgeon. His uniform was nondescript; hardly more a
+uniform than the riding clothes worn by Saxon himself, but on his
+shoulders he had pinned a major's straps. This was Dr. Cornish, of the
+Foreign Legion, but for the moment he was absorbed in his work and
+forgetful of his disastrously adopted profession of arms.
+
+He called for water and bandages, and, while he worked, Rodman was
+talking with the other man. Herve stood silently looking on. He
+recognized that the dark man was a ship-captain--probably commanding a
+tramp freighter.
+
+"When did you come?" inquired Rodman.
+
+"Called at this port for coal," responded the other. "I've been down
+to Rio with flour, and I have to call at La Guayra. I sail in two
+hours."
+
+"Where do you go from Venezuela?"
+
+"I sailed out of Havre, and I'm going back with fruit. The Doc's had
+about enough. I'm goin' to take him with me."
+
+For a moment, Rodman stood speculating, then he bent eagerly forward.
+
+"Paul," he whispered, "you know me. I've done you a turn or two in the
+past."
+
+The sailor nodded.
+
+"Now, I want you to do me a turn. I want you to take this man with
+you. He must get out of here, and he can't care for himself. He'll be
+all right--either all right or dead--before you land on the other
+side. The Doc here will look after him. He's got money. Whatever you
+do for him, he'll pay handsomely. He's a rich man." The filibuster was
+talking rapidly and earnestly.
+
+"Where do I take him?" asked the captain, with evident reluctance.
+
+"Wherever you're going; anywhere away from here. He'll make it all
+right with you."
+
+The captain caught the surgeon's eyes, and the surgeon nodded.
+
+Rodman suddenly remembered Saxon's story, the story of the old past
+that was nothing more to him than another life, and the other man upon
+whom he had turned his back. Possibly, there might even be efforts at
+locating the conspirators. He leaned over, and, though he sunk his
+voice low, Herve heard him say:
+
+"This gentleman doesn't want to be found just now. If people ask about
+him, you don't know who he is, _comprende_?"
+
+"That's no lie, either," growled the ship-master. "I ain't got an idea
+who he is. I ain't sure I want him on my hands."
+
+A sudden quiet came on the place. An officer had entered the door,
+his face pale, and, as though with an instantaneous prescience that he
+bore bad tidings, the noises dropped away. The officer raised his
+hand, and his words fell on absolute silence as he said in Spanish:
+
+"The conference is ended. Vegas surrenders--without terms."
+
+"You see!" exclaimed Rodman, excitedly. "You see, it's the last
+chance! Paul, you've got to take him! In a half-hour, the armistice
+will be over. For God's sake, man!" He ended with a gesture of appeal.
+
+The place began to empty.
+
+"Get him to my boat, then," acceded the captain. "Here, you fellows,
+lend a hand. Come on, Doc." The man who had a ship at anchor was in a
+hurry. "Don't whisper that I'm sailing; I can't carry all the people
+that want to leave this town to-night. I've got to slip away. Hurry
+up."
+
+A quarter of an hour later, Herve stood at the mole with Rodman,
+watching the row-boat that took the other trio out to the tramp
+steamer, bound ultimately for France. Rodman seized his watch, and
+studied its face under a street-lamp with something akin to frantic
+anxiety.
+
+"Where do you go, monsieur?" inquired the Frenchman.
+
+"Go? God knows!" replied Rodman, as he gazed about in perplexity. "But
+I've got to beat it, and beat it quick."
+
+A moment later, he was lost in the shadows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+When Duska Filson had gone out into the woods that day to read Saxon's
+runaway letter, she had at once decided to follow, with regal disdain
+of half-way methods. To her own straight-thinking mind, unhampered
+with petty conventional intricacies, it was all perfectly clear. The
+ordinary woman would have waited, perhaps in deep distress and tearful
+anxiety, for some news of the man she loved, because he had gone away,
+and it is not customary for the woman to follow her wandering lover
+over a quadrant of the earth's circumference. Duska Filson was not of
+the type that sheds tears or remains inactive. To one man in the
+world, she had said, "I love you," and to her that settled everything.
+He had gone to the place where his life was imperiled in the effort to
+bring back to her a clear record. If he were fortunate, her
+congratulation, direct from her own heart and lips, should be the
+first he heard. If he were to be plunged into misery, then above all
+other times she should be there. Otherwise, what was the use of loving
+him?
+
+But, when the steamer was under way, crawling slowly down the world by
+the same route he had taken, the days between quick sunrise and sudden
+sunset seemed interminable.
+
+Outwardly, she was the blithest passenger on the steamer, and daily
+she held a sort of _salon_ for the few other passengers who were
+doomed to the heat and the weariness of such a voyage.
+
+But, when she was alone with Steele in the evening, looking off at the
+moonlit sea, or in her own cabin, her brow would furrow, and her hands
+would clench with the tensity of her anxiety. And, when at last Puerto
+Frio showed across the purple water with a glow of brief sunset behind
+the brown shoulder of San Francisco, she stood by the rail, almost
+holding her breath in suspense, while the anchor chains ran out.
+
+As soon as Steele had ensconced Mrs. Horton and Duska at the _Frances
+y Ingles_, he hurried to the American Legation for news of Saxon. When
+he left Duska in the hotel _patio_, he knew, from the anxious little
+smile she threw after him, that for her the jury deciding the supreme
+question was going out, leaving her as a defendant is left when the
+panel files into the room where they ballot on his fate. He rushed
+over to the legation with sickening fear that, when he came back, it
+might have to be like the juryman whose verdict is adverse.
+
+As it happened, he caught Mr. Pendleton without delay, and before he
+had finished his question the envoy was looking about for his Panama
+hat. Mr. Pendleton wanted to do several things at once. He wanted to
+tell the story of Saxon's coming and going, and he wanted to go in
+person, and have the party moved over to the legation, where they must
+be his guests while they remained in Puerto Frio. It would be several
+days before another steamer sailed north. They had missed by a day the
+vessel on which Saxon had gone. Meanwhile, there were sights in the
+town that might beguile the intervening time. Saxon had interested the
+envoy, and Saxon's friends were welcome. Hospitality is simplified in
+places where faces from God's country are things to greet with the
+fervor of delight.
+
+At dinner that evening, sitting at the right of the minister, Duska
+heard the full narrative of Saxon's brief stay and return home. Mr.
+Pendleton was at his best. There was no diplomatic formality, and the
+girl, under the reaction and relief of her dispelled anxiety, though
+still disappointed at the hapless coincidence of missing Saxon, was as
+gay and childlike as though she had not just emerged from an
+overshadowing uncertainty.
+
+"I'm sorry that he couldn't accept my hospitality here at the
+legation," said the minister at the end of his story, with much mock
+solemnity, "but etiquette in diplomatic circles is quite rigid, and he
+had an appointment to sleep at the palace."
+
+"So, they jugged him!" chuckled Steele, with a grin that threatened
+his ears. "I always suspected he'd wind up in the Bastile."
+
+"He was," corrected the girl, her chin high, though her eyes sparkled,
+"a guest of the President, and, as became his dignity, was supplied
+with a military escort."
+
+"He needn't permit himself any vaunting pride about that," Steele
+assured her. "It's just difference of method. In our country, a
+similar honor would have been accorded with a patrol wagon and a
+couple of policemen."
+
+After dinner, Duska insisted on dispatching a cablegram which should
+intercept the _City of Rio_ at some point below the Isthmus. It was
+not an original telegram, but, had Saxon received it, it would have
+delighted him immoderately. She said:
+
+"I told you so. Sail by _Orinoco_."
+
+The following morning, there were tours of discovery, personally
+conducted by the young Mr. Partridge. Duska had wanted to leave the
+carriage at the old cathedral, and stand flat against the blank wall,
+but she refrained, and satisfied herself with marching up very close
+and regarding it with hostility. As the carriage turned into the main
+plaza, a regiment of infantry went by, the band marching ahead
+playing, with the usual blare, the national anthem. Then, as the
+coachman drew up his horses at the legation door, there was sudden
+confusion, followed by the noise of popping guns. It was the hour just
+preceding the noon _siesta_. The plaza was indolent with lounging
+figures, and droning in the sleeping sing-song chorus of lazy voices.
+At the sound, which for the moment impressed the girl like the
+exploding of a pack of giant crackers, a sudden stillness fell on the
+place, closely followed by a startled outcry of voices as the figures
+in the plaza broke wildly for cover, futilely attempting to shield
+their faces with their arms against possible bullets. Then, there came
+a deeper detonation, and somewhere the crumbling of an adobe wall. The
+first sound came just as Mrs. Horton was stepping to the sidewalk.
+Duska had already leaped lightly out, and stood looking on in
+surprise. But Mr. Partridge knew his Puerto Frio. He led them hastily
+through the huge street-doors, and they had no sooner passed than the
+porter, with many mumbled prayers to the Holy Mother, slammed the
+great barriers against the outside world. The final assault for _Vegas
+y Libertad_ had at last begun.
+
+Mr. Pendleton had insisted that the ladies remain at the rear of the
+house, but Duska, with her adventurous passion for seeing all there
+was to see, threatened insubordination. To her, the idea of leaving
+several perfectly good balconies vacant, and staying at the back of a
+house, when the only battle one would probably ever see was occurring
+in the street just outside, seemed far from sensible. But, after she
+had looked out for a few moments, had seen a belated fruit-vender
+crumple to the street, and had smelled the acrid stench of the burnt
+powder, she was willing to turn away.
+
+Inasmuch as the stay of Duska and her aunt involved several days of
+waiting for the sailing of the next ship, Duska was somewhat surprised
+at hearing nothing from Saxon in the meanwhile. He had had time to
+reach the point to which the cablegram was addressed. She had told him
+she would sail by the _Orinoco_, since that was the first available
+steamer. At such a time, Saxon would certainly answer that message.
+She fancied he would even manage to join her steamer, either by coming
+down to meet it, or waiting to intercept it at the place where he had
+received her message. Consequently, when she reached that port and
+sailed again without either seeing Saxon or receiving a message from
+him, she was decidedly surprised, and, though she did not admit it
+even to herself, she was likewise alarmed.
+
+It happened that one of her fellow passengers on the steamer _Orinoco_
+was a tall, grave gentleman, who wore his beard trimmed in the French
+fashion, and who in his bearing had a certain air of distinction.
+
+On a coast vessel, it was unusual for a passenger to hold himself
+apart and reserved against the chance companionships of a voyage. Yet,
+this gentleman did so. He had been introduced by the captain as M.
+Herve, had bowed and smiled, but since that he had not sought to
+further the acquaintanceship, or to recognize it except by a polite
+bow or smile when he passed one of the party on his solitary deck
+promenades.
+
+Possibly, this perfunctory greeting would have been the limit and
+confine of their associations, had he not chanced to be standing one
+day near enough to Duska and Steele to overhear their conversation.
+The voyage was almost ended, and New York was not far off. Long ago,
+the lush rankness of the tropics had given way to the more temperate
+beauty of the higher zones, and this beauty was the beauty of early
+autumn.
+
+Steele was talking of Frederick Marston, and the girl was listening
+with interest. As long as Saxon insisted on remaining the first
+disciple, she must of course be interested in his demi-god. Just now,
+however, Saxon's name was not mentioned. Finally, the stranger turned,
+and came over with a smile.
+
+"When I hear the name of Frederick Marston," he said, "I am challenged
+to interest. Would I be asking too much if I sought to join you in
+your talk of him?"
+
+The girl looked up and welcomed him with her accustomed graciousness,
+while Steele drew up a camp-stool, and the Frenchman seated himself.
+
+For a while, he listened sitting there, his fingers clasped about his
+somewhat stout knee, and his face gravely speculative, contributing to
+the conversation nothing except his attention.
+
+"You see, I am interested in Marston," he at length began.
+
+The girl hesitated. She had just been expressing the opinion, possibly
+absorbed from Saxon, that the personality of the artist was extremely
+disagreeable. As she glanced at M. Herve, the thought flashed through
+her mind that this might possibly be Marston himself. She knew that
+master's fondness for the incognito. But she dismissed the idea as
+highly fanciful, and even ventured frankly to repeat her criticism.
+
+At last, Herve replied, with great gravity:
+
+"Mademoiselle, I had the honor to know the great Frederick Marston
+once. It was some years ago. He keeps himself much as a hermit might
+in these days, but I am sure that the portion of the story I know is
+not that of the vain man or of the poseur. Possibly," he hesitated
+modestly, "it might interest mademoiselle?"
+
+"I'm sure of it," declared the girl.
+
+"Marston," he began, "drifted into the Paris _ateliers_ from your
+country, callow, morbid, painfully young and totally inexperienced. He
+was a tall, gaunt boy with a beard that grew hardly as fast as his
+career, though finally it covered his face. Books and pictures he knew
+with passionate love. With life, he was unacquainted; at men, he
+looked distantly over the deep chasm of his bashfulness. Women he
+feared, and of them he knew no more than he knew of dragons.
+
+"He was eighteen then. He was in the _Salon_ at twenty-two, and at the
+height of fame at twenty-six. He is now only thirty-three. What he
+will be at forty, one can not surmise."
+
+The Frenchman gazed for a moment at the spiraling smoke from his
+cigarette, and halted with the uncertainty of a bard who doubts his
+ability to do justice to his lay.
+
+"I find the story difficult." He smiled with some diffidence, then
+continued: "Had I the art to tell it, it would be pathos. Marston was
+a generous fellow, beloved by those who knew him, but quarantined by
+his morbid reserve from wide acquaintanceship. Temperament--ah, that
+is a wonderful thing! It is to a man what clouds and mists are to a
+land! Without them, there is only arid desert--with too many, there
+are storm and endless rain and dreary winds. He had the storms and
+rain and winds in his life--but over all he had the genius! The
+masters knew that before they had criticized him six months. In a
+year, they stood abashed before him."
+
+"Go on, please!" prompted Duska, in a soft voice of sympathetic
+interest.
+
+"He dreaded notoriety, he feared fame. He never had a photograph
+taken, and, when it was his turn to pose in the sketch classes, where
+the students alternate as models for their fellows, his nervousness
+was actual suffering. To be looked at meant, for him, to drop his eyes
+and find his hands in his way--the hands that could paint the finest
+pictures in Europe!"
+
+"To understand his half-mad conduct, one must understand his half-mad
+genius. To most men who can command fame, the plaudits of clapping
+hands are as the incense of triumph. To him, there was but the art
+itself--the praise meant only embarrassment. His ideal was that of the
+English poet--a land where
+
+    '--only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall
+            blame:
+    And no one shall work for money and no one shall work for fame.'
+
+That was what he wished, and could not have in Paris.
+
+"It was in painting only that he forgot himself, and became a
+disembodied magic behind a brush. When a picture called down unusual
+comment from critics and press, he would disappear--remain out of
+sight for months. No one knew where he went. Once, I remember, in my
+time, he stayed away almost a year.
+
+"He knew one woman in Paris, besides the models, who were to him
+impersonal things. Of that one woman alone, he was not afraid. She was
+a pathetic sort of a girl. Her large eyes followed him with adoring
+hero-worship. She was the daughter of an English painter who could not
+paint, one Alfred St. John, who lodged in the rear of the floor above.
+She herself was a poet who could not write verse. To her, he talked
+without bashfulness, and for her he felt vast sorrow. Love! _Mon
+dieu_, no! If he had loved her, he would have fled from her in terror!
+
+"But she loved him. Then, he fell ill. Typhoid it was, and for weeks
+he was in his bed, with the papers crying out each day what a disaster
+threatened France and the world, if he should die. And she nursed him,
+denying herself rest. Typhoid may be helped by a physician, but the
+patient owes his life to the nurse. When he recovered, his one
+obsessing thought was that his life really belonged to her rather than
+to himself. I have already said he was morbid half to the point of
+madness. Genius is sometimes so!
+
+"By no means a constant _absintheur_, in his moods he liked to watch
+the opalescent gleams that flash in a glass of _Pernod_. One night,
+when he had taken more perhaps than was his custom, he returned to his
+lodgings, resolved to pay the debt, with an offer of marriage.
+
+"I do not know how much was the morbidness of his own temperament, and
+how much was the absinthe. I know that after that it was all wormwood
+for them both.
+
+"She was proud. She soon divined that he had asked her solely out of
+sympathy, and perhaps it was at her urging that he left Paris alone.
+Perhaps, it was because his fame was becoming too great to allow his
+remaining there longer a recluse. At all events, he went away without
+warning--fled precipitantly. No one was astonished. His friends only
+laughed. For a year they laughed, then they became a trifle uneasy.
+Finally, however, these fears abated. St. John, his father-in-law,
+admitted that he was in constant correspondence with the master, and
+knew where he was in hiding. He refused to divulge his secret of
+place. He said that Marston exacted this promise--that he wanted to
+hide. Then came new pictures, which St. John handled as his
+son-in-law's agent. Paris delighted in them. Marston travels about
+now, and paints. Whether he is mildly mad, or only as mad as his
+exaggerated genius makes him, I have often wondered."
+
+"What became of the poor girl?" Duska's voice put the question, very
+tenderly.
+
+"She, also, left Paris. Whether she let her love conquer her pride and
+joined him, or whether she went elsewhere--also alone, no one knows
+but St. John, and he does not encourage questions."
+
+"I hope," said the girl slowly, "she went back, and made him love
+her."
+
+Herve caught the melting sympathy in Duska's eyes, and his own were
+responsive.
+
+"If she did," he said with conviction, "it must have made the master
+happy. He gave her what he could. He did not withhold his heart from
+stint, but because it was so written." He paused, then in a lighter
+voice went on:
+
+"And, speaking of Marston, one finds it impossible to refrain from
+reciting an extraordinary adventure that has just befallen his first
+disciple, Mr. Saxon, who is a countryman of yours."
+
+The girl's eyes came suddenly away from the sea to the face of the
+speaker, as he continued:
+
+"I happened to be on the streets, when wiser folk were in their homes,
+just after the battle in Puerto Frio. I found Mr. Robert
+Saxon--perhaps the second landscape painter in the world--lying
+wounded on a pavement among dead revolutionists, and I helped to carry
+him to an _insurrecto_ haunt. He was smuggled unconscious on a ship
+sailing for some point in my own land--Havre, I think. _Allons!_ Life
+plays pranks with men that make the fairy tales seem feeble!"
+
+Steele had been so astounded that he had found no opportunity to stop
+the Frenchman. Now, as he made a sign, M. Herve looked at the girl.
+She was sitting quite rigid in her steamer chair, and her lips were
+white. Her eyes were on his own, and were entirely steady.
+
+"Will you tell us the whole story, M. Herve?" she asked.
+
+"_Mon dieu!_ I have been indiscreet. I have made a _faux pas_!"
+
+The Frenchman's distress was genuinely deep.
+
+"No," answered the girl. "I must know all the story. I thank you for
+telling me."
+
+As Herve told his story, he realized that the woman whom Saxon had
+turned back to warn, according to Rodman's sketching, was the woman
+sitting before him on the deck of the _Orinoco_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Captain Harris had been, like Rodman, one of the men who make up the
+world's flotsam and jetsam. He, too, had meddled in the affairs of
+that unstable belt which lies just above and below the "line." South
+and Central American politics and methods were familiar to him. He had
+not attained the command of the tramp freighter _Albatross_ without
+learning one decisive lesson, that of eliminating curiosity from his
+plan of living. He argued that his passenger was an _insurrecto_, and,
+once seized in Puerto Frio, could hardly hope to shield himself behind
+American citizenship. There had been many men in Puerto Frio when the
+captain sailed who would have paid well for passage to any port beyond
+the frontier, but to have taken them might have brought complications.
+He had been able at some risk to slip two men at most to his vessel
+under the curtain of night, and to clear without interference. He had
+chosen the man who was his friend, Dr. Cornish, and the man who was
+his countryman and helpless. Of course, all the premises upon which
+both Rodman and this sea-going man acted were false premises. Had he
+been left, Saxon would have been in no danger. He had none the less
+been shanghaied for a voyage of great length, and he had been
+shanghaied out of sincere kindness.
+
+It had not occurred to either the captain or the physician that the
+situation could outlast the voyage. The man had a fractured skull, and
+he might die, or he might recover; but one or the other he must do,
+and that presumably before the completion of the trip across the
+Atlantic. That he should remain in a comatose state for days proved
+mildly surprising and interesting to the physician, but that at the
+end of this time he should suffer a long attack of brain fever was an
+unexpected development. Saxon knew nothing of his journeying, and his
+only conversation was that of delirium. He owed his life to the skill
+and vigilance of the doctor, who had seen and treated human ills under
+many crude conditions, and who devoted himself with absorption to the
+case. Neither the physician nor the captain knew that the man had
+once been called Robert Saxon. There was nothing to identify him. He
+had come aboard in the riding clothes borrowed from the lockers of the
+_Phyllis_, and his pockets held only a rusty key, some American gold
+and a little South American silver. Without name or consciousness or
+baggage, he was slowly crossing the Atlantic.
+
+Other clothing was provided, and into the newer pockets Captain Harris
+and Dr. Cornish scrupulously transferred these articles. That Carter,
+if he recovered, could reimburse the skipper was never questioned. If
+he died, the care given him would be charged to the account of
+humanity, together with other services this rough man had rendered in
+his diversified career.
+
+Meanwhile, on the steamer _Orinoco_, the girl was finding her clear,
+unflinching courage subjected to the longest, fiercest siege of
+suspense, and Steele tried in every possible manner to comfort the
+afflicted girl in this time of her trial and to alleviate matters with
+optimistic suggestions. M. Herve was in great distress over having
+been the unwitting cause of fears which he hoped the future would
+clear away. His aloofness had ended, and, like Steele, he attached
+himself to her personal following, and sought with a hundred polite
+attentions to mitigate what he regarded as suffering of his
+authorship. Duska's impulse had been to leave the vessel at the first
+American port, but Steele had dissuaded her. His plan was to wire to
+Kentucky at the earliest possible moment, and learn whether there had
+been any message from Saxon. Failing in that, he advocated going on to
+New York. If by any chance Saxon had come back to the States; if, for
+example, he had recovered _en voyage_ and been transferred, as was not
+impossible, to a west-bound vessel, his agent in New York might have
+some tidings.
+
+Herve cursed himself for his failure to learn, in the confused
+half-hour at the Puerto Frio tavern, the name of the vessel that had
+taken Saxon on board, or at least the name of the fellow refugee who
+had befriended him.
+
+When the ship came abreast of the fanglike skyline of Manhattan
+Island, and was shouldered against its pier at Brooklyn by swarming
+tugs, the girl, although outwardly calm, was not far from inward
+despair.
+
+Steele's first step was the effort to learn what steamer it might have
+been that left Puerto Frio for Venezuela and thence for France. But,
+in the promiscuous fleets of rusty-hulled tramps that beat their way
+about the world, following a system hardly more fixed than the course
+of a night-hawk cab about a city's streets, the effort met only
+failure.
+
+The girl would not consent to an interval of rest after her
+sea-voyage, but insisted on accompanying Steele at once to the
+establishment of the art dealer who had the handling of Saxon's
+pictures.
+
+The dealer had seen Mr. Saxon some time before as the artist passed
+through New York, but since that time had received no word. He had
+held a successful exhibition, and had written several letters to the
+Kentucky address furnished him, but to none of them had there been a
+reply. The dealer was enthusiastic over the art of the painter, and
+showed the visitors a number of clippings and reviews that were rather
+adulation than criticism.
+
+The girl glanced at them impatiently. The work was great, and she was
+proud of its praise, but just now she was feeling that it really meant
+nothing at all to her in comparison with the painter himself. To her,
+he would have been quite as important, she realized, had no critic
+praised him; had his brush never forced a compliment from the world.
+Her brow gathered in perplexity over one paragraph that met her eye.
+
+"The most notable piece of work that has yet come from this remarkable
+palette," said the critic, "is a canvas entitled, 'Portrait of a
+lady.' In this, Mr. Saxon has done something more than approximate the
+genius of Frederick Marston. He has seemed to carry it a point
+forward, and one is led to believe that such an effort may be the door
+through which the artist shall issue from the distinction of being
+'Marston's first disciple' into a larger distinction more absolutely
+his own." There was more, but the feature which caught her eye was the
+fact stated that, "A gentleman bought this picture for his private
+collection, refusing to give his name."
+
+"What does it mean?" demanded Duska, handing the clipping to Steele.
+"That picture and the landscape from the Knob were not for sale."
+
+The dealer was puzzled.
+
+"Mr. Saxon," he explained, "directed that from this assignment two
+pictures were to be reserved. They were designated by marks on the
+back of the cases and the canvases. Neither the portrait nor the
+landscape was so marked."
+
+"He must have made a mistake, in the hurry of packing," exclaimed the
+girl, in deep distress. "He must have marked them wrong!"
+
+"Who bought them?" demanded Steele.
+
+The dealer shook his head.
+
+"It was a gentleman, evidently an Englishman, though he said he lived
+in Paris. He declined to give his name, and paid cash. He took the
+pictures with him in a cab to his hotel. He did not even state where
+he was stopping." The dealer paused, then added: "He explained to me
+that he collected for the love of pictures, and that he found the
+notoriety attaching to the purchase of famous paintings extremely
+distasteful."
+
+"Have you ever seen this gentleman before?" urged Steele.
+
+"Yes," the art agent answered reflectively, "he has from time to time
+picked up several of Mr. Saxon's pictures, and his conversation
+indicated that he was equally familiar with the work of Marston
+himself. He said he knew the Paris agent of Mr. Saxon quite well, and
+it is possible that through that source you might be able to locate
+him. I am very sorry the mistake occurred, and, while I am positive
+that you will find the letters 'N. F. S.' (not for sale) on the two
+pictures I have held, I shall do all in my power to trace the lost
+ones."
+
+In one of the packing rooms, the suspicions of Duska were
+corroborated. Two canvases were found about the same shape and size as
+the two that had been bought by the foreign art-lover. Palpably,
+Saxon, in his hurry of boxing, had wrongly labeled them.
+
+In the flood of her despair, the girl found room for a new pang. It
+was not only because these pictures were the fulfillment of Saxon's
+most mature genius that their loss became a little tragedy; not even
+merely because in them she felt that she had in a measure triumphed
+over Marston's hold on the man she loved, but because by every
+association that was important to her and to him they were canonized.
+
+That evening, Steele made his announcement. He was going to Havre and
+Paris. If anything could be learned at that end, he would find it out,
+and while there he would trace the pictures.
+
+"You see," he assured her, with a cheery confidence he by no means
+felt, "it's really much simpler than it looks. He was hurt, and he did
+not recover at once. By the time he reaches France, the sea-voyage
+will have restored him, and he will cable. Those tramp steamers are
+slow, and he hasn't yet had time. If he takes a little longer to get
+well, I'll be there to look after him, and bring him home."
+
+The girl shook her head.
+
+"You haven't thought about the main thing," she said quickly, leaning
+forward and resting her fingers lightly on his arm, "or perhaps you
+thought of it, George dear, and were too kind to speak of it. After
+this, he may wake up--he may wake up the other man. I must go to him
+myself. I must be with him." Her voice became eager and vibrant: "I
+want to be the first living being he will greet."
+
+Steele found a thousand objections rising up for utterance, but, as he
+looked at the steady blue of her eyes, he left them all unsaid. She
+had gone to South America, of course she would go to France.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would be imaginative flattery to call the lodgings of Alfred St.
+John and his daughter commodious, even with the added comforts that
+the late years had brought to the alleviation of their barrenness. The
+windows still looked out over the dismal roofs of the _Quartier Latin_
+and the frowning gray chimney pots where the sparrows quarreled.
+
+St. John might have moved to more commodious quarters, for the days
+were no longer as pinched as had been those of the past, yet he
+remained in the house where he had lived before his own ambition died.
+
+His stock-in-trade was his agency in handling the paintings of
+Frederick Marston, the half-mad painter who, since he had left Paris
+shortly after his marriage, had not returned to his ancient haunts,
+or had any parcel in the life of the art world that idolized him,
+except as he was represented by this ambassador.
+
+St. John sold the pictures that the painter, traveling about,
+presumably concealing himself under assumed names, sent back to the
+waiting market and the eager critics.
+
+And St. John knew that, inasmuch as he had been poor, in the
+half-starved, hungry way of being poor, now his commissions clothed
+him and paid for his claret, and, above all, made it possible for him
+to indulge the one soul he loved with the simple comforts that
+softened her suffering.
+
+The daughter of St. John required some small luxuries which it
+delighted the Englishman to give her. He had been proud when she
+married Frederick Marston, he had been distressed when the marriage
+proved a thing of bitterness, and during the past years he had watched
+her grow thin, and had feared at first, and known later, that she had
+fallen prey to the tubercular troubles which had caused her mother's
+death.
+
+St. John had been a petty sort, and had not withstood the whisperings
+of dishonest motives. Paradoxically his admiration for Frederick
+Marston was, seemingly at least, wholly sincere.
+
+In this hero-worship for the painter, who had failed as a husband to
+make his daughter happy, there was no disloyalty for the daughter. He
+knew that Marston had given all but the love he had not been able to
+give and that he had simulated this until her own insight pierced the
+deception, refusing compassion where she demanded love.
+
+The men who rendered unto Marston their enthusiastic admiration were
+men of a cult, and tinged with a sort of cult fanaticism. St. John, as
+father-in-law, agent and correspondent, was enabled to pose along the
+Boulevard St. Michel as something of a high priest, and in this small
+vanity he gloried. So, when the questioners of the cafes bombarded him
+with inquiries as to when Marston would tire of his pose of hermit and
+return to Paris, the British father-in-law would throw out his shallow
+chest, and allow an enigmatical smile to play in his pale eyes, and a
+faint uplift to come to the corners of his thin lips, but he never
+told.
+
+"I have a letter here," he would say, tapping the pocket of his coat.
+"The master is well, and says that he feels his art to be broadening."
+
+Between the man and his daughter, the subject of the painter was never
+mentioned. After her return from England, where she had spent the
+first year after Marston dropped out of her life, she had exacted from
+her father a promise that his name should not be spoken between them,
+and the one law St. John never transgressed was that of devotion to
+her.
+
+Her life was spent in the lodgings, to which St. John clung because
+they were in the building where Marston had painted. She never
+suggested a removal to more commodious quarters. Possibly, into her
+pallid life had crept a sentimental fondness for the place for the
+same reason. Her weakness was growing into feebleness. Less, each day,
+she felt like going down the steep flights of stairs for a walk in the
+Boulevard of St. Michael, and climbing them again on her return. More
+heavily each day, she leaned on his supporting arm. All these things
+St. John noted, and day by day the traces of sandy red in his mustache
+and beard faded more and more into gray, and the furrow between his
+pale blue eyes deepened more perceptibly.
+
+St. John had gone one afternoon to a neighboring _atelier_, and the
+girl, wandering into his room, saw a portrait standing on the easel
+which St. John had formerly used for his own canvases. Most of the
+pictures that came here were Marston's. This one, like the rest, was
+unsigned. She sank into the deeply cushioned chair that St. John kept
+for her in his own apartment, and gazed fixedly at the portrait.
+
+It was a picture of a woman, and the woman in the chair smiled at the
+woman on the canvas.
+
+"You are very beautiful--my successor!" she murmured. For a time, she
+studied the warm, vivid tones of the painted features, then, with the
+same smile, devoid of bitterness, she went on talking to the other
+face.
+
+"I know you are my successor," she said, "because the enthusiasm
+painted into your face is not the enthusiasm of art alone--nor," she
+added slowly, "is it pity!"
+
+Then, she noticed that one corner of the canvas caught the light with
+the shimmer of wet paint. It was the corner where ordinarily an artist
+affixes his name. She rose and went to the heavy studio-easel, and
+looked again with her eyes close to the stretchers. The paint was
+evidently freshly applied to that corner of the canvas. To her peering
+gaze, it almost seemed that through the new coating of the background
+she could catch a faint underlying line of red, as though it had been
+a stroke in the letter of a name. Then, she noticed her father's
+palette lying on a chair near the easel, and the brushes were damp.
+The lake and Van Dyke brown and neutral-tint that had been squeezed
+from their tubes were mixed into a rich tone on the palette, which
+matched the background of the portrait. Sinking back in the chair,
+fatigued even by such a slight exertion, she heard her father's
+returning tread on the stairs.
+
+From the door, he saw her eyes on the picture, but true to his promise
+he remained silent, though, as he caught her gaze on the palette, his
+own eyes took on something of anxiety and foreboding.
+
+"Does he sign his pictures now?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"No. Why?"
+
+"It looked--almost," she said wearily, "as though the signature had
+been painted out there at the corner."
+
+For an instant, St. John eyed his daughter with keen intentness.
+
+"The canvas was scraped in shipping," he said, at last. "I touched up
+the spot where the paint was rubbed."
+
+For a time, both were silent. The father saw that two hectic spots
+glowed on the girl's bloodless cheeks, and that her eyes, fixed on the
+picture, wore a deeply wistful longing.
+
+He, too, knew that this picture was a declaration of love, that in her
+silence she was torturing herself with the thought that these other
+eyes had stirred the heart that had remained closed to her. He did not
+want to admit to her that this was not a genuine Marston; yet, he
+faltered a moment, and resolved that he could not, even for so
+necessary a deception, let her suffer.
+
+"That portrait, my child," he confessed slowly, "was not painted
+by--by him. It's by another artist, a lesser man, named Saxon."
+
+Into the deep-set eyes surged a look of incredulous, but vast, relief.
+The frail shoulders drew back from their shallow-chested sag, and the
+thin lips smiled.
+
+"Doesn't he sign his pictures, either?" she demanded, finally.
+
+For an instant, St. John hesitated awkwardly for an explanation.
+
+"Yes," he said at last, a little lamely. "This canvas was cut down for
+framing, and the signature was thrown so close to the edge that the
+frame conceals the name." He paused, then added, quietly: "I have kept
+my promise of silence, but now--do you want to hear of _him_?"
+
+She looked up--then shook her head, resolutely.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Late one evening in the cafe beneath the Elysee Palace Hotel, a tall
+man of something like thirty-five, though aged to the seeming of a bit
+more, sat over his brandy and soda and the perusal of a packet of
+letters. He wore traveling dress, and, though the weather had hardly
+the bitterness to warrant it, a fur-trimmed great-coat fell across the
+empty chair at his side. It was not yet late enough for the gayety
+that begins with midnight, and the place was consequently uncrowded.
+The stranger had left a taxicab at the door a few minutes before, and,
+without following his luggage into the office, he had gone directly to
+the cafe, to glance over his mail before being assigned to a room.
+
+The man was tall and almost lean. Had Steele entered the cafe at that
+moment, he would have rushed over to the seated figure, and grasped a
+hand with a feeling that his quest had ended, then, on second sight,
+he would have drawn back, incredulous and mystified. This guest
+lacked no feature that Robert Saxon possessed. His eyes held the same
+trace of the dreamer, though a close scrutiny showed also a hard
+glitter--his dreams were different. The hand that held the letter was
+marked front and back, though a narrow inspection would have shown the
+scar to be a bit more aggravated, more marked with streaked wrinkles
+about the palm. He and the American painter were as identical as
+models struck from one die in the lines and angles that make face and
+figure. Yet, in this man, there was something foreign and alien to
+Saxon, a difference of soul-texture. Saxon was a being of flesh, this
+man a statue of chilled steel.
+
+The envelope he had just cast upon the table fell face upward, and the
+waiting _garcon_ could hardly help observing that it was addressed to
+Senor George Carter, care of a steamship agency in the _Rue Scribe_.
+
+As Carter read the letter it had contained, his brows gathered first
+in great interest, then in surprise, then in greater interest and
+greater surprise.
+
+"There has been a most strange occurrence here," said the writer, who
+dated his communication from Puerto Frio, and wrote in Spanish. "Just
+before the revolution broke, a man arrived who was called Robert A.
+Saxon. He was obviously mistaken for you by the government and was
+taken into custody, but released on the interference of his minister.
+The likeness was so remarkable that I was myself deceived and
+consequently astounded you should make so bold as to return. He,
+however, established a clean bill of health and that very fact has
+suggested to me an idea which I think will likewise commend itself to
+you, _amigo mio_. That I am speaking only from my sincere interest in
+you, you need not question when you consider that I have kept you
+advised through these years of matters here and have divulged to no
+soul your whereabouts. This man left at once, but the talk spread
+rapidly in confidential circles than an _Americano_ had come who was
+the double of yourself. Some men even contended that it was really
+you, and that it was you also who betrayed the plans of Vegas to the
+government, but that scandal is not credited. Most of those who are
+well informed know that the traitor was one whom we trusted, a man
+who in your day was on the side of the established government. That
+man is now in high influence by reason of playing the Judas, and it
+may be that he will make an effort to secure your extradition.
+Embezzlement, you know, is not a political offense, and he still holds
+a score against you. You know to whom I refer. That is why I warn you.
+You have a double and your double has a clean record. For a time if
+there is no danger of crossing tracks with him, I should advise that
+you be Senor Saxon instead of Senor Carter. This should be safe enough
+since Senor Saxon sailed on the day after his arrival for North
+America. I have the felicity to inscribe myself," etc., etc. ---- A
+dash served as a signature, but Carter knew the writing, and was
+satisfied. For a time, he sat in deep reverie, then, rising, took up
+his coat, and went to the door. His stride was precisely the stride of
+Robert Saxon.
+
+At the desk above, he discussed apartments. Having found one that
+suited his taste, he signed the guest-card with the name of Robert
+Saxon, and inquired as to the hour of departure of trains for Calais
+on the following morning. He volunteered the information that he was
+leaving then for London. True to his word, on the next day he left the
+hotel in a taximeter cab which turned down the _Champs Elysees_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When it was definitely settled that Duska and her aunt were to go to
+Europe, Steele conceived a modification of the plans, to which only
+after much argument and persuasion and even a touch of deception he
+won the girl's consent. The object of his amendment was secretly to
+give him a chance to arrive first on the scene, accomplish what he
+could of search, and be prepared with fore-knowledge to stand as a
+buffer between Duska and the first shock of any ill tidings. Despite
+his persistent optimism of argument, the man was far from confident.
+The plan was that the two ladies should embark for Genoa, and go from
+there to Paris by rail, while he should economize days by hurrying
+over the northern ocean track. Duska chafed at the delay involved, but
+Steele found ingenious arguments. The tramp steamer, he declared, with
+its roundabout course, would be slow, and it would be better for him
+to be armed against their coming with such facts as he could gather,
+in order that he might be a more effective guide.
+
+Possibly, he argued, the tramp ship had gone by way of the Madeiras,
+and might soon be in the harbor of Funchal. If she took the southerly
+track, she could go at once by a steamer that would give her a day
+there, and, armed with letters he would send to the consulate, this
+contingency could be probed, leaving him free to work at the other
+end. If he learned anything first, she would learn of it at once by
+wireless.
+
+So, at last, he stood on a North River pier, and saw the girl waving
+her good-by across the rail, until the gap of churning water had
+widened and blurred the faces on the deck. Then, he turned and
+hastened to make his own final arrangements for sailing by the
+_Mauretania_ on the following day.
+
+In Havre, he found himself utterly baffled. He haunted the
+water-front, and browbeat the agents, all to no successful end.
+
+In Paris, matters seemed to bode no better results. He first exhausted
+the more probable points. Saxon's agent, the _commissaire de police_,
+the consulate, the hospitals--he even made a melancholy visit to the
+grewsome building where the morgue squats behind _Notre Dame_. Then he
+began the almost endless round of hotels. His "taxi" sped about
+through the swift, seemingly fluid currents of traffic, as a man in a
+hurry can go only in Paris, the frictionless. The town was familiar to
+him in most of its aspects, and he was able to work with the readiness
+and certainty of one operating in accustomed haunts, commanding the
+tongue and the methods. At last, he learned of the registry at the
+Elysee Palace Hotel. He questioned the clerk, and that functionary
+readily enough gave him the description of the gentleman who had so
+inscribed himself. It was a description of the man he sought. Steele
+fell into one grave error. He did not ask to see the signature itself.
+"Where had Monsieur Saxon gone? To London. _Certainment_, he had taken
+all his luggage with him. No, he had not spoken of returning to Paris.
+Yes, monsieur seemed in excellent health."
+
+So, Steele turned his search to London, and in London found himself
+even more hopelessly mixed in baffling perplexity. He had learned only
+one thing, and that one thing filled him with vague alarm. Saxon had
+apparently been here. He had been to all seeming sane and well, and
+had given his own name. His conduct was inexplicable. It was
+inconceivable that he should have failed to communicate with Duska.
+Steele cabled to America, thinking Saxon might have done so since
+their departure. Nothing had been heard at home.
+
+Late in the afternoon on the day of his arrival in London, Steele went
+for a walk, hoping that before he returned some clew would occur to
+him, upon which he could concentrate his efforts. His steps wandered
+aimlessly along Pall Mall, and, after the usage of former habit,
+carried him to a club, where past experience told him he would meet
+old friends. But, at the club door, he halted, realizing that he did
+not want to meet men. He could think better alone. So, with his foot
+on the stone stairs, he wheeled abruptly, and went on to Trafalgar
+Square, where once more he halted, under the lions of the Nelson
+Column, and racked his brain for any thought or hint that might be
+followed to a definite end.
+
+He stood with the perplexed air of a man without definite objective.
+The square was well-nigh empty except for a few loiterers about the
+basins, and the view was clear to the elevation on the side where, at
+the cab-stand, waited a row of motor "taxis" and hansoms. The
+afternoon was bleak, and the solemn monotone of London was graver and
+more forbidding than usual.
+
+Suddenly, his heart pounded with a violence that made his chest feel
+like a drum. With a sudden start, he called loudly, "Saxon! Hold on,
+Saxon!" then went at a run toward the cab-stand.
+
+He had caught a fleeting and astounding vision. A man, with the poise
+and face that he sought, had just stepped into one of the waiting
+vehicles, and given an order to the driver. Even in his haste, Steele
+was too late to do anything more than take a second cab, and shout to
+the man on the box to follow the vehicle that had just left the curb.
+As his "taxi" turned into the Strand, and slurred through the mud
+past the Cecil and the Savoy, he kept his eyes strained on the cab
+ahead, threading its way through the congested traffic, disappearing,
+dodging, reappearing, and taxing his gaze to the utmost. For a moment
+after they had both crowded into Fleet Street, he lost it, and, as he
+leaned forward, searching the jumble of traffic, his own vehicle came
+to a halt just opposite the Law Courts. He looked hastily out, to see
+the familiar shoulders of the man he followed disappearing beyond a
+street-door, under the swinging "Sign of the Cock."
+
+Tossing a half-crown to the cabman, he followed up the stairs, and
+entered the room, where the tables were almost deserted. A group of
+men was sitting in one of the stalls, deep in converse, and, though
+two were hidden by the dividing partitions, Steele saw the one figure
+he sought at the head of the table. The figure bent forward in
+conversation, and, while his voice was low and his words inaudible,
+the Kentuckian saw that the eyes were glittering with a hard, almost
+malevolent keenness. As he came hastily forward, he caught the voice:
+it was Saxon's voice, yet infinitely harder. The two companions were
+strangers of foreign aspect, and they were listening attentively,
+though one face wore a sullen scowl.
+
+Steele came over, and dropped his hand on the shoulder of the man he
+had pursued.
+
+"Bob!" he exclaimed, then halted.
+
+The three faces looked up simultaneously, and in all was displeasure
+for the abrupt interruption of a conversation evidently intended for
+no outside ears. Each expression was blank and devoid of recognition,
+and, as the tall man rose to his feet, his face was blanker than the
+others.
+
+Then, with the greater leisure for scrutiny, Steele realized his
+mistake. For a time, he stood dumfounded at the marvelous resemblance.
+He knew without asking that this man was the double who had brought
+such a tangle into his friend's life. He bowed coldly.
+
+"I apologize," he explained, shortly. "I mistook this gentleman for
+someone else."
+
+The three men inclined their heads stiffly, and the Kentuckian,
+dejected by his sudden reverse from apparent success to failure,
+turned on his heel, and left the place. It had not, of course,
+occurred to him to connect the appearance of his snarler of Saxon's
+affairs with the name on the Paris hotel-list, and he was left more
+baffled than if he had known only the truth, in that he had been
+thrown upon a false trail.
+
+The Kentuckian joined Mrs. Horton and her niece in Genoa on their
+arrival. As he met the hunger in the girl's questioning eyes, his
+heart sickened at the meagerness of his news. He could only say that
+Paris had divulged nothing, and that a trip to London had been equally
+fruitless of result. He did not mention the fact that Saxon had
+registered at the hotel. That detail he wished to spare her.
+
+She listened to his report, and at its end said only, "Thank you," but
+he knew that something must be done. A woman who could let herself be
+storm-tossed by grief might ride safely out of such an affair when the
+tempest had beaten itself out, but she, who merely smiled more sadly,
+would not have even the relief that comes of surrender to tears.
+
+At Milan, there was a wait of several hours. Steele insisted on the
+girl's going with him for a drive. At a picture-exhibition, they
+stopped.
+
+"Somehow," said Steele, "I feel that where there are paintings there
+may be clews. Shall we go in?"
+
+The girl listlessly assented, and they entered a gallery, which they
+found already well filled. Steele was the artist, and, once in the
+presence of great pictures, he must gnaw his way along a gallery wall
+as a rat gnaws its way through cheese, devouring as he went, seeing
+only that which was directly before him. The girl's eyes ranged more
+restlessly.
+
+Suddenly, Steele felt her clutch his arm.
+
+"George!" she breathed in a tense whisper. "George!"
+
+He followed her impulsively pointed finger, and further along, as the
+crowd of spectators opened, he saw, smiling from a frame on the wall,
+the eyes and lips of the girl herself. Under the well-arranged lights,
+the figure stood out as though it would leave its fixed place on the
+canvas and mingle with the human beings below, hardly more lifelike
+than itself.
+
+"The portrait!" exclaimed Steele, breathlessly. "Come, Duska; that may
+develop something."
+
+As they anxiously approached, they saw above the portrait another
+familiar canvas; a landscape presenting a stretch of valley and
+checkered flat, with hills beyond, and a sky tuneful with the spirit
+of a Kentucky June.
+
+Then, as they came near enough to read the labels, Steele drew back,
+startled, and his brows darkened with anger.
+
+"My God!" he breathed.
+
+The girl standing at his elbow read on a brass tablet under each
+frame, "Frederick Marston, pnxt."
+
+"What does it mean?" she indignantly demanded, looking at the man
+whose face had become rigid and unreadable.
+
+"It means they have stolen his pictures!" he replied, shortly. "It
+means infamous thievery at least, and I'm afraid--" In his anger and
+surprise, he had almost forgotten to whom he was speaking. Now, with
+realization, he bit off his utterance.
+
+She was standing very straight.
+
+"You needn't be afraid to tell me," she said quietly; "I want to
+know."
+
+"I'm afraid," said Steele, "it means foul play. Of course," he added
+in a moment, "Marston himself is not a party to the fraud. It's
+conceivable that his agent, this man St. John, has done this in
+Marston's absence. I must get to Paris and see."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+In the compartment of the railway carriage, Steele was gazing fixedly
+at the lace "tidy" on the cushioned back of the opposite seat. His
+brows were closely knit in thought. He was evolving a plan.
+
+Duska sat with her elbow on the sill of the compartment window, her
+chin on her gloved hand, her eyes gazing out, vague and unseeing. Yet,
+she loved beauty, and just outside the panes there was beauty drawn to
+a scale of grandeur.
+
+They were climbing, behind the double-header of engines, up where it
+seemed that one could reach out and touch the close-hanging clouds,
+into tunnels and out of tunnels, through St. Gothard's Pass and on
+where the Swiss Alps reached up into the fog that veiled the summits.
+The mountain torrents came roaring down, to beat their green water
+into swirling foam, and dash over the lower rocks like frenzied
+mill-races. Her eyes did not wake to a sparkle at sight of the quaint
+chalets which seemed to stagger under huge roof slabs of rugged slate.
+She did not even notice how they perched high on seemingly
+unattainable crags like stranded arks on Helvetian Ararats.
+
+Each tunnel was the darkness between changed tableaux, and the mouth
+of each offered a new and more wonderful picture. The car-windows
+framed glimpses of Lake Como, Lake Lugano, and valleys far beneath
+where villages were only a jumble of toy blocks; yet, all these things
+did not change the utter weariness of Duska's eyes where enthusiasm
+usually dwelt, or tempt Steele's fixity of gaze from the lace "tidy."
+
+At Lucerne, his thinking found expression in a lengthy telegram to
+Paris. The Milan exhibit had opened up a new channel for speculation.
+If Saxon's pictures were being pirated and sold as Marston's, there
+was no one upon whom suspicion would fall more naturally than the
+unscrupulous St. John, Marston's factor in Paris. Steele vaguely
+remembered the Englishman with his petty pride for his stewardship,
+though his own art life had lain in circles that rarely intercepted
+that of the Marston cult even at its outer rim. If this fraud were
+being practiced, its author was probably swindling both artists, and
+the appearance of either of them in Paris might drive St. John to
+desperate means of self-protection.
+
+The conversion of the rooms formerly occupied by Marston into a school
+had been St. John's doing. This _atelier_ was in the house where St.
+John himself lived, and the Kentuckian knew that, unless he had moved
+his lodgings, he could still be found there, as could the very minor
+"academy" of Marston-idolizers, with their none-too-exalted
+instructor, Jean Hautecoeur.
+
+At all events, it was to this address that Steele directed his
+message. Its purport was to inform St. John that Americans, who had
+only a short stay in Paris, were anxious to procure a Marston of late
+date, and to summon him to the Hotel Palais d'Orsay for the day of
+their arrival there.
+
+When they reached the hotel, he told the girl of his plan, suggesting
+that it might be best for him to have this interview with the agent
+alone, but admitting that, if she insisted on being present, it was
+her right. She elected to hear the conversation, and, when St. John
+arrived, he was conducted to the sitting-room of Mrs. Horton's suite.
+
+Pleased with the prospect of remunerative sales, Marston's agent made
+his entrance jauntily. The shabbiness of the old days had been put by.
+He was now sprucely clothed, and in his lapel he wore a bunch of
+violets.
+
+His thin, dissipated face was adorned with a rakishly trimmed mustache
+and Vandyke of gray which still held a fading trace of its erstwhile
+sandy red. His eyes were pale and restless as he stood bowing at the
+door. The afternoon was waning, and the lights had not yet been turned
+on.
+
+"Mr. Steele?" he inquired.
+
+Steele nodded.
+
+St. John looked expectantly toward the girl in the shadow, as though
+awaiting an introduction, which was not forthcoming. As he looked, he
+seemed to grow suddenly nervous and ill-at-ease.
+
+"You are Mr. Marston's agent, I believe?" Steele spoke crisply.
+
+"I have had that honor since Mr. Marston left Paris some years ago.
+You know, doubtless, that the master spends his time in foreign
+travel." The agent spoke with a touch of self-importance.
+
+"I want you to deliver to me here the portrait and the landscape now
+on exhibition at Milan," ordered the American.
+
+"It will be difficult--perhaps expensive--but I think it may be
+possible." St. John spoke dubiously.
+
+Steele's eyes narrowed.
+
+"I am not requesting," he announced, "I am ordering."
+
+"But those canvases, my dear sir, represent the highest note of a
+master's work!" began St. John, almost indignantly. "They are the
+perfection of the art of the greatest living painter, and you direct
+me to procure them as though they were a grocer's staple on a shelf!
+Already, they are as good as sold. One does not have to peddle
+Marston's canvases!"
+
+Steele walked over to the door, and, planting his back against its
+panels, folded his arms. His voice was deliberate and dangerous:
+
+"It's not worth while to bandy lies with you. We both know that those
+pictures are from the brush of Robert Saxon. We both know that you
+have bought them at the price of a pupil's work, and mean to sell them
+at the price of the master's. I shall be in a position to prove the
+swindle, and to hand you over to the courts."
+
+St. John had at the first words stiffened with a sudden flaring of
+British wrath under his gray brows. As he listened, the red flush of
+anger faded to the coward's pallor.
+
+"That is not all," went on Steele. "We both know that Mr. Saxon came
+to Paris a short while ago. For him to learn the truth meant your
+unmasking. He disappeared. We both know whose interests were served by
+that disappearance. You will produce those canvases, and you will
+produce Mr. Saxon within twenty-four hours, or you will face not only
+exposure for art-piracy, but prosecution for what is more serious."
+
+As he listened, St. John's face betrayed not only fear, but also a
+slowly dawning wonder that dilated his vague pupils. Steele, keenly
+reading the face, as he talked, knew that the surprise was genuine.
+
+"As God is my witness," avowed the Englishman, earnestly, "if Mr.
+Saxon is in Paris, or in Europe, I know nothing of it."
+
+"That," observed Steele dryly, "will be a matter for you to prove."
+
+"No, no!" The Englishman's voice was charged with genuine terror, and
+the hand that he raised in pleading protest trembled. His carefully
+counterfeited sprightliness of guise dropped away, and left him an old
+man, much broken.
+
+"I will tell you the whole story," he went on. "It's a miserable
+enough tale without imputing such evil motives as you suggest. It's a
+shameful confession, and I shall hold back nothing. The pictures you
+saw are Saxon's pictures. Of course, I knew that. Of course, I bought
+them at what his canvases would bring with the intention of selling
+them at the greater price commanded by the greater painter. I knew
+that the copyist had surpassed the master, but the world did not know.
+I knew that Europe would never admit that possible. I knew that, if
+once I palmed off this imitation as genuine, all the art-world would
+laugh to scorn the man who announced the fraud. Mr. Saxon himself
+could not hope to persuade the critics that he had done those
+pictures, once they were accepted as Marston's. The art-world is led
+like sheep. It believes there is one Marston, and that no other can
+counterfeit him. And I knew that Marston himself could not expose me,
+because I know that Marston is dead." The man was ripping out his
+story in labored, detached sentences.
+
+Steele looked up with astonished eyes. The girl sat listening, with
+her lips parted.
+
+"You see--" the Englishman's voice was impassioned in its
+bitterness--"I am not shielding myself. I am giving you the unrelieved
+truth. When I determined the fact of his death, I devised a scheme. I
+did not at that time know that this American would be able to paint
+pictures that could be mistaken for Marston's. Had I known it, I
+should have endeavored to ascertain if he would share the scheme with
+me. Collaborating in the fraud, we could have levied fortunes from
+the art world, whereas in his own name he must have painted a decade
+more to win the verdict of his true greatness. I was Marston's agent.
+I am Marston's father-in-law. When I speak, it is as his ambassador.
+Men believe me. My daughter--" the man's voice broke--"my daughter
+lies on her death-bed. For her, there are a few months, perhaps only a
+few weeks, left of life. I have provided for her by trading on the
+name and greatness of her husband. If you turn me over to the police,
+you will kill her. For myself, it would be just, but I am not guilty
+of harming Mr. Saxon, and she is guilty of nothing." The narrator
+halted in his story, and covered his face with his talon-like fingers.
+St. John was not a strong man. The metal of his soul was soft and
+without temper. He dropped into a chair, and for a while, as his
+auditors waited in silence, gave way to his emotion.
+
+"I tell you," he groaned, "I have at least been true to one thing in
+life. I have loved my child. I don't want her punished for my
+offenses."
+
+Suddenly, he rose and faced the girl.
+
+"I don't know you," he said passionately, "but I am an old man. I am
+an outcast--a derelict! I was not held fit for an introduction, but I
+appeal to you. Life can drive a man to anything. Life has driven me to
+most things, but not to all. I knew that any day might bring my
+exposure. If it had come after my daughter's death, I would have been
+satisfied. I have for months been watching her die--wanting her to
+live, yet knowing that her death and my disgrace were racing
+together." He paused, then added in a quaking voice: "There were days
+when I might have been introduced to a woman like you, many years
+ago."
+
+Duska was not fitted by nature to officiate at "third degree"
+proceedings. As she looked back into the beseeching face, she saw only
+that it was the face of an old man, broken and terrified, and that
+even through its gray terror it showed the love of which he talked.
+
+Her hand fell gently on his shoulder.
+
+"I am sorry--about your daughter," she said, softly.
+
+St. John straightened, and spoke more steadily.
+
+"The story is not ended. In those days, it was almost starvation. No
+one would buy my pictures. No one would buy her verse. The one source
+of revenue we might have had was what Marston sought to give us, but
+that she would not accept. She said she had not married him for
+alimony. He tried often and in many ways, but she refused. Then, he
+left. He had done that before. No one wondered. After his absence had
+run to two years, I was in Spain, and stumbled on a house, a sort of
+_pension_, near Granada, where he had been painting under an assumed
+name, as was his custom. Then, he had gone again--no one knew where.
+But he had left behind him a great stack of finished canvases. _Mon
+dieu_, how feverishly the man must have worked during those
+months--for he had then been away from the place almost a year. The
+woman who owned the house did not know the value of the pictures. She
+only knew that he had ordered his rooms reserved, and had not
+returned, and that rental and storage were due her. I paid the
+charges, and took the pictures. Then, I investigated. My
+investigations proved that my surmise as to his death was correct. I
+was cautious in disposing of the pictures. They were like the diamonds
+of Kimberley, too precious to throw upon the market in sufficient
+numbers to glut the art-appetite of the world. I hoarded them. I let
+them go one or two at a time, or in small consignments. He had always
+sold his pictures cheaply. I was afraid to raise the price too
+suddenly. From time to time, I pretended to receive letters from the
+painter. I had then no definite plan. When they had reached the
+highest point of fame and value, I would announce his death. But,
+meanwhile, I discovered the work young Saxon was doing in America. I
+followed his development, and I hesitated to announce the death of
+Marston. An idea began to dawn on me in a nebulous sort of way, that
+somehow this man's work might be profitably utilized by substitution.
+At first, it was very foggy--my idea--but I felt that in it was a
+possibility, at all events enough to be thought over--and so I did not
+announce the death of Marston. Then, I realized that I could
+supplement the Marston supply with these canvases. I was timid. Such
+sales must be cautiously made, and solely to private individuals who
+would remove the pictures from public view. At last, I found these two
+which you saw at Milan. I felt that Mr. Saxon could never improve
+them. I would take the chance, even though I had to exhibit them
+publicly. The last of the Marstons, save a few, had been sold. I could
+realize enough from these to take my daughter to Cairo, where she
+might have a chance to live. I bought the canvases in New York in
+person. They have never been publicly shown save in Milan; they were
+there but for a day only, and were not to be photographed. When you
+sent for me, I thought it was an American Croesus, and that I had
+succeeded." St. John had talked rapidly and with agitation. Now, as he
+paused, he wiped the moisture from his forehead with his
+pocket-handkerchief.
+
+"I have planned the thing with the utmost care. I have had no
+confederates. I even collected a few of Mr. Saxon's earlier and less
+effective pictures, and exhibited them beside Marston's best, so the
+public might compare and be convinced in its idea that the boundary
+between the master and the follower was the boundary between the
+sublime and the merely meritorious. That is all. For a year I have
+hesitated. When I entered this room, I realized my danger. Even in the
+growing twilight, I recognized the lady as the original of the
+portrait."
+
+"But didn't you know," questioned the girl, "that sooner or later the
+facts must become known--that at any time Mr. Saxon might come to
+Europe, and see one of his own pictures as I saw the portrait of
+myself in Milan?"
+
+St. John bowed his head.
+
+"I was desperate enough to take that chance," he answered, "though I
+safeguarded myself in many ways. My sales would invariably be to
+purchasers who would take their pictures to private galleries. I
+should only have to dispose of a few at a time. Mr. Saxon has sold
+many pictures in Paris under his own name, and does not know who
+bought them. Selling them as Marston's, though somewhat more
+complicated, might go on for some time--and my daughter's life can
+not last long. After that, nothing matters."
+
+"Have you actually sold any Saxons as Marstons heretofore?" demanded
+Steele.
+
+St. John hesitated for a moment, and then nodded his head.
+
+"Possibly, a half-dozen," he acknowledged, "to private collectors,
+where I felt it was safe."
+
+"I have no wish to be severe," Steele spoke quietly, "but those two
+pictures we must have. I will pay you a fair profit. For the time, at
+least, the matter shall go no further."
+
+St. John bowed with deep gratitude.
+
+"They shall be delivered," he said.
+
+Steele stood watching St. John bow himself out, all the bravado turned
+to obsequiousness. Then, the Kentuckian shook his head.
+
+"We have unearthed that conspiracy," he said, "but we have learned
+nothing. To-morrow, I shall visit the studio where the Marston
+enthusiasts work, and see if there is anything to be learned there."
+
+"And I shall go with you," the girl promptly declared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+On an unimportant cross street which cuts at right angles the
+_Boulevard St. Michel_, that axis of art-student Paris, stands an old
+and somewhat dilapidated house, built, after the same fashion as all
+its neighbors, about a court, and entered by a door over which the
+_concierge_ presides. This house has had other years in which it stood
+pretentious, with the pride of a mansion, among its peers. Now, its
+splendor is tarnished, its respectability is faded, and the face it
+presents to the street wears the gloom that comes of past glory,
+heightened, perhaps, by the dark-spiritedness of many tenants who have
+failed to enroll their names among the great.
+
+Yet, for all its forbidding frown, its front bespeaks a certain
+consciousness of lingering dignity. A plate, set in the door-case,
+announces that the great Marston painted here a few scant years ago,
+and here still that more-or-less-distinguished instructor, Jean
+Hautecoeur, tells his pupils in the second-floor _atelier_ how it was
+done.
+
+He was telling them now. The model, who had been posed as, "Aphrodite
+Rising from the Foam," was resting. She sat on the dilapidated throne
+amid a circle of easels. A blanket was thrown about her, from the
+folds of which protruded a bare and shapely arm, the hand holding
+lightly between two fingers the cigarette with which she beguiled her
+recess.
+
+The master, looking about on the many industrious, if not
+intellectual, faces, was discoursing on Marston's feeling for values.
+
+"He did not learn it," declared M. Hautecoeur: "he was born with it.
+He did not acquire it: he evolved it. A faulty value caused him pain
+as a false note causes pain to the true musician." Then, realizing
+that this was dangerous doctrine from the lips of one who was
+endeavoring to instill the quality into others, born with less gifted
+natures, he hastened to amend. "Yet, other masters, less facile, have
+gained by study what they lacked by heritage."
+
+The room was bare except for its accessories of art. A few
+well-chosen casts hung about the walls. Many unmounted canvases were
+stacked in the corners, the floors were chalk-marked where
+easel-positions had been recorded; charcoal fragments crunched
+underfoot when one walked across the boards. From the sky-light--for
+the right of the building had only two floors--fell a flood of
+afternoon light, filtering through accumulated dust and soot. The door
+upon the outer hall was latched. The students, bizarre and unkempt in
+the bohemianism of their cult, mixed colors on their palettes as they
+listened. In their little world of narrow horizons, the discourse was
+like a prophet's eulogy of a god.
+
+As the master, his huge figure somewhat grotesque in its long,
+paint-smeared blouse and cap, stood delivering his lecture with much
+eloquence of gesture, he was interrupted by a rap on the door. Jacques
+du Bois, whose easel stood nearest the threshold, reluctantly took his
+pipe from his teeth, and turned the knob with a scowl for the
+interruption. For a moment, he stood talking through the slit with a
+gentleman in the hall-way, his eyes meanwhile studying with
+side-glances the lady who stood behind the gentleman. Then, he bowed
+and closed the door.
+
+"Someone wishes a word with M. Hautecoeur," he announced.
+
+The master stepped importantly into the hall, and Steele introduced
+himself. M. Hautecoeur declared that he quite well remembered monsieur
+and his excellent painting. He bowed to mademoiselle with unwieldly
+gallantry.
+
+"Mr. Robert Saxon," began the American, "is, I believe, one of the
+most distinguished of the followers of Frederick Marston. Miss Filson
+and I are both friends of Mr. Saxon, and, while in Paris, we wished to
+visit the shrine of the Marston school. We have taken the liberty of
+coming here. Is it possible to admit us?"
+
+The instructor looked cautiously into the _atelier_, satisfied himself
+that the model had not resumed her throne and nudity, then flung back
+the door with a ceremonious sweep. Steele, familiar with such
+surroundings, cast only a casual glance about the interior. It was
+like many of the smaller schools in which he had himself painted. To
+the girl, who had never seen a life-class at work, it was stepping
+into a new world. Her eyes wandered about the walls, and came back to
+the faces.
+
+"I have never had the honor of meeting your friend, Monsieur Saxon,"
+declared the instructor in English. "But his reputation has crossed
+the sea! I have had the pleasure of seeing several of his canvases.
+There is none of us following in the footsteps of Marston who would
+not feel his life crowned with high success, had he come as close as
+Saxon to grasping the secret that made Marston Marston. Your great
+country should be proud of him."
+
+Steele smiled.
+
+"Our country could also claim Marston. You forget that, monsieur."
+
+The instructor spread his hands in a deprecating gesture.
+
+"Ah, _mon ami_, that is debatable. True, your country gave him birth,
+but it was France that gave him his art."
+
+"Did you know," suggested Steele, "that some of the unsigned Saxon
+pictures have passed competent critics as the work of Marston?"
+
+Hautecoeur lifted his heavy brows.
+
+"Impossible, monsieur," he protested; "quite impossible! It is the
+master's boast that any man who can pass a painting as a Marston
+has his invitation to do so. He never signs a canvas--it is
+unnecessary--his stroke--his treatment--these are sufficient
+signature. I do not belittle the art of your friend," he hastened to
+explain, "but there is a certain--what shall I say?--a certain
+individualism about the work of this greatest of moderns which is
+inimitable. One must indeed be much the novice to be misled. Yet, I
+grant you there was one quality the master himself did not formerly
+possess which the American grasped from the beginning."
+
+"His virility of touch?" inquired Steele.
+
+"Just so! Your man's art is broader, perhaps stronger. That difference
+is not merely one of feeling: it is more. The American's style was the
+outgrowth of the bigness of your vast spaces--of the broad spirit of
+your great country--of the pride that comes to a man in the
+consciousness of physical power and currents of red blood! Marston was
+the creature of a confined life, bounded by walls. He was
+self-absorbed, morbid, anemic. To be the perfect artist, he needed
+only to be the perfect animal! He did not understand that. He disliked
+physical effort. He felt that something eluded him, and he fought for
+it with brush and mahlstick. He should have used the Alpinstock or the
+snow-shoe." Hautecoeur was talking with an enthused fervor that swept
+him into metaphor.
+
+"Yet--" Steele was secretly sounding his way toward the end he
+sought--"yet, the latter pictures of Marston have that same quality."
+
+"Precisely. I would in a moment more have spoken of that. I have my
+theory. Since leaving Paris, I believe Marston has gone perhaps into
+the Alps, perhaps into other countries, and built into himself the
+thing we urged upon him--the robust vision."
+
+The girl spoke for the first time, putting, after the fashion of the
+uninitiated, the question which, the more learned hesitate to
+propound:
+
+"What is this thing you call the secret? What is it that makes the
+difference?"
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, if I knew that!" The instructor sighed as he
+smiled. "How says the English Fitzgerald? 'A hair perhaps divides the
+false and true.' Had Marston had the making of the famous epigram, he
+would not have said he mixed his paints with brains. Rather would he
+have confessed, he mixed them with ideals."
+
+"But I fear we delay the posing," suggested Steele, moving, with
+sudden apprehension, toward the door.
+
+"I assure you, no!" prevaricated the teacher, with instant readiness.
+"It is a wearying pose. The model will require a longer rest than the
+usual. Will not mademoiselle permit me to show her those Marston
+canvases we are fortunate enough to have here? Perhaps, she will then
+understand why I find it impossible to answer her question."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Captain Paul Harris had set his course to France with a slow,
+long voyage ahead, his shanghaied passenger had gone from stunned
+unconsciousness into the longer and more complicated helplessness of
+brain-fever. There was a brushing of shoulders with death. There were
+fever and unconsciousness and delirium, and through each phase Dr.
+Cornish, late of the Foreign Legion, brought his patient with studious
+care--through all, that is, save the brain fog. Then, as the vessel
+drew to the end of the voyage, the physical illness appeared to be
+conquered, yet the awakening had been only that of nerves and bodily
+organs. The center of life, the mind, was as remote and incommunicable
+as though the thought nerves had been paralyzed. Saxon was like a
+country whose outer life is normal, but whose capital is cut off and
+whose government is supine. The physician, studying with absorbed
+interest, struggled to complete the awakening. Unless it should be
+complete, it were much better that the man had died, for, when the
+vessel dropped her anchor at Havre, the captain led ashore a man who
+in the parlance of the peasants was a poor "innocent," a human
+blank-book in a binding once handsome, now worn, with nothing
+inscribed on its pages.
+
+For a time, the physician and skipper were puzzled as to the next
+step. The physician was confident that the eyes, which gazed blankly
+out from a face now bearded and emaciated, would eventually regain
+their former light of intelligence. He did not believe that this
+helpless creature--who had been, when he first saw him in Puerto Frio,
+despite blood-discolored face and limp unconsciousness, so perfect a
+figure of a man--had passed into permanent darkness. The light would
+again dawn, possibly at first in fitful waverings and flashes through
+the fog. If only there could be some familiar scene or thing to
+suggest the past! But, unfortunately, all that lay across the world.
+So, they decided to take him to Paris, and ensconce him in Captain
+Harris' modest lodgings in the _Rue St. Jacques_, and, inasmuch as the
+captain's lodgings were shared by no one, and his landlady was a
+kindly soul, Dr. Cornish also resolved to go there. For a few weeks,
+the sailor was to be home from the sea, and meant to spend his holiday
+in the capital. As for the physician, he was just now unattached. He
+had hoped to be in charge of a government's work of health and
+sanitation. Instead, he was idle, and could afford to remain and study
+an unusual condition. He certainly could not abandon this anonymous
+creature whom fate had thrust upon his keeping. Now, six weeks after
+his accident, Saxon sat alone in the modest apartment of the lodgings
+in the _Rue St. Jacques_. Since his arrival in Paris, the walls of
+that room and the court in the center of the house had been the
+boundaries of his world. He had not seen beyond them. He had been
+physically weak and languid, mentally void. They had attempted to
+persuade him to move about, but his apathy had been insuperable.
+Sometimes, he wandered about the court like a small child. He had no
+speech. Often, he fingered a rusty key as a baby fingers a rattle. On
+the day that Steele and Duska had gone to the academy of M.
+Hautecoeur, Dr. Cornish and Paul Harris had left the lodgings for a
+time, and Saxon sat as usual at a window, looking absently out on the
+court.
+
+In its center stood a stone _jardiniere_, now empty. About it was the
+flagged area, also empty. In front was the street-door--closed. Saxon
+looked out with the opaque stare of pupils that admit no images to the
+brain. They were as empty as the stone jar. Possibly, the sun,
+borrowing some of the warmth of the spent summer, made a vague appeal
+to animal instinct; possibly, the first ray of mental dawn was
+breaking. At all events, Saxon rose heavily, and made his way into the
+area.
+
+At last, he wandered to the street-door. It happened to be closed, but
+the _concierge_ stood near.
+
+"_Cordon?_" inquired the porter, with a smile. It is the universal
+word with which lodgers in such abodes summon the guardian of the gate
+to let them in or out.
+
+Saxon looked up, and across the hitherto unbroken vacancy of his
+pupils flickered a disturbed, puzzled tremor of mental groping.
+
+He opened his thin lips, closed them again, then smiled, and said with
+perfect distinctness:
+
+"_Cordon, s'il vous plait._"
+
+The _concierge_ knew only that monsieur was an invalid. In his next
+question was nothing more than simple Gallic courtesy.
+
+"_Est-ce que monsieur va mieux aujour d'hui?_"
+
+Once more, Saxon's lips hesitated, then mechanically moved.
+
+"_Oui, merci_," he responded.
+
+The man who found himself standing aimlessly on the sidewalk of the
+_Rue St. Jacques_, was a man clothed in an old and ill-fitting suit of
+Captain Harris' clothes. He was long-haired, hollow-cheeked and
+bearded like a pirate. At last, he hesitatingly turned and wandered
+away at random. About him lay Paris and the world, but Paris and the
+world were to him things without names or meaning.
+
+His unguided steps carried him to the banks of the Seine, and finally
+he stood on the island, gazing without comprehension at the square
+towers of _Notre Dame_, his brows strangely puckered as his eyes
+picked out the carvings of the "Last Judgment" and the _Galerie des
+Rois_.
+
+He shook his head dully, and, turning once more, went on without
+purpose until at the end of much wandering he again halted. This time,
+he had before him the _Pantheon's_ entrance, and confronting him on
+its pedestal sat a human figure in bronze. It was Rodin's unspeakably
+melancholy conception, "_le Penseur_," and it might have stood for
+Saxon's self as it half-crouched with limbs tense and brows drawn in,
+in the agony of brooding thought-travail.
+
+Then, Saxon's head came up, and into his eyes stole a confused
+groping, as though reason's tentacles were struggling out blindly for
+something upon which to lay hold. With such a motion perhaps, the
+prehistoric man-creature may have thrown up his chin at the bursting
+into being of thought's first coherent germ. But from "_le Penseur_"
+Saxon turned away with a futile shake of his head to resume his
+wanderings.
+
+Finally, in a narrow cross street, he halted once more, and looked
+about him with a consciousness of vast weariness. He had traversed the
+length of many blocks in his aimlessness, crossing and recrossing his
+own course, and he was still feeble from long days of illness and
+inertia.
+
+Suddenly, he raised his head, and his lips, which had been half-parted
+in the manner of lips not obeying a positive brain, closed in a firm
+line that seemed to make his chin and jaw take on a stronger contour.
+He drew his brows together as he stood studying the door before him,
+and his pupils were deeply vague and perplexed. But it was a different
+perplexity. The vacuity was gone.
+
+Automatically, one thin hand went into the trousers-pocket, and came
+out clutching a rusty key. For another moment, he stood regarding the
+thing, turning it over in his fingers. Then, he laughed, and drew back
+his sagging shoulders. With the gesture, he threw away all imbecility,
+and followed the inexorable call of some impulse which he could not
+yet fully understand, but which was neither vague nor haphazard.
+
+At that moment, Dr. Cornish, chancing to glance up from his course a
+block away, stopped dumfounded at the sight of his patient. When he
+had gathered his senses, and looked again, the patient had
+disappeared.
+
+Saxon walked a few steps further, turned into an open street-door,
+passed the _concierge_ without a word, and toilsomely, but with a
+purposeful tread, mounted the narrow, ill-lighted stairs. At the
+turning where strangers usually stumbled, he lifted his foot clear
+for the longer stride, yet he had not glanced down.
+
+For just a moment, he paused for breath in the hall, upon which opened
+several doors identical in appearance. Without hesitation, he fitted
+the ancient key into an equally ancient lock, opened the door, and
+entered.
+
+At the click of the thrown tumbler of the lock, some of the occupants
+of the place glanced up. They saw the door swing wide, and frame
+between its jambs a tall, thin man, who stood unsteadily supporting
+himself against the case. The black-bearded face was flushed with a
+burning fever, but the eyes that looked out from under the heavy brows
+were wide awake and intelligent.
+
+"But Marston will one day return to us," Monsieur Hautecoeur was
+declaring to Steele and the girl, who, with backs to the door, were
+studying a picture on the wall. "He will return, and then----"
+
+[Illustration: {Saxon arrives at the atelier}]
+
+The instructor had caught the sound of the opening door, and he
+half-turned his head to cast a side glance in its direction. His words
+died suddenly on his lips. His pose became petrified; his features
+transfixed with astonishment. His rigid fixity of face and figure
+froze the watching students into answering tenseness. Even the
+blanket-wrapped model held a freshly lighted cigarette poised half-way
+to her lips. Then, the man in the door took an unsteady step forward,
+and from his trembling fingers the key fell to the floor, where in the
+dead stillness it seemed to strike with a crash. The girl and Steele
+wheeled. At that moment, the lips of the bearded face moved, and from
+them came the announcement:
+
+"_Me voici, je viens d'arriver._"
+
+The voice broke the hypnotic suspense of the silence as a pin-point
+snaps a toy balloon.
+
+Hautecoeur sprang excitedly forward.
+
+"Marston! Marston has returned!" he shouted, in a great voice that
+echoed against the sky-light.
+
+As the man stepped forward, he staggered slightly, and would have
+fallen had he not been already folded in the giant embrace of the
+lesser master.
+
+Duska stood as white as the fresh sheets of drawing-paper at her feet.
+Her fingers spasmodically clenched and opened at her sides, and from
+her teeth, biting into the lower lip, her breathing came in gasps. The
+walls seemed to race in circles, and it was with half-realization that
+she heard Steele calling the man, wildly demanding recognition.
+
+The newcomer was leaning heavily on Hautecoeur's arm. He did not
+appear to notice Steele, but his gaze met and held the girl's pallid
+face and the intensely anguished eyes that looked into his. For an
+instant, they stood facing each other, neither speaking; then, in a
+voice of polite concern, the tall man said:
+
+"Mademoiselle is ill!" There was no note of recognition--only, the
+solicitous tone of any man who sees a woman who is obviously
+suffering.
+
+Duska raised her chin. Her throat gave a convulsive jerk, but she only
+caught her lip more tightly between her teeth, so that a moment later,
+when she spoke, there were purplish indentations on its almost
+bloodless line.
+
+She half-turned to Steele. Her voice was an utterly hopeless whisper,
+but as steady as Marston's had been.
+
+"For God's sake," she said, "take me home!"
+
+At the door, they encountered the excited physician, who stumbled
+against them with a mumbled apology as he burst into the _atelier_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Late that afternoon, in Mrs. Horton's drawing-room at the _Hotel
+Palais d'Orsay_, Steele stood at the window, his gaze almost sullen in
+the moodiness of his own ineffectual sympathy. The day had grown as
+cheerless as himself. Outside, across the _Quai d'Orsay_, a cold rain
+pelted desolately into the gray water of the Seine, and drew a wet
+veil across the opposite bank. Through the reeking mist, the remote
+gray branches in the Gardens of the _Tuileries_ stood out starkly
+naked. Even the vague masses of the _Louvre_ seemed as forbidding as
+the shadowy bulk of some buttressed prison. The "taxis" slurred by
+through wet streets, and those persons who were abroad went with
+streaming umbrellas and hurried steps. The raw chill of Continental
+hotels permeated the place. He knew that in the center of the room
+Duska sat, her elbows resting on the table top; her eyes,
+distressfully wide, fixed on the wet panes of the other window. He
+knew that, if he spoke to her, her lips would shape themselves into a
+pathetic smile, and her answer would be steady. He knew that she had
+given herself no luxury of outburst, but that she had remained there,
+in much the same attitude, all afternoon; sometimes, crushing her
+small handkerchief into a tight wad of lace and linen; sometimes,
+opening it out and smoothing it with infinite care into a tiny square
+upon the table. He knew that her feet, with their small shoes and
+high-arched, silk-stockinged insteps, twitched nervously from time to
+time; that the gallant shoulders drooped forward. These details were
+pictured in his mind, and he kept his eyes stolidly pointed toward the
+outer gloom so that he might not be forced to see it all again in
+actuality.
+
+At last, he wheeled with a sudden gesture of desperation, and, going
+across to the table, dropped his hand over hers.
+
+She looked up with the unchanged expression of wide-eyed suffering
+that has no outlet.
+
+"Duska, dear," he asked, "can I do anything?"
+
+She shook her head, and, as she answered, it was in a dead voice.
+"There is nothing to do."
+
+"If I leave you, will you promise to cry? You must cry," he commanded.
+
+"I can't cry," she answered, in the same expressionless flatness of
+tone.
+
+"Duska, can you forgive me?" He had moved around, and stood leaning
+forward with his hands resting upon the table.
+
+"Forgive you for what?"
+
+"For being the author of all this hideous calamity," he burst out with
+self-accusation, "for bringing him there--for introducing you."
+
+She reached out suddenly, and seized his hand.
+
+"Don't!" she pleaded. "Do you suppose that I would give up a memory
+that I have? Why, all my world is memory now! Do you suppose I blame
+you--or him?"
+
+"You might very well blame us both. We both knew of the possibilities,
+and let things go on."
+
+She rose, and let her eyes rest on him with directness. Her voice was
+not angry, but very earnest.
+
+"That is not true," she said. "It couldn't be helped. It was written.
+He told me everything. He asked me to forget, and I held him--because
+we loved each other. He could no more help it than he could help being
+himself, fulfilling his genius when he thought he was following
+another man. There are just some things--" she halted a moment, and
+shook her head--"some things," she went on quietly, "that are bigger
+than we are."
+
+"But, now----" He stopped.
+
+"But, now--" the quiet of her words hurt the man more than tears could
+have done--"now, his real life has claimed him--the life that only
+loaned him to me."
+
+The telephone jangled suddenly, and Steele, whose nerves were all on
+edge, started violently at the sound. Mechanically, he took up the
+instrument from its table-rack, and listened.
+
+"Yes, this is Mr. Steele. What? Mr. St. John? Tell him I'll see him
+down there--to wait for me." Steele was about to replace the receiver,
+when Duska's hand caught his wrist.
+
+"No," she said quickly, "have him come here."
+
+"Wait. Hold the wire." The man turned to the girl.
+
+"Duska, you are only putting yourself on the rack," he pleaded. "Let
+me see him alone." She shook her head with the old determination.
+"Have him come here," she repeated.
+
+"Send Mr. St. John up," ordered the Kentuckian.
+
+One might have seen from his eyes that, when Mr. St. John arrived, his
+reception would be ungracious. The man felt all the stored-up savagery
+born of his helpless remonstrance. It must have some vent. Every one
+and everything that had contributed to her misery were alike hateful
+to him. Had he been able to talk to Saxon just then, his unreasoning
+wrath would have poured itself forth as readily and bitterly as on St.
+John. The sight of the agent standing in the door a few moments later,
+inoffensive, even humble, failed to mollify him.
+
+"I shall have the two pictures delivered within the next day,"
+ventured the Englishman.
+
+Steele turned brutally on the visitor.
+
+"Do you mean to risk remaining in Paris now?" he demanded.
+
+At the tone, St. John stiffened. He was humble because these people
+had been kind. Now, meeting hostility, he threw off his lowly
+demeanor.
+
+"Why, may I ask, should I leave Paris?" There was a touch of
+delicately shaded defiance in the questioning voice.
+
+"Because, now, you must reckon with Mr. Saxon for pirating his work!
+Because he may choose to make you walk the plank."
+
+Steele whipped out his answer in rapid, angry sentences.
+
+St. John met the eyes of the Kentuckian insolently.
+
+"Pardon the suggestion that you misstate the case," he said, softly.
+"I have never sold a picture as a Marston that was not a Marston--it
+would appear that unconsciously I was, after all, honest. As for Mr.
+Saxon, there is, it seems, no Mr. Saxon. That gentleman was entirely
+mythical. It was an alias, if you please."
+
+It was Steele who winced now, but his retort was contemptuously cool:
+
+"Do you fancy Mr. Marston will accept that explanation?"
+
+"Mr. Steele--" the derelict drew back his thin shoulders, and faced
+the other with a glint in the pale pupils that was an echo of the days
+when he had been able to look men in the face. "Before I became a
+scoundrel, sir, I was a gentleman. My daughter is extremely ill. I
+must remain with her, and take the chance as to what Mr. Marston may
+choose to do. I shall hope that he will make some allowance for a
+father's desperate--if unscrupulous--effort to care for his daughter.
+I hope so particularly inasmuch as that daughter is also his wife."
+
+Steele started forward, his eyes going involuntarily to the girl, but
+she sat unflinching, except that a sudden, spasm of pain crossed the
+hopelessness of her eyes. Somewhere among Duska Filson's ancestors,
+there had been a stoic. Instantly, Steele realized that it was he
+himself who had brought about the needless cruelty of that reminder.
+St. John had disarmed him, and put him in the wrong.
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir," he said.
+
+"I came here," said St. John slowly, "not only to notify you about
+your canvases. There was something else. You were both very
+considerate when I was here before. It is strange that a man who will
+do dishonest things still clings to the wish that his occasional
+honest motives shall not be misconstrued. I don't want you to think
+that I intentionally lied to you then. I told you Frederick Marston
+was dead. I believed it. Before I began this--this piracy, I
+investigated, and satisfied myself on the point. Time corroborated me.
+It is as though he had arisen from the grave. That is all."
+
+The man paused; then, looking at the girl, he continued:
+
+"And Mr. Saxon--" he hesitated a moment upon the name, but went
+resolutely on--"Mr. Saxon will recover. When he wakes next, the
+doctors believe, he will awake to everything. After his violent
+exertion and the shock of his partial realization, he became
+delirious. For several days perhaps, he must have absolute quiet, but
+he will take up a life in which there are no empty spaces."
+
+The girl rose, and, as she spoke, there was a momentary break in her
+voice that led Steele to hope for the relief of tears, but her tone
+steadied itself, and her eyes remained dry.
+
+"Mr. St. John," she said slowly, "may I go and see--your daughter?"
+
+For a moment, the Englishman looked at her quietly, then tears flooded
+his eyes. He thought of the message of the portrait, and, with no
+information except that of his own observing eyes, he read a part at
+least of the situation.
+
+"Miss Filson," he said with as simple a dignity as though his name had
+never been tarnished, as though the gentleman had never decayed into
+the derelict, "my daughter would be happy to receive you, but she is
+in no condition to hear startling news. By her own wish, we have not
+in seven years spoken of Mr. Marston. She does not know that I
+believed him dead, she does not know that he has reappeared. To tell
+her would endanger her life."
+
+"I shall not go as a bearer of news," the girl assured him; "I shall
+go only as a friend of her father's, and--because I want to."
+
+St. John hesitatingly put out his hand. When the girl gave him hers,
+he bent over it with a catch in his voice, but a remnant of the grand
+manner, and kissed her fingers in the fashion of the old days.
+
+Driving with Steele the next morning to St. John's lodgings, the girl
+looked straight ahead steadfastly. The rain of the night had been
+forgotten, and the life of Paris glittered with sun and brilliant
+abandon. Pleasure-worship and vivacious delight seemed to lie like a
+spirit of the departed summer on the boulevards. Along the _Champs
+Elysees_, from the _Place de la Concorde_ to the _Arc de Triomphe_,
+flowed a swift, continuous parade of motors, bearing in state gaily
+dressed women, until the nostrils were filled with a strangely blended
+odor of gasoline and flowers. The pavement cafes and sidewalks flashed
+color, and echoed laughter. Nowhere, from the spot where the
+guillotine had stood to the circle where Napoleon decreed his arch,
+did there seem a niche for sorrow.
+
+"Will you wait here to see to what he awakens?" questioned Steele.
+
+Duska shook her head.
+
+"I have no right to wait. And yet--yet, I can't go home!" She leaned
+toward him, impulsively. "I couldn't bear going back to Kentucky now,"
+she added, plaintively; "I couldn't bear it."
+
+"You will go to Nice for a while," said Steele, firmly. He had fallen
+into the position, of arranging their affairs. Mrs. Horton, distressed
+in Duska's distress, found herself helpless to act except upon his
+direction.
+
+The girl nodded, apathetically.
+
+"It doesn't matter," she said.
+
+Then, she looked up again.
+
+"But I want you to stay. I want you to do everything you can for both
+of them." She paused, and her next words were spoken with an effort:
+"And I don't want--I don't want you to speak of me. I don't want you
+to try to remind him."
+
+"He will question me," demurred Steele.
+
+Duska's head was raised with a little gesture of pride.
+
+"I am not afraid," she said, "that he will ask you anything he should
+not--anything that he has not the right to ask."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+When he turned back, a day later, from the turmoil of the station,
+from the strenuous labor of weighing trunks, locating the compartment
+in the train, subsidizing the guards, and, hardest of all, saying
+good-bye to Duska with a seeming or normal cheerfulness, Steele found
+himself irritably out of measure with the quick-step of Paris. Mrs.
+Horton and the girl were on their way to the Riviera. He was left
+behind to watch results; almost, it seemed to him, to sit by and
+observe the post-mortem on every hope in the lives of three people.
+Nice should still be quiet. The tidal wave of "trippers" would not for
+a little while sweep over its rose-covered slopes and white beaches
+and dazzling esplanades, and the place would afford the girl at least
+every soothing influence that nature could offer. That would not be
+much, but it would be something.
+
+As for himself, he felt the isolation of Paris. On a desert, a man
+may become lonely; in deep forests and on high mountains, he may come
+to know and hate his own soul in solitude, but the last note of
+aloofness, of utter exile, is that which comes to him who looks vainly
+for one face in a sea of other faces, whose small cosmos lies in
+unwept and unnoticed ruin in the midst of a giant city that moves
+along its indifferent way to the time of dance-music. In the hotel,
+there was the chatter of tourists. His own tongue was prattled by men
+and women whose lives seemed to revolve around the shops of the _Rue
+de la Paix_, or whose literature was the information of the
+guide-books. He felt that everyone was invading his somberness of mood
+with trivialities, until, in revulsion against the whole stage-setting
+of things, he had himself and his luggage transported to the _Hotel
+Voltaire_, where the life about him was the simpler life of the less
+pretentious _quais_ of the Seine.
+
+After his _dejeuner_, he sat for a time attempting to readjust his
+ideas. He had told Saxon that he would never again speak of love to
+Duska. Now, he realized how barren of hope it would ever be for him to
+renew his plea. She had bankrupted his heart. He had buried his own
+hopes, and no one except himself had known at what cost to himself. He
+had taken his place in the niche dedicated to closest friend, just
+outside the inner shrine reserved for the one who could penetrate that
+far. Now, he was in a greater distress. Now, he wanted only her
+happiness, and as he had never wanted it before. Now, he realized that
+the only source through which this could come was the source that
+seemed hopelessly clogged. There was no doubt of his sincerity. Even
+his own intimate questioning acquitted him of self-consideration.
+Could he at that moment have had one wish fulfilled by some magic
+agency of miracle, that wish would have been that he might lead Robert
+Saxon, as Robert Saxon had been, to Duska, with all his memory and
+love intact, and free from any incumbrance that might divide them.
+That would have been the gift of all gifts, and the only gift that
+would drive the look of heart-hunger and despair from her eyes.
+
+Steele was restless, and, taking up his hat, he strolled out along the
+quay, and turned at last into the _Boulevard St. Michel_, stretching
+off in a broad vista of cafe-lined sidewalks. The life of the "_Boule
+Mich_" held no attraction for him. In his earlier days, he had known
+it from the river to the _Boulevard Montparnasse_. He knew its
+tributary streets, its lodgings, its schools and the life which the
+spirit of the modern is so rapidly revolutionizing from Bohemia's
+shabby capital to a conventionalized district. None of these things
+held for him the piquant challenge of novelty.
+
+As he passed a certain cafe, which he had once known as the informal
+club of the Marston cult, he realized that here the hilarity was more
+pronounced than elsewhere. The boulevard itself was for squares a
+thread, stringing cafes like beads in a necklace. Each had its crowd
+of revelers; its boisterous throng of frowsy, velvet-jacketed,
+long-haired students; its laughing models; its inevitable brooding and
+despondent _absintheurs_ sitting apart in isolated melancholy. Yet,
+here at the "_Chat Noir_," the chorus was noisier. Although the
+evening was chill, the sidewalk tables were by no means deserted. The
+Parisian proves his patriotism by his adherence to the out-door table,
+even if he must turn up his collar, and shiver as he sips his wine.
+
+Listlessly, Steele turned into the place. It was so crowded this
+evening that for a time it looked as though he would have difficulty
+in finding a seat. At last, a waiter led him to a corner where,
+dropping to the seat along the wall, he ordered his wine, and sat
+gloomily looking on.
+
+The place was unchanged. There were still the habitues quarreling over
+their warring tenets of the brush; men drawn to the center of painting
+as moths are drawn to a candle; men of all nationalities and sorts,
+alike only in the general quality of their unkempt _grotesquerie_.
+
+There was music of a sort; a plaintive chord long-drawn from the
+violin occasionally made its sweet wail heard above the babel and
+through the reeking smoke of the room. Evidently, it was some occasion
+beyond the ordinary, and Steele, leaning over to the student nearest
+him, inquired in French:
+
+"Is there some celebration?"
+
+The stranger was a short man, with hair that fell low on his neck and
+greased his collar. He had a double-pointed beard and deep-set black
+eyes, which he kept fixed on his absinthe as it dripped drop by drop
+from the nickeled device attached to his _frappe_ glass. At the
+question, he looked up, astonished.
+
+"But is it possible monsieur does not know? We are all brothers
+here--brothers in the worship of the beautiful! Does not monsieur
+know?"
+
+Steele did not know, and he told the stranger so without persiflage.
+
+"It is that the great Marston has returned!" proclaimed the student,
+in a loud voice. "It is that the master has come back to us--to
+Paris!"
+
+The sound of his voice had brought others about the table. "Does
+monsieur know that the Seine flows?" demanded a pearly pretty model,
+raising her glass and flashing from her dark eyes a challenging glance
+of ridicule.
+
+Steele did not object to the good-humored baiting, but he looked about
+him, and was thankful that the girl on her way to Nice could not look
+in on this enthusiasm over the painter's home-coming; could not see to
+what Marston was returning; what character of devotees were pledging
+the promotion of the first disciple to the place of the worshiped
+master.
+
+Some half-drunken student, his hand upon the shoulder of a model,
+lifted a tilting glass, and shouted thickly, "_Vive l'art! Vive
+Marston!_" The crowd took up the shout, and there was much clinking of
+glass.
+
+Steele, with a feeling of deep disgust, rose to go. The other _quais_
+of the Seine were better after all. But, as he reached for his hat, he
+felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turning, recognized, with a glow of
+welcome, the face of M. Herve. Like himself, M. Herve seemed out of
+his element, or would have seemed so had he also not had, like Steele,
+that adaptability which makes some men fit into the picture wherever
+they may find themselves. The two shook hands, and dropped back on the
+cushions of the wall seat.
+
+"I have heard the story," the Frenchman assured Steele. "Monsieur may
+spare himself the pain of repeating it. It is a miracle!"
+
+Steele was looking into his glass.
+
+"It is a most unhappy miracle," he replied.
+
+"But, _mon dieu_!" M. Herve looked across the table, tapping the
+Kentuckian's sleeve with his outstretched fingers. "It makes one
+think, _mon ami_--it makes one think!"
+
+His vis-a-vis only nodded, and Herve went on:
+
+"It brings home to one the indestructibility of the true genius--the
+unquenchable fire of it! Destiny plays a strange game. She has here
+taken a man, and juggled with his life; battered his identity to
+unrecognizable fragments; set a seal on his past. Yet, his genius she
+could not efface. That burned through to the light--sounded on
+insistently through the confusion of wreck, even as that violin sounds
+through this hell of noises and disorder--the great unsilenced chord!
+The man thinks he copies another. Not so--he is merely groping to find
+himself. Never have I thought so deeply as since I have heard this
+story."
+
+For a time, Steele did not reply. To him, the personal element drowned
+the purely academic interest of the psychological phase in this
+tragedy.
+
+Suddenly, a new element of surprise struck him, and he leaned across
+the table, his voice full of questioning.
+
+"But you," he demanded, "you had studied under Marston. You knew him,
+and yet, when you saw Saxon, you had no recognition."
+
+M. Herve nodded his head with grave assent.
+
+"That was my first incredulous thought when I heard of this miracle,"
+he admitted; "yet, only for a moment. After all, that was inevitable.
+They were different. Now, bearded, ill, depleted, I fancy he may once
+more look the man I knew--that man whose hair was a mane, and whose
+morbid timidity gave to his eyes a haunted and uncertain fire. When I
+saw Saxon, it is true I saw a man wounded and unconscious; his face
+covered with blood and the dirt of the street, yet he was, even so,
+the man of splendid physique--the new man remade by the immensity of
+your Western prairies--having acquired all that the man I had known
+lacked. He was transformed. In that, his Destiny was kind--she gave it
+not only to his body, but to his brush. He was before a demi-god of
+the palette. Now, he is the god."
+
+"Do you chance to know," asked Steele suddenly, "how his hand was
+pierced?"
+
+"Have you not heard that story?" the Frenchman asked. "I am
+regrettably responsible for that. We sought to make him build the
+physical man. I persuaded him to fence, though he did it badly and
+without enthusiasm. One evening, we were toying with sharpened foils.
+Partly by his carelessness and partly by my own, the blade went
+through his palm. For a long period, he could not paint."
+
+Frederick Marston was not at once removed from the lodgings in the
+_Rue St. Jacques_. Absolute rest was what he most required. When he
+awoke again, unless he awoke refreshed by sufficient rest, Dr. Cornish
+held out no hope. The strain upon enfeebled body and brain had been
+great, and for days he remained delirious or unconscious. Dr. Cornish
+was like adamant in his determination that he should be left
+undisturbed for a week or more.
+
+Meanwhile, the episode had unexpected results. The physician who had
+come to Paris fleeing from a government he had failed to overturn, who
+had taken an emergency case because there was no one else at hand,
+found himself suddenly heralded by the Paris press as "that
+distinguished specialist, Dr. Cornish, who is effecting a miraculous
+recovery for the greatest of painters."
+
+During these days, Steele was constantly at the lodgings, and with
+him, sharing his anxiety, was M. Herve. There were many callers to
+inquire--painters and students of the neighborhood, and the greater
+celebrities from the more distinguished schools.
+
+But no one was more constantly in attendance than Alfred St. John. He
+divided his time between the bedside of his daughter and the lodgings
+where Marston lay. The talk that filled the Latin Quarter, and
+furiously excited the studio on the floor below, was studiously kept
+from the girl confined to her couch upstairs.
+
+One day while St. John was in the _Rue St. Jacques_, pacing the small
+_cour_ with Steele and Herve, Jean Hautecoeur came in hurriedly. His
+manner was that of anxious embarrassment, and for a moment he paused,
+seeking words.
+
+St. John's face turned white with a divination of his tidings.
+
+"Does she need me?" he asked, almost breathlessly.
+
+Hautecoeur nodded, and St. John turned toward the door. Steele went
+with him, and, as they climbed the steep stairs, the old man leaned
+heavily on his support.
+
+The Kentuckian waited in St. John's room most of that night. In the
+next apartment were the girl, her father and the physician. A little
+before dawn, the old man came out. His step was almost tottering, and
+he seemed to have aged a decade since he entered the door of the
+sick-room.
+
+"My daughter is dead," he said very simply, as his guest paused at the
+threshold. "I am leaving Paris. My people except for me have borne a
+good name. I wanted to ask you to save that name from exposure. I
+wanted to bury with my daughter everything that might shadow her
+memory. For myself, nothing matters."
+
+Steele took the hand the Englishman held tremblingly outstretched.
+
+"Is there anything else I can do?" he asked.
+
+St. John shook his head.
+
+"That will be quite all," he answered.
+
+Such things as had to be done, however, Steele did, and two days
+later, when Alfred St. John took the train for Calais and the Channel,
+it was with assurances that, while they could not at this time cheer
+him, at least fortified him against all fear of need.
+
+It was a week later that Cornish sent for the Kentuckian, who was
+waiting in the court.
+
+"I think you can see him now," said the physician briefly, "and I
+think you will see a man who has no gaps in his memory."
+
+Steele went with some misgiving to the sick-room. He found Marston
+looking at him with eyes as clear and lucid as his own. As he came up,
+the other extended a hand with a trembling gesture of extreme
+weakness. Steele clasped it in silence.
+
+For a time, neither spoke.
+
+While Steele waited, the other's face became drawn. He was evidently
+struggling with himself in desperate distress. There was something to
+be said which Marston found it bitterly difficult to say. At last, he
+spoke slowly, forcing his words and holding his features in masklike
+rigidity of control.
+
+"I remember it all now, George." He hesitated as his friend nodded;
+then, with a drawing of his brows and a tremendous effort, he added,
+huskily:
+
+"And I must go to my wife."
+
+Steele hesitated before answering.
+
+"You can't do that, Bob," he said, gently. "I was near her as long as
+could be. I think she is entirely happy now."
+
+The man in the bed looked up. His eyes read the eyes of the other. If
+there was in his pulse a leaping sense of release, he gave it no
+expression.
+
+"Dead?" he whispered.
+
+Steele nodded.
+
+For a time, Marston gazed up at the ceiling with a fixed stare. Then,
+his face clouded with black self-reproach.
+
+"If I could blot out that injury from memory! God knows I meant it as
+kindness."
+
+"There is time enough to forget," said Steele.
+
+It was some days later that Marston went with Steele to the _Hotel
+Voltaire_. There was much to be explained and done. He learned for the
+first time the details of the expedition that Steele had made to
+South America, and then to Europe; of the matter of the pictures and
+St. John's connection with them, and of the mystifying circumstances
+of the name registered at the Elysee Palace Hotel. That incident they
+never fathomed.
+
+St. John had buried his daughter in the _Cimetiere Montmartre_. After
+the first mention of the matter on his recovery to consciousness,
+Marston had not again alluded to his former wife, until he was able to
+go to the spot, and place a small tribute on her grave. Standing
+there, somewhat awestruck, his face became deeply grave, and, looking
+up at his friend, he spoke with deep agitation:
+
+"There is one part of my life that was a tremendous mistake. I sought
+to act with regard for a misconceived duty and kindness, and I only
+inflicted infinite pain. I want you to know, and I tell you here at a
+spot that is to me very solemn, that I never abandoned her. When I
+left for America, it was at her command. It was with the avowal that I
+should remain subject to her recall as long as we both lived. I should
+have kept my word. It's not a thing that I can talk of again. You
+know all that has happened since, but for once I must tell you."
+
+Steele felt that nothing he could say would make the recital easier,
+and he merely inclined his head.
+
+"I shall have her removed to England, if St. John wishes it," Marston
+said. "God knows I'd like to have the account show some offsetting of
+the debit."
+
+As they left the gates for the omnibus, Marston added:
+
+"If St. John will continue to act as my agent, he can manage it from
+the other side of the Channel. I shall not be often in Paris."
+
+Later, he turned suddenly to the Kentuckian, with a half-smile.
+
+"We swindled St. John," he exclaimed. "We bought back the pictures at
+Saxon prices." His voice became unusually soft. "And Frederick Marston
+can never paint another so good as the portrait. We must set that
+right. Do you know--" the man laughed sheepishly--"it's rather
+disconcerting to find that one has spent seven years in self-worship?"
+
+Steele smiled with relief at the change of subject.
+
+"Is that the sensation of being deified?" he demanded. "Does one
+simply feel that Olympus is drawn down to sea level?"
+
+Shortly after, Marston sent a brief note to Duska.
+
+"I shall say little," he wrote. "I can't be sure you will give me a
+hearing, but also I can not go on until I have begged it. I can not
+bear that any report shall reach you until I have myself reported. My
+only comfort is that I concealed nothing that I had the knowledge to
+tell you. There is now no blank in my life, and yet it is all blank,
+and must remain blank unless I can come to you. I am free to speak,
+and, if you give it to me, no one else can deny me the right to speak.
+All that I said on that night when a certain garden was bathed in the
+moon is more true now than then, and now I speak with full knowledge.
+Can you forgive everything?"
+
+And the girl reading the letter let it drop in her lap, and looked out
+through her window across the dazzling whiteness of the _Promenade
+des Anglais_ to the purple Mediterranean. Once more, her eyes lighted
+from deep cobalt to violet.
+
+"But there was nothing to forgive," she softly told the sea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+When, a month later, Frederick Marston went to the hotel on the
+_Promenade des Anglais_ at Nice, it was a much improved and
+rejuvenated man as compared with the wasted creature who had opened
+the closed door of the "academy" in the _Quartier Latin_, and had
+dropped the key on the floor. Although still a trifle gaunt, he was
+much the same person who, almost a year before, had clung to the
+pickets at Churchill Downs, and halted in his view of a two-year-old
+finish. Just as the raw air of the north had given place to the wooing
+softness of the Riviera, and the wet blankets of haze over the gardens
+of the Tuileries to the golden sunlight of the flower-decked south, so
+he had come again out of winter into spring, and the final result of
+his life's equation was the man that had been Saxon, untouched by the
+old Marston.
+
+Duska's stay at Nice had been begun in apathy. About her were all the
+influences of beauty and roses and soft breezes, but it was not until
+she had read this first letter from Marston that these things meant
+anything to her. Then, suddenly, she had awakened to a sense of its
+delight. She knew that he would not come at once, and she felt that
+this was best. She wanted him to come back to her when he could come
+as the man who had been in her life, and, since she knew he was
+coming, she could wait. Her eyes had become as brightly blue as the
+Mediterranean mirroring the sky, and her cheeks had again taken on
+their kinship to the roses of the Riviera. Once more, she was one with
+the nature of this favored spot, a country that some magical realist
+seems to have torn bodily from the enchanted Isles of Imagination, and
+transplanted in the world of Fact.
+
+Now, she became eager to see everything, and it so happened that, when
+Marston, who had not notified her of the day of his arrival, reached
+her hotel, it was to find that she and her aunt had motored over to
+Monte Carlo, by the upper Corniche Road, that show-drive of the world
+which climbs along the heights with the sea below and the sky, it
+would seem, not far above.
+
+The man turned out again to the _Promenade des Anglais_. The sun was
+shining on its whiteness, and it seemed that the city was a huge
+structure of solid marble, set between the sea and the color-spotted
+slopes of the villa-clad hills.
+
+Marston was highly buoyant as he made his way to the garage where he
+could secure a car to give chase. He even paused with boyish and
+delighted interest to gaze into the glittering shop windows of the
+_Promenade_ and the _Avenue Felix Faure_, where were temptingly
+displayed profound booklets guaranteeing the purchaser a sure system
+for conquering the chances of roulette "on a capital of L9, playing
+red or black, manque or passe, pair or impair, and compiled by one
+with four years of experience."
+
+He had soon negotiated for a car, and had gained the friendship of a
+chauffeur, who grinned happily and with contentment when he learned
+that monsieur's object was speed. Ahead of him stretched nine miles of
+perfect macadam, with enough beauty to fill the eye and heart with joy
+for every mile, and at the end of the journey--unless he could
+happily overtake her sooner--was Duska.
+
+The car sped up between the villas, up to the white ribbon of road
+where the ships, lying at anchor in the purpled water beneath, were
+white toys no longer than pencils, where towns were only patches of
+roof tiles, and mountainsides mere rumpled blankets of green and
+color; where the road-houses were delights of picturesque rusticity
+and flower-covered walls.
+
+Thanks to a punctured tire, Marston found a large dust-coated car
+standing at the roadside when he had covered only half of the journey.
+It was drawn up near a road-house that sat back of a rough stone wall,
+and was abandoned save for the chauffeur, who labored over his task of
+repair. But Marston stopped and ran up the stone stairs to the small
+terrace, where, between rose bushes that crowded the time-stained
+facade of the modest caravansery, were set two or three small tables
+under a trellis; and, at one of the tables, he recognized Mrs. Horton.
+
+Mrs. Horton rose with a little gasp of delight to welcome him, and
+recognized how his eyes were ranging in search for an even more
+important personage while he greeted her. Off beyond the road, with
+its low guarding wall of stone, the mountainside fell away
+precipitously to the sea, stretching out below in a limitless expanse
+of the bluest blue that our eyes can endure. The slopes were thickly
+wooded.
+
+"We blew out a tire," explained Mrs. Horton, "and Duska is exploring
+somewhere over the wall there. I was content to sit here and wait--but
+you are younger," she added with a smile. "I won't keep you here."
+
+From inside the tavern came the tinkle of guitars, from everywhere in
+the clear crystalline air hung the perfume of roses. Marston, with
+quick apologies, hastened across the road, vaulted the wall, and began
+his search. It was a brief one, for, turning into a clearing, he saw
+her below him on a ledge. She stood as straight and slim and
+gracefully erect as the lancelike young trees.
+
+He made his way swiftly down the slope, and she had not turned nor
+heard his approach. He went straight to her, and took her in his arms.
+
+The girl wheeled with a little cry of recognition and delight; then,
+after a moment, she held him off at arms' length, and looked at him.
+Her eyes were deep, and needed no words. About them was all the world
+and all the beauty of it.
+
+Finally, she laughed with the old, happy laugh.
+
+"Once," she said very slowly, "you quoted poetry to me--a verse about
+the young queen's crowning. Do you remember?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"But that doesn't apply now," he assured her. "You are going to crown
+me with an undeserved and unspeakable crown."
+
+"Quote it to me now," she commanded, with reinstated autocracy.
+
+For a moment, the man looked into her face as the sun struck down on
+its delicate color, under the softness of hat and filmy automobile
+veil; then, clasping her very close, he whispered the lines:
+
+    "Beautiful, bold and browned,
+      Bright-eyed out of the battle,
+    The young queen rode to be crowned."
+
+"Do you remember some other lines in the same verse?" she questioned,
+in a voice that made his throbbing pulses bound faster; but, before he
+could answer, she went on:
+
+    "'Then the young queen answered swift,
+      "We hold it crown of our crowning, to take our crown for
+            a gift."'"
+
+They turned together, and started up the slope.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+Minor punctuation and typographic errors have been corrected.
+
+Hyphenation and accent usage have been made consistent.
+
+Page 180 had the word 'excusive'. This may be a typographic error for
+either exclusive or excursive. In the context, exclusive seemed more
+appropriate, and has been used--"Unless there were a traitor in very
+exclusive and carefully guarded councils, ..."
+
+A table of contents has been added for the convenience of the reader.
+
+
+
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