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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The World For Sale, by Gilbert Parker, V1
+#108 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: The World For Sale, Volume 1.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6281]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 5, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD FOR SALE, PARKER, V1 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD FOR SALE
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+PRELUDE
+
+BOOK I
+
+I.        "THE DRUSES ARE UP!"
+II.       THE WHISPER FROM BEYOND
+III.      CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS
+IV.       THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE
+V.        "BY THE RIVER STARZKE....IT WAS SO DONE"
+VI.       THE UNGUARDED FIRES
+VII.      IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+VIII.     THE SULTAN
+IX.       MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN
+X.        FOR LUCK
+XI.       THE SENTENCE OF THE PATRIN
+XII.      "LET THERE BE LIGHT"
+XIII.     THE CHAIN OF THE PAST
+XIV.      SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE
+XV.       THE WOMAN FROM WIND RIVER
+XVI.      THE MAYOR FILLS AN OFFICE
+XVII.     THE MONSEIGNEUR AND THE NOMAD
+XVIII.    THE BEACONS
+XIX.      THE BEEPER OF THE BRIDGE
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+XX.       TWO LIFE PIECES
+XXI.      THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
+XXII.     THE SECRET MAN
+XXIII.    THE RETURN OF BELISARIUS
+XXIV.     AT LONG LAST
+XXV.      MAN PROPOSES
+XXVI.     THE SLEEPER
+XXVII.    THE WORLD FOR SALE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+'The World for Sale' is a tale of the primitive and lonely West and
+North, but the primitiveness and loneliness is not like that to be found
+in 'Pierre and His People'.  Pierre's wanderings took place in a period
+when civilization had made but scant marks upon the broad bosom of the
+prairie land, and towns and villages were few and far scattered.  The
+Lebanon and Manitou of this story had no existence in the time of Pierre,
+except that where Manitou stands there was a Hudson's Bay Company's post
+at which Indians, half-breeds, and chance settlers occasionally gathered
+for trade and exchange-furs, groceries, clothing, blankets, tobacco, and
+other things; and in the long winters the post was as isolated as an
+oasis in the Sahara.
+
+That old life was lonely and primitive, but it had its compensating
+balance of bright sun, wild animal life, and an air as vivid and virile
+as ever stirred the veins of man.  Sometimes the still, bright cold was
+broken by a terrific storm, which ravaged, smothered, and entombed the
+stray traveller in ravines of death.  That was in winter; but in summer,
+what had been called, fifty years ago, an alkali desert was an
+everlasting stretch of untilled soil, with unsown crops, and here and
+there herds of buffalo, which were stalked by alert Red Indians, half-
+breeds, and white pioneer hunters.
+
+The stories in 'Pierre and His People' were true to the life of that
+time; the incidents in 'The World for Sale', and the whole narrative, are
+true to the life of a very few years ago.  Railways have pierced and
+opened up lonely regions of the Sagalae, and there are two thriving towns
+where, in the days of Pierre, only stood a Hudson's Bay Company's post
+with its store.  Now, as far as eye can see, vast fields of grain greet
+the eye, and houses and barns speckle the greenish brown or Tuscan yellow
+of the crop-covered lands, while towns like Lebanon and Manitou provide
+for the modern settler all the modern conveniences which science has
+given to civilized municipalities.  Today the motor-car and the telephone
+are as common in such places as they are in a thriving town of the United
+Kingdom.  After the first few days of settlement two things always
+appear--a school-house and a church.  Probably there is no country in the
+world where elementary education commands the devotion and the cash of
+the people as in English Canada; that is why the towns of Lebanon and
+Manitou had from the first divergent views.  Lebanon was English,
+progressive, and brazenly modern; Manitou was slow, reactionary, more or
+less indifferent to education, and strenuously Catholic, and was thus
+opposed to the militant Protestantism of Lebanon.
+
+It was my idea to picture a situation in the big new West where destiny
+is being worked out in the making of a nation and the peopling of the
+wastes.  I selected a very modern and unusual type of man as the central
+figure of my story.  He was highly educated, well born, and carefully
+brought up.  He possessed all the best elements of a young man in a new
+country--intelligent self-dependence, skill, daring, vision.  He had an
+original turn of mind, and, as men are obliged to do in new countries,
+he looked far ahead.  Yet he had to face what pioneers and reformers in
+old countries have to face, namely the disturbance of rooted interests.
+Certainly rooted interests in towns but a generation old cannot be
+extensive or remarkable, but if they are associated with habits and
+principles, they may be as deadly as those which test the qualities and
+wreck the careers of men in towns as old as London.  The difference,
+however, between the old European town and the new Western town is that
+differences in the Western town are more likely to take physical form,
+as was the case in the life of Ingolby.  In order to accentuate the
+primitive and yet highly civilized nature of the life I chose my heroine
+from a race and condition more unsettled and more primitive than that of
+Lebanon or Manitou at any time.  I chose a heroine from the gipsy race,
+and to heighten the picture of the primitive life from which she had come
+I made her a convert to the settled life of civilization.  I had known
+such a woman, older, but with the same characteristics, the same
+struggles, temptations, and suffering the same restriction of her life
+and movements by the prejudice in her veins--the prejudice of racial
+predilection.
+
+Looking at the story now after its publication, I am inclined to think
+that the introduction of the gipsy element was too bold, yet I believe
+it was carefully worked out in construction, and was a legitimate,
+intellectual enterprise.  The danger of it was that it might detract from
+the reality and vividness of the narrative as a picture of Western life.
+Most American critics of the book seem not to have been struck by this
+doubt which has occurred to me.  They realize perhaps more faithfully
+than some of the English critics have done that these mad contrasts are
+by no means uncommon in the primitive and virile life of the West and
+North.  Just as California in the old days, just as Ballaret in Australia
+drew the oddest people from every corner of the world, so Western towns,
+with new railways, brought strange conglomerations into the life.  For
+instance, a town like Winnipeg has sections which represent the life of
+nearly every race of Europe, and towns like Lebanon and Manitou, with
+English and French characteristics controlling them mainly, are still as
+subject to outside racial influences as to inside racial antagonisms.
+
+I believe The World for Sale shows as plainly as anything can show the
+vexed and conglomerate life of a Western town.  It shows how racial
+characteristics may clash, disturb, and destroy, and yet how wisdom,
+tact, and lucky incident may overcome almost impossible situations.  The
+antagonisms between Lebanon and Manitou were unwillingly and unjustly
+deepened by the very man who had set out to bring them together, as one
+of the ideals of his life, and as one of the factors of his success.
+Ingolby, who had everything to gain by careful going, almost wrecked his
+own life, and he injured the life of the two towns by impulsive acts.
+
+The descriptions of life in the two towns are true, and the chief
+characters in the book are lifted out of the life as one has seen it.
+Men like Osterhaut and Jowett, Indians like Tekewani, doctors like
+Rockwell, priests like Monseigneur Fabre, ministers like Mr. Tripple, and
+ne'er-do-weels like Marchand may be found in many a town of the West and
+North.  Naturally the book must lack in something of that magnetic
+picturesqueness and atmosphere which belongs to the people in the
+Province of Quebec.  Western and Northern life has little of the settled
+charm which belongs to the old civilization of the French province.  The
+only way to recapture that charm is to place Frenchmen in the West, and
+have them act and live--or try to act and live--as they do in old Quebec.
+
+That is what I did with Pierre in my first book of fiction, Pierre and
+His People, but with the exception of Monseigneur Fabre there is no
+Frenchman in this book who fulfils, or could fulfil, the temperamental
+place which I have indicated.  Men like Monseigneur Fabre have lived in
+the West, and worked and slaved like him, blest and beloved by all
+classes, creeds, and races.  Father Lacombe was one of them.  The part he
+played in the life of Western Canada will be written some day by one who
+understands how such men, celibate, and dedicated to religious life, may
+play a stupendous part in the development of civilization.  Something of
+him is to be found in my description of Monseigneur Fabre.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+This book was begun in 1911 and finished in 1913, a year before war broke
+out.  It was published serially in the year 1915 and the beginning of
+1916.  It must, therefore, go to the public on the basis of its merits
+alone, and as a picture of the peace-life of the great North West.
+
+
+
+
+PRELUDE
+
+Harvest-time was almost come, and the great new land was resting under
+coverlets of gold.  From the rise above the town of Lebanon, there
+stretched out ungarnered wheat in the ear as far as sight could reach,
+and the place itself and the neighbouring town of Manitou on the other
+side of the Sagalac River were like islands washed by a topaz sea.
+
+Standing upon the Rise, lost in the prospect, was an old, white-haired
+man in the cassock of a priest, with grey beard reaching nearly to the
+waist.
+
+For long he surveyed the scene, and his eyes had a rapt look.
+
+At last he spoke aloud:
+
+     "There shall be an heap of corn in the earth, high upon the hills;
+     his fruit shall shake like Libanus, and shall be green in the city
+     like grass upon the earth."
+
+A smile came to his lips--a rare, benevolent smile.  He had seen this
+expanse of teeming life when it was thought to be an alkali desert, fit
+only to be invaded by the Blackfeet and the Cree and the Blood Indians on
+a foray for food and furs.  Here he had come fifty years before, and had
+gone West and North into the mountains in the Summer season, when the
+land was tremulous with light and vibrating to the hoofs of herds of
+buffalo as they stampeded from the hunters; and also in the Winter time,
+when frost was master and blizzard and drift its malignant servants.
+
+Even yet his work was not done.  In the town of Manitou he still said
+mass now and then, and heard the sorrows and sins of men and women, and
+gave them "ghostly comfort," while priests younger than himself took the
+burden of parish-work from his shoulders.
+
+For a lifetime he had laboured among the Indians and the few whites and
+squaw-men and half-breeds, with neither settlement nor progress.  Then,
+all at once, the railway; and people coming from all the world, and
+cities springing up!  Now once more he was living the life of
+civilization, exchanging raw flesh of fish and animals and a meal of
+tallow or pemmican for the wheaten loaf; the Indian tepee for the warm
+house with the mansard roof; the crude mass beneath the trees for the
+refinements of a chancel and an altar covered with lace and white linen.
+
+A flock of geese went honking over his head.  His eyes smiled in memory
+of the countless times he had watched such flights, had seen thousands
+of wild ducks hurrying down a valley, had watched a family of herons
+stretching away to some lonely water-home.  And then another sound
+greeted his ear.  It was shrill, sharp and insistent.  A great serpent
+was stealing out of the East and moving down upon Lebanon.  It gave
+out puffs of smoke from its ungainly head.  It shrieked in triumph as
+it came.  It was the daily train from the East, arriving at the Sagalac
+River.
+
+"These things must be," he said aloud as he looked.  While he lost
+himself again in reminiscence, a young man came driving across the
+plains, passing beneath where he stood.  The young man's face and figure
+suggested power.  In his buggy was a fishing-rod.
+
+His hat was pulled down over his eyes, but he was humming cheerfully to
+himself.  When he saw the priest, he raised his hat respectfully, yet
+with an air of equality.
+
+"Good day, Monseigneur" (this honour of the Church had come at last to
+the aged missionary), he said warmly.  "Good day--good day!"
+
+The priest raised his hat and murmured the name, "Ingolby."  As the
+distance grew between them, he said sadly: "These are the men who change
+the West, who seize it, and divide it, and make it their own--
+
+     "'I will rejoice, and divide Sichem: and mete out the valley of
+     Succoth.'
+
+"Hush!  Hush!" he said to himself in reproach.  "These things must be.
+The country must be opened up.  That is why I came--to bring the Truth
+before the trader."
+
+Now another traveller came riding out of Lebanon towards him, galloping
+his horse up-hill and down.  He also was young, but nothing about him
+suggested power, only self-indulgence.  He, too, raised his hat, or
+rather swung it from his head in a devil-may-care way, and overdid his
+salutation.  He did not speak.  The priest's face was very grave, if not
+a little resentful.  His salutation was reserved.
+
+"The tyranny of gold," he murmured, "and without the mind or energy that
+created it.  Felix was no name for him.  Ingolby is a builder, perhaps a
+jerry-builder; but he builds."
+
+He looked across the prairie towards the young man in the buggy.
+
+"Sure, he is a builder.  He has the Cortez eye.  He sees far off, and
+plans big things.  But Felix Marchand there--"
+
+He stopped short.
+
+"Such men must be, perhaps," he added.  Then, after a moment, as he gazed
+round again upon the land of promise which he had loved so long, he
+murmured as one murmurs a prayer:
+
+     "Thou suferedst men to ride over our heads: we went through fire and
+     water, and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+I.  "THE DRUSES ARE UP!"
+II.  THE WHISPER FROM BEYOND
+III.  CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS
+IV.  THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE
+V.  "BY THE RIVER STARZKE....IT WAS SO DONE"
+VI.  THE UNGUARDED FIRES
+VII.  IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+"THE DRUSES ARE UP!"
+
+"Great Scott, look at her!  She's goin' to try and take 'em !" exclaimed
+Osterhaut, the Jack-of-all-trades at Lebanon.
+
+"She ain't such a fool as all that.  Why, no one ever done it alone.  Low
+water, too, when every rock's got its chance at the canoe.  But, my
+gracious, she is goin' to ride 'em!"
+
+Jowett, the horse-dealer, had a sportsman's joy in a daring thing.
+
+"See, old Injun Tekewani's after her!  He's calling at her from the bank.
+He knows.  He done it himself years ago when there was rips in the tribe
+an' he had to sew up the tears.  He run them Rapids in his canoe--"
+
+"Just as the Druse girl there is doin'--"
+
+"An' he's done what he liked with the Blackfeet ever since."
+
+"But she ain't a chief--what's the use of her doin' it?  She's goin'
+straight for them.  She can't turn back now.  She couldn't make the bank
+if she wanted to.  She's got to run 'em.  Holy smoke, see her wavin' the
+paddle at Tekewani!  Osterhaut, she's the limit, that petticoat--so quiet
+and shy and don't-look-at-me, too, with eyes like brown diamonds."
+
+"Oh, get out, Jowett; she's all right!  She'll make this country sit up
+some day-by gorry, she'll make Manitou and Lebanon sit up to-day if she
+runs the Carillon Rapids safe!"
+
+"She's runnin' 'em all right, son.  She's--by jee, well done, Miss Druse!
+Well done, I say--well done!" exclaimed Jowett, dancing about and waving
+his arms towards the adventurous girl.
+
+The girl had reached the angry, thrashing waters where the rocks rent and
+tore into white ribbons the onrushing current, and her first trial had
+come on the instant the spitting, raging panthers of foam struck the bow
+of her canoe.  The waters were so low that this course, which she had
+made once before with her friend Tekewani the Blackfeet chief, had perils
+not met on that desperate journey.  Her canoe struck a rock slantwise,
+shuddered and swung round, but by a dexterous stroke she freed the frail
+craft.  It righted and plunged forward again into fresh death-traps.
+
+It was these new dangers which had made Tekewani try to warn her from the
+shore--he and the dozen braves with him: but it was characteristic of his
+race that, after the first warning, when she must play out the game to
+the bitter end, he made no further attempt to stop her.  The Indians ran
+down the river-bank, however, with eyes intent on her headlong progress,
+grunting approval as she plunged safely from danger to danger.
+
+Osterhaut and Jowett became silent, too, and, like the Indians, ran as
+fast as they could, over fences, through the trees, stumbling and
+occasionally cursing, but watching with fascinated eyes this adventuress
+of the North, taking chances which not one coureur-de-bois or river-
+driver in a thousand would take, with a five thousand-dollar prize as the
+lure.  Why should she do it?
+
+"Women folks are sick darn fools when they git goin'," gasped Osterhaut
+as he ran.  "They don't care a split pea what happens when they've got
+the pip.  Look at her--my hair's bleachin'."
+
+"She's got the pip all right," stuttered Jowett as he plunged along; "but
+she's foreign, and they've all got the pip, foreign men and women both--
+but the women go crazy."
+
+"She keeps pretty cool for a crazy loon, that girl.  If I owned her,
+I'd--"
+
+Jowett interrupted impatiently.  "You'd do what old man Druse does--you'd
+let her be, Osterhaut.  What's the good of havin' your own way with one
+that's the apple of your eye, if it turns her agin you?  You want her to
+kiss you on the high cheek-bone, but if you go to play the cat-o'-nine-
+tails round her, the high cheek-bone gets froze.  Gol blast it, look at
+her, son!  What are the wild waves saying?  They're sayin', 'This is a
+surprise, Miss Druse.  Not quite ready for ye, Miss Druse.'   My, ain't
+she got the luck of the old devil!"
+
+It seemed so.  More than once the canoe half jammed between the rocks,
+and the stern lifted up by the force of the wild current, but again the
+paddle made swift play, and again the cockle-shell swung clear.  But now
+Fleda Druse was no longer on her feet.  She knelt, her strong, slim brown
+arms bared to the shoulder, her hair blown about her forehead, her daring
+eyes flashing to left and right, memory of her course at work under such
+a strain as few can endure without chaos of mind in the end.  A hundred
+times since the day she had run these Rapids with Tekewani, she had gone
+over the course in her mind, asleep and awake, forcing her brain to see
+again every yard of that watery way; because she knew that the day must
+come when she would make the journey alone.  Why she would make it she
+did not know; she only knew that she would do it some day; and the day
+had come.  For long it had been an obsession with her--as though some
+spirit whispered in her ear--"Do you hear the bells ringing at Carillon?
+Do you hear the river singing towards Carillon?  Do you see the wild
+birds flying towards Carillon?  Do you hear the Rapids calling--the
+Rapids of Carillon?"
+
+Night and day since she had braved death with Tekewani, giving him a gun,
+a meerschaum pipe, and ten pounds of beautiful brown "plug" tobacco as a
+token of her gratitude--night and day she had heard this spirit murmuring
+in her ear, and always the refrain was, "Down the stream to Carillon!
+Shoot the Rapids of Carillon!"
+
+Why?  How should she know?  Wherefore should she know?  This was of the
+things beyond the why of the human mind.  Sometimes all our lives, if we
+keep our souls young, and see the world as we first saw it with eyes and
+heart unsoiled, we hear the murmuring of the Other Self, that Self from
+which we separated when we entered this mortal sphere, but which followed
+us, invisible yet whispering inspiration to us.  But sometimes we only
+hear It, our own soul's oracle, while yet our years are few, and we have
+not passed that frontier between innocence and experience, reality and
+pretence.  Pretence it is which drives the Other Self away with wailing
+on its lips.  Then we hear It cry in the night when, because of the
+trouble of life, we cannot sleep; or at the play when we are caught away
+from ourselves into another air than ours; when music pours around us
+like a soft wind from a garden of pomegranates; or when a child asks a
+question which brings us back to the land where everything is so true
+that it can be shouted from the tree-tops.
+
+Why was Fleda Druse tempting death in the Carillon Rapids?
+
+She had heard a whisper as she wandered among the pine-trees there at
+Manitou, and it said simply the one word, "Now!"  She knew that she must
+do it; she had driven her canoe out into the resistless current to ride
+the Rapids of Carillon.  Her Other Self had whispered to her.
+
+Yonder, thousands of miles away in Syria, there were the Hills of
+Lebanon; and there was one phrase which made every Syrian heart beat
+faster, if he were on the march.  It was, "The Druses are up!"  When
+that wild tribe took to the saddle to war upon the Caravans and against
+authority, from Lebanon to Palmyra, from Jerusalem to Damascus men looked
+anxiously about them and rode hard to refuge.
+
+And here also in the Far North where the River Sagalac ran a wild race to
+Carillon, leaving behind the new towns of Lebanon and Manitou, "the
+Druses were up."
+
+The daughter of Gabriel Druse, the giant, was riding the Rapids of the
+Sagalac.  The suspense to her and to those who watched her course--to
+Tekewani and his braves, to Osterhaut and Jowett--could not be long.
+It was a matter of minutes only, in which every second was a miracle
+and might be a catastrophe.
+
+From rock to rock, from wild white water to wild white water she sped,
+now tossing to death as it seemed, now shooting on safely to the next
+test of skill and courage--on, on, till at last there was only one
+passage to make before the canoe would plunge into the smooth water
+running with great swiftness till it almost reached Carillon.
+
+Suddenly, as she neared the last dangerous point, round which she must
+swing between jagged and unseen barriers of rock, her sight became for an
+instant dimmed, as though a cloud passed over her eyes.  She had never
+fainted in her life, but it seemed to her now that she was hovering on
+unconsciousness.  Commending the will and energy left, she fought the
+weakness down.  It was as though she forced a way through tossing,
+buffeting shadows; as though she was shaking off from her shoulders
+shadowy hands which sought to detain her; as though smothering things
+kept choking back her breath, and darkness like clouds of wool gathered
+about her face.  She was fighting for her life, and for years it seemed
+to be; though indeed it was only seconds before her will reasserted
+itself, and light broke again upon her way.  Even on the verge of the
+last ambushed passage her senses came back; but they came with a stark
+realization of the peril ahead: it looked out of her eyes as a face shows
+itself at the window of a burning building.
+
+Memory shook itself free.  It pierced the tumult of waters, found the
+ambushed rocks, and guided the lithe brown arms and hands, so that the
+swift paddle drove the canoe straight onward, as a fish drives itself
+through a flume of dragon's teeth beneath the flood.  The canoe quivered
+for an instant at the last cataract, then responding to Memory and Will,
+sped through the hidden chasm, tossed by spray and water, and swept into
+the swift current of smooth water below.
+
+Fleda Druse had run the Rapids of Carillon.  She could hear the bells
+ringing for evening service in the Catholic Church of Carillon, and
+bells-soft, booming bells-were ringing in her own brain.  Like muffled
+silver these brain-bells were, and she was as one who enters into a deep
+forest, and hears far away in the boscage the mystic summons of forest
+deities.  Voices from the banks of the river behind called to her--
+hilarious, approving, agitated voices of her Indian friends, and of
+Osterhaut and Jowett, those wild spectators of her adventure: but they
+were not wholly real.  Only those soft, booming bells in her brain were
+real.
+
+Shooting the Rapids of Carillon was the bridge by which she passed from
+the world she had left to this other.  Her girlhood was ended--wondering,
+hovering, unrealizing girlhood.  This adventure was the outward sign, the
+rite in the Lodge of Life which passed her from one degree of being to
+another.
+
+She was safe; but now as her canoe shot onward to the town of Carillon,
+her senses again grew faint.  Again she felt the buffeting mist, again
+her face was muffled in smothering folds; again great hands reached out
+towards her; again her eyes were drawn into a stupefying darkness; but
+now there was no will to fight, no energy to resist.  The paddle lay
+inert in her fingers, her head drooped.  She slowly raised her head once,
+twice, as though the call of the exhausted will was heard, but suddenly
+it fell heavily upon her breast.  For a moment so, and then as the canoe
+shot forward on a fresh current, the lithe body sank backwards in the
+canoe, and lay face upward to the evening sky.
+
+The canoe sped on, but presently it swung round and lay athwart the
+current, dipping and rolling.
+
+From the banks on either side, the Indians of the Manitou Reservation and
+the two men from Lebanon called out and hastened on, for they saw that
+the girl had collapsed, and they knew only too well that her danger was
+not yet past.  The canoe might strike against the piers of the bridge at
+Carillon and overturn, or it might be carried to the second cataract
+below the town.  They were too far away to save her, but they kept
+shouting as they ran.
+
+None responded to their call, but that defiance of the last cataract of
+the Rapids of Carillon had been seen by one who, below an eddy on the
+Lebanon side of the river, was steadily stringing upon maple-twigs black
+bass and long-nosed pike.  As he sat in the shade of the trees, he had
+seen the plunge of the canoe into the chasm, and had held his breath in
+wonder and admiration.  Even at that distance he knew who it was.  He had
+seen Fleda only a few times before, for she was little abroad; but when
+he had seen her he had asked himself what such a face and form were doing
+in the Far North.  It belonged to Andalusia, to the Carpathians, to
+Syrian villages.
+
+"The pluck of the very devil!" he had exclaimed, as Fleda's canoe swept
+into the smooth current, free of the dragon's teeth; and as he had
+something of the devil in himself, she seemed much nearer to him than the
+hundreds of yards of water intervening.  Presently, however, he saw her
+droop and sink away out of sight.
+
+For an instant he did not realize what had happened, and then, with angry
+self-reproach, he flung the oars into the rowlocks of his skiff and drove
+down and athwart the stream with long, powerful strokes.
+
+"That's like a woman!" he said to himself as he bent to the oars, and
+now and then turned his head to make sure that the canoe was still safe.
+"Do the trick better than a man, and then collapse like a rabbit."
+
+He was Max Ingolby, the financier, contractor, manager of great
+interests, disturber of the peace of slow minds, who had come to Lebanon
+with the avowed object of amalgamating three railways, of making the
+place the swivel of all the trade and interests of the Western North; but
+also with the declared intention of uniting Lebanon and Manitou in one
+municipality, one centre of commercial and industrial power.
+
+Men said he had bitten off more than he could chew, but he had replied
+that his teeth were good, and he would masticate the meal or know the
+reason why.  He was only thirty-three, but his will was like nothing the
+West had seen as yet.  It was sublime in its confidence, it was free from
+conceit, and it knew not the word despair, though once or twice it had
+known defeat.
+
+Men cheered him from the shore as his skiff leaped through the water.
+"It's that blessed Ingolby," said Jowett, who had tried to "do" the
+financier in a horsedeal, and had been done instead, and was now a devout
+admirer and adherent of the Master Man.  "I saw him driving down there
+this morning from Lebanon.  He's been fishing at Seely's Eddy."
+
+"When Ingolby goes fishing, there's trouble goin' on somewhere and he's
+stalkin' it," rejoined Osterhaut.  "But, by gol, he's goin' to do this
+trump trick first; he's goin' to overhaul her before she gits to the
+bridge.  Look at him swing!  Hell, ain't it pretty!  There you go, old
+Ingolby.  You're right on it, even when you're fishing."
+
+On the other-the Manitou-shore Tekewani and his braves were less
+talkative, but they were more concerned in the incident than Osterhaut
+and Jowett.  They knew little or nothing of Ingolby the hustler, but they
+knew more of Fleda Druse and her father than all the people of Lebanon
+and Manitou put together.  Fleda had won old Tekewani's heart when she
+had asked him to take her down the Rapids, for the days of adventure for
+him and his tribe were over.  The adventure shared with this girl had
+brought back to the chief the old days when Indian women tanned bearskins
+and deerskins day in, day out, and made pemmican of the buffalo-meat;
+when the years were filled with hunting and war and migrant journeyings
+to fresh game-grounds and pastures new.
+
+Danger faced was the one thing which could restore Tekewani's self-
+respect, after he had been checked and rebuked before his tribe by the
+Indian Commissioner for being drunk.  Danger faced had restored it, and
+Fleda Druse had brought the danger to him as a gift.
+
+If the canoe should crash against the piers of the bridge, if it should
+drift to the cataract below, if anything should happen to this white girl
+whom he worshipped in his heathen way, nothing could preserve his self-
+respect; he would pour ashes on his head and firewater down his throat.
+
+Suddenly he and his braves stood still.  They watched as one would watch
+an enemy a hundred times stronger than one's self.  The white man's skiff
+was near the derelict canoe; the bridge was near also.  Carillon now
+lined the bank of the river with its people.  They ran upon the bridge,
+but not so fast as to reach the place where, in the nick of time, Ingolby
+got possession of the rolling canoe; where Fleda Druse lay waiting like a
+princess to be waked by the kiss of destiny.
+
+Only five hundred yards below the bridge was the second cataract, and she
+would never have waked if she had been carried into it.
+
+To Ingolby she was as beautiful as a human being could be as she lay with
+white face upturned, the paddle still in her hand.
+
+"Drowning isn't good enough for her," he said, as he fastened her canoe
+to his skiff.
+
+"It's been a full day's work," he added; and even in this human crisis he
+thought of the fish he had caught, of "the big trouble," he had been
+thinking out as Osterhaut had said, as well as of the girl that he was
+saving.
+
+"I always have luck when I go fishing," he added presently.  "I can take
+her back to Lebanon," he continued with a quickening look.  "She'll be
+all right in a jiffy.  I've got room for her in my buggy--and room for
+her in any place that belongs to me," he hastened to reflect with a
+curious, bashful smile.
+
+"It's like a thing in a book," he murmured, as he neared the waiting
+people on the banks of Carillon, and the ringing of the vesper bells came
+out to him on the evening air.
+
+"Is she dead?" some one whispered, as eager hands reached out to secure
+his skiff to the bank.
+
+"As dead as I am," he answered with a laugh, and drew Fleda's canoe up
+alongside his skiff.
+
+He had a strange sensation of new life, as, with delicacy and gentleness,
+he lifted her up in his strong arms and stepped ashore.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE WHISPER FROM BEYOND
+
+Ingolby had a will of his own, but it had never been really tried
+against a woman's will.  It was, however, tried sorely when Fleda came to
+consciousness again in his arms and realized that a man's face was nearer
+to hers than any man's had ever been except that of her own father.  Her
+eyes opened slowly, and for the instant she did not understand, but when
+she did, the blood stole swiftly back to her neck and face and forehead,
+and she started in dismay.
+
+"Put me down," she whispered faintly.
+
+"I'm taking you to my buggy," he replied.  "I'll drive you back to
+Lebanon."  He spoke as calmly as he could, for there was a strange
+fluttering of his nerves, and the crowd was pressing him.
+
+"Put me down at once," she said peremptorily.  She trembled on her feet,
+and swayed, and would have fallen but that Ingolby and a woman in black,
+who had pushed her way through the crowd with white, anxious face, caught
+her.
+
+"Give her air, and stand back!" called the sharp voice of the constable
+of Carillon, and he heaved the people back with his powerful shoulders.
+
+A space was cleared round the place where Fleda sat with her head
+against the shoulder of the stately woman in black who had come to her
+assistance.  A dipper of water was brought, and when she had drunk it
+she raised her head slowly and her eyes sought those of Ingolby.
+
+"One cannot pay for such things," she said to him, meeting his look
+firmly and steeling herself to thank him.  Though deeply grateful, it was
+a trial beyond telling to be obliged to owe the debt of a life to any
+one, and in particular to a man of the sort to whom material gifts could
+not be given.
+
+"Such things are paid for just by accepting them," he answered quickly,
+trying to feel that he had never held her in his arms, as she evidently
+desired him to feel.  He had intuition, if not enough of it, for the
+regions where the mind of Fleda Druse dwelt.
+
+"I couldn't very well decline, could I?" she rejoined, quick humour
+shooting into her eyes.  "I was helpless.  I never fainted before in my
+life."
+
+"I am sure you will never faint again," he remarked.  "We only do such
+things when we are very young."
+
+She was about to reply, but paused reflectively.  Her half-opened lips
+did not frame the words she had been impelled to speak.
+
+Admiration was alive in his eyes.  He had never seen this type of
+womanhood before--such energy and grace, so amply yet so lithely framed;
+such darkness and fairness in one living composition; such individuality,
+yet such intimate simplicity.  Her hair was a very light brown, sweeping
+over a broad, low forehead, and lying, as though with a sense of modesty,
+on the tips of the ears, veiling them slightly.  The forehead was classic
+in its intellectual fulness; but the skin was so fresh, even when pale as
+now, and with such an underglow of vitality, that the woman in her, sex
+and the possibilities of sex, cast a glamour over the intellect and
+temperament showing in every line of her contour.  In contrast to the
+light brown of the hair was the very dark brown of the eyes and the still
+darker brown of the eyelashes.  The face shone, the eyes burned, and the
+piquancy of the contrast between the soft illuminating whiteness of the
+skin and the flame in the eyes had fascinated many more than Ingolby.
+
+Her figure was straight yet supple, somewhat fuller than is modern
+beauty, with hints of Juno-like stateliness to come; and the curves of
+her bust, the long lines of her limbs, were not obscured by her
+absolutely plain gown of soft, light-brown linen.  She was tall, but not
+too commanding, and, as her hand was raised to fasten back a wisp of
+hair, there was the motion of as small a wrist and as tapering a bare arm
+as ever made prisoner of a man's neck.
+
+Impulse was written in every feature, in the passionate eagerness of
+her body; yet the line from the forehead to the chin, and the firm
+shapeliness of the chin itself, gave promise of great strength of will.
+From the glory of the crown of hair to the curve of the high instep of a
+slim foot it was altogether a personality which hinted at history--at
+tragedy, maybe.
+
+"She'll have a history," Madame Bulteel, who now stood beside the girl,
+herself a figure out of a picture by Velasquez, had said of her sadly;
+for she saw in Fleda's rare qualities, in her strange beauty, happenings
+which had nothing to do with the life she was living.  So this duenna of
+Gabriel Druse's household, this aristocratic, silent woman was ever on
+the watch for some sudden revelation of a being which had not found
+itself, and which must find itself through perils and convulsions.
+
+That was why, to-day, she had hesitated to leave Fleda alone and come to
+Carillon, to be at the bedside of a dying, friendless woman whom by
+chance she had come to know.  In the street she had heard of what was
+happening on the river, and had come in time to receive Fleda from the
+arms of her rescuer.
+
+"How did you get here?" Fleda asked her.
+
+"How am I always with you when I am needed, truant?" said the other with
+a reproachful look.  "Did you fly?  You are so light, so thin, you could
+breathe yourself here," rejoined the girl, with a gentle, quizzical
+smile.  "But, no," she added, "I remember, you were to be here at
+Carillon."
+
+"Are you able to walk now?" asked Madame Bulteel.
+
+"To Manitou--but of course," Fleda answered almost sharply.
+
+After the first few minutes the crowd had fallen back.  They watched her
+with respectful admiration from a decent distance.  They had the chivalry
+towards woman so characteristic of the West.  There was no vulgarity in
+their curiosity, though most of them had never seen her before.  All,
+however, had heard of her and her father, the giant greybeard who moved
+and lived in an air of mystery, and apparently secret wealth, for more
+than once he had given large sums--large in the eyes of folks of moderate
+means, when charity was needed; as in the case of the floods the year
+before, and in the prairie-fire the year before that, when so many people
+were made homeless, and also when fifty men had been injured in one
+railway accident.  On these occasions he gave disproportionately to his
+mode of life.
+
+Now, when they saw that Fleda was about to move away, they drew just a
+little nearer, and presently one of the crowd could contain his
+admiration no longer.  He raised a cheer.
+
+"Three cheers for Her," he shouted, and loud hurrahs followed.
+
+"Three cheers for Ingolby," another cried, and the noise was boisterous
+but not so general.
+
+"Who shot Carillon Rapids?" another called in the formula of the West.
+
+"She shot the Rapids," was the choral reply.  "Who is she?" came the
+antiphon.
+
+"Druse is her name," was the gay response.  "What did she do?"
+
+"She shot Carillon Rapids--shot 'em dead.  Hooray!"
+
+In the middle of the cheering, Osterhaut and Jowett arrived in a wagon
+which they had commandeered, and, about the same time, from across the
+bridge, came running Tekewani and his braves.
+
+"She done it like a kingfisher," cried Osterhaut.  "Manitou's got the
+belt."
+
+Fleda Druse's friendly eyes were given only for one instant to Osterhaut
+and his friend.  Her gaze became fixed on Tekewani who, silent, and with
+immobile face, stole towards her.  In spite of the civilization which
+controlled him, he wore Indian moccasins and deerskin breeches, though
+his coat was rather like a shortened workman's blouse.  He did not belong
+to the life about him; he was a being apart, the spirit of vanished and
+vanishing days.
+
+"Tekewani--ah, Tekewani, you have come," the girl said, and her eyes
+smiled at him as they had not smiled at Ingolby or even at the woman in
+black beside her.
+
+"How!" the chief replied, and looked at her with searching, worshipping
+eyes.
+
+"Don't look at me that way, Tekewani," she said, coming close to him.
+"I had to do it, and I did it."
+
+"The teeth of rock everywhere!" he rejoined reproachfully, with a
+gesture of awe.
+
+"I remembered all--all.  You were my master, Tekewani."
+
+"But only once with me it was, Summer Song," he persisted.  Summer Song
+was his name for her.
+
+"I saw it--saw it, every foot of the way," she insisted.  "I thought
+hard, oh, hard as the soul thinks.  And I saw it all."  There was
+something singularly akin in the nature of the girl and the Indian.  She
+spoke to him as she never spoke to any other.
+
+"Too much seeing, it is death," he answered.  "Men die with too much
+seeing.  I have seen them die.  To look hard through deerskin curtains,
+to see through the rock, to behold the water beneath the earth, and the
+rocks beneath the black waters, it is for man to see if he has a soul,
+but the seeing--behold, so those die who should live!"
+
+"I live, Tekewani, though I saw the teeth of rocks beneath the black
+water," she urged gently.
+
+"Yet the half-death came--"
+
+"I fainted, but I was not to die--it was not my time."
+
+He shook his head gloomily.  "Once it may be, but the evil spirits tempt
+us to death.  It matters not what comes to Tekewani; he is as the leaf
+that falls from the stem; but for Summer Song that has far to go, it is
+the madness from beyond the Hills of Life."
+
+She took his hand.  "I will not do it again, Tekewani."
+
+"How!" he said, with hand upraised, as one who greets the great in this
+world.
+
+"I don't know why I did it," she added meaningly.  "It was selfish.  I
+feel that now."
+
+The woman in black pressed her hand timidly.
+
+"It is so for ever with the great," Tekewani answered.  "It comes, also,
+from beyond the Hills--the will to do it.  It is the spirit that whispers
+over the earth out of the Other Earth.  No one hears it but the great.
+The whisper only is for this one here and that one there who is of the
+Few.  It whispers, and the whisper must be obeyed.  So it was from the
+beginning."
+
+"Yes, you understand, Tekewani," she answered softly.  "I did it because
+something whispered from the Other Earth to me."
+
+Her head drooped a little, her eyes had a sudden shadow.
+
+"He will understand," answered the Indian; "your father will understand,"
+as though reading her thoughts.  He had clearly read her thought, this
+dispossessed, illiterate Indian chieftain.  Yet, was he so illiterate?
+Had he not read in books which so few have learned to read?  His life had
+been broken on the rock of civilization, but his simple soul had learned
+some elemental truths--not many, but the essential ones, without which
+there is no philosophy, no understanding.  He knew Fleda Druse was
+thinking of her father, wondering if he would understand, half-fearing,
+hardly hoping, dreading the moment when she must meet him face to face.
+She knew she had been selfish, but would Gabriel Druse understand?  She
+raised her eyes in gratitude to the Blackfeet chief.
+
+"I must go home," she said.
+
+She turned to go, but as she did so, a man came swaggering down the
+street, broke through the crowd, and made towards her with an arm raised,
+a hand waving, and a leer on his face.  He was a thin, rather handsome,
+dissolute-looking fellow of middle height and about forty, in dandified
+dress.  His glossy black hair fell carelessly over his smooth forehead
+from under a soft, wide-awake hat.
+
+"Manitou for ever!" he cried, with a flourish of his hand.  "I salute
+the brave.  I escort the brave to the gates of Manitou.  I escort the
+brave.  I escort the brave.  Salut!  Salut!  Salut!  Well done, Beauty
+Beauty--Beauty--Beauty, well done again!"
+
+He held out his hand to Fleda, but she drew back with disgust.  Felix
+Marchand, the son of old Hector Marchand, money-lender and capitalist of
+Manitou, had pressed his attentions upon her during the last year since
+he had returned from the East, bringing dissoluteness and vulgar pride
+with him.  Women had spoiled him, money had corrupted and degraded him.
+
+"Come, beautiful brave, it's Salut!  Salut!  Salut!" he said, bending
+towards her familiarly.
+
+Her face flushed with anger.
+
+"Let me pass, monsieur," she said sharply.
+
+"Pride of Manitou--" he apostrophized, but got no farther.
+
+Ingolby caught him by the shoulders, wheeled him round, and then flung
+him at the feet of Tekewani and his braves.
+
+At this moment Tekewani's eyes had such a fire as might burn in Wotan's
+smithy.  He was ready enough to defy the penalty of the law for
+assaulting a white man, but Felix Marchand was in the dust, and that
+would do for the moment.
+
+With grim face Ingolby stood over the begrimed figure.  "There's the
+river if you want more," he said.  "Tekewani knows where the water's
+deepest."  Then he turned and followed Fleda and the woman in black.
+Felix Marchand's face was twisted with hate as he got slowly to his feet.
+
+"You'll eat dust before I'm done," he called after Ingolby.  Then, amid
+the jeers of the crowd, he went back to the tavern where he had been
+carousing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+CONCERNING INGOLBY AND THE TWO TOWNS
+
+A word about Max Ingolby.
+
+He was the second son of four sons, with a father who had been a failure;
+but with a mother of imagination and great natural strength of brain, yet
+whose life had been so harried in bringing up a family on nothing at all,
+that there only emerged from her possibilities a great will to do the
+impossible things.  From her had come the spirit which would not be
+denied.
+
+In his boyhood Max could not have those things which lads prize--fishing-
+rods, cricket-bats and sleds, and all such things; but he could take most
+prizes at school open to competition; he could win in the running-jump,
+the high-jump, and the five hundred yards' race; and he could organize a
+picnic, or the sports of the school or town--at no cost to himself.  His
+finance in even this limited field had been brilliant.  Other people
+paid, and he did the work; and he did it with such ease that the others
+intriguing to crowd him out, suffered failure and came to him in the end
+to put things right.
+
+He became the village doctor's assistant and dispenser at seventeen and
+induced his master to start a drug-store.  He made the drug-store a
+success within two years, and meanwhile he studied Latin and Greek
+and mathematics in every spare hour he had--getting up at five in the
+morning, and doing as much before breakfast as others did in a whole day.
+His doctor loved him and helped him; a venerable Archdeacon, an Oxford
+graduate, gave him many hours of coaching, and he went to the University
+with three scholarships.  These were sufficient to carry him through in
+three years, and there was enough profit-sharing from the drug-business
+he had founded on terms to shelter his mother and his younger brothers,
+while he took honours at the University.
+
+There he organized all that students organize, and was called in at last
+by the Bursar of his college to reorganize the commissariat, which he did
+with such success that the college saved five thousand dollars a year.
+He had genius, the college people said, and after he had taken his degree
+with honours in classics and mathematics they offered him a professorship
+at two thousand dollars a year.
+
+He laughed ironically, but yet with satisfaction, when the professorship
+was offered.  It was all so different from what was in his mind for the
+future.  As he looked out of the oriel window in the sweet gothic
+building, to the green grass and the maples and elms which made the
+college grounds like an old-world park, he had a vision of himself
+permanently in these surroundings of refinement growing venerable with
+years, seeing pass under his influence thousands of young men directed,
+developed and inspired by him.
+
+He had, however, shaken himself free of this modest vision.  He knew that
+such a life would act like a narcotic to his real individuality.  He
+thirsted for contest, for the control of brain and will; he wanted to
+construct; he was filled with the idea of simplifying things, of
+economizing strength; he saw how futile was much competition, and how the
+big brain could command and control with ease, wasting no force, saving
+labour, making the things controlled bigger and better.
+
+So it came that his face was seen no more in the oriel window.  With a
+mere handful of dollars, and some debts, he left the world of scholarship
+and superior pedagogy, and went where the head offices of railways were.
+Railways were the symbol of progress in his mind.  The railhead was the
+advance post of civilization.  It was like Cortez and his Conquistadores
+overhauling and appropriating the treasures of long generations.  So
+where should he go if not to the Railway?
+
+His first act, when he got to his feet inside the offices of the
+President of a big railway, was to show the great man how two "outside"
+proposed lines could be made one, and then further merged into the
+company controlled by the millionaire in whose office he sat.  He got his
+chance by his very audacity--the President liked audacity.  In attempting
+this merger, however, he had his first failure, but he showed that he
+could think for himself, and he was made increasingly responsible.  After
+a few years of notable service, he was offered the task of building a
+branch line of railway from Lebanon and Manitou north, and northwest, and
+on to the Coast; and he had accepted it, at the same time planning to
+merge certain outside lines competing with that which he had in hand.
+For over four years he worked night and day, steadily advancing towards
+his goal, breaking down opposition, manoeuvring, conciliating, fighting.
+
+Most men loved his whimsical turn of mind, even those who were the agents
+of the financial clique which had fought him in their efforts to get
+control of the commercial, industrial, transport and banking resources of
+the junction city of Lebanon.  In the days when vast markets would be
+established for Canadian wheat in Shanghai and Tokio, then these two
+towns of Manitou and Lebanon on the Sagalac would be like the swivel to
+the organization of trade of a continent.
+
+Ingolby had worked with this end in view.  In doing so he had tried to
+get what he wanted without trickery; to reach his goal by playing the
+game according to the rules, and this policy nonplussed his rivals and
+associates.  They expected secret moves, and he laid his cards on the
+table.  Sharp, quick, resolute and ruthless he was, however, if he knew
+that he was being tricked.  Then he struck, and struck hard.  The war of
+business was war and not "gollyfoxing," as he said.  Selfish, stubborn
+and self-centred he was in much, but he had great joy in the natural and
+sincere, and he had a passionate love of Nature.  To him the flat prairie
+was never ugly.  Its very monotony had its own individuality.  The
+Sagalac, even when muddy, had its own deep interest, and when it was full
+of logs drifting down to the sawmills, for which he had found the money
+by interesting capitalists in the East, he sniffed the stinging smell of
+the pines with elation.  As the great saws in the mills, for which he had
+secured the capital, throwing off the spray of mangled wood, hummed and
+buzzed and sang, his mouth twisted in the droll smile it always wore when
+he talked with such as Jowett and Osterhaut, whose idiosyncrasies were
+like a meal to him; as he described it once to some of the big men from
+the East who had been behind his schemes, yet who cavilled at his ways.
+He was never diverted from his course by such men, and while he was loyal
+to those who had backed him, he vowed that he would be independent of
+these wooden souls in the end.  They and the great bankers behind them
+were for monopoly; he was for organization and for economic prudence.  So
+far they were necessary to all he did; but it was his intention to shake
+himself free of all monopoly in good time.  One or two of his colleagues
+saw the drift of his policy and would have thrown him over if they could
+have replaced him by a man as capable, who would, at the time, consent to
+grow rich on their terms.
+
+They could not understand a man who would stand for a half-hour watching
+a sunset, or a morning sky dappled with all the colours that shake from a
+prism; they were suspicious of a business-mind which could gloat over the
+light falling on snow-peaked mountains, while it planned a great bridge
+across a gorge in the same hour; of a man who would quote a verse of
+poetry while a flock of wild pigeons went whirring down a pine-girt
+valley in the shimmer of the sun.
+
+On the occasion when he had quoted a verse of poetry to them, one of them
+said to him with a sidelong glance: "You seem to be dead-struck on
+Nature, Ingolby."
+
+To that, with a sly quirk of the mouth, and meaning to mystify his
+wooden-headed questioner still more, he answered: "Dead-struck?  Dead-
+drunk, you mean.  I'm a Nature's dipsomaniac--as you can see," he added
+with a sly note of irony.
+
+Then instantly he had drawn the little circle of experts into a
+discussion upon technical questions of railway-building and finance,
+which made demands upon all their resources and knowledge.  In that
+conference he gave especial attention to the snub-souled financier who
+had sneered at his love of Nature.  He tied his critic up in knots of
+self-assertion and bad logic which presently he deftly, deliberately and
+skilfully untied, to the delight of all the group.
+
+"He's got as much in his ten years in the business as we've got out
+of half a life-time," said the chief of his admirers.  This was the
+President who had first welcomed him into business, and introduced him to
+his colleagues in enterprise.
+
+"I shouldn't be surprised if the belt flew off the wheel some day,"
+savagely said Ingolby's snub-souled critic, whose enmity was held in
+check by the fact that on Ingolby, for the moment, depended the safety
+of the hard cash he had invested.
+
+But the qualities which alienated an expert here and there caught the
+imagination of the pioneer spirits of Lebanon.  Except those who, for
+financial reasons, were opposed to him, and must therefore pit themselves
+against him, as the representatives of bigger forces behind them, he was
+a leader of whom Lebanon was combatively proud.  At last he came to the
+point where his merger was practically accomplished, and a problem
+arising out of it had to be solved.  It was a problem which taxed every
+quality of an able mind.  The situation had at last become acute, and
+Time, the solvent of most complications, had not quite eased the strain.
+Indeed, on the day that Fleda Druse had made her journey down the
+Carillon Rapids, Time's influence had not availed.  So he had gone
+fishing, with millions at stake--to the despair of those who were risking
+all on his skill and judgment.
+
+But that was Ingolby.  Thinking was the essence of his business, not
+Time.  As fishing was the friend of thinking, therefore he fished in
+Seely's Eddy, saw Fleda Druse run the Carillon Rapids, saved her from
+drowning, and would have brought her in pride and peace to her own home,
+but that she decreed otherwise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE COMING OF JETHRO FAWE
+
+Gabriel Druse's house stood on a little knoll on the outskirts of the
+town of Manitou, backed by a grove of pines.  Its front windows faced the
+Sagalac, and the windows behind looked into cool coverts where in old
+days many Indian tribes had camped; where Hudson's Bay Company's men had
+pitched their tents to buy the red man's furs.  But the red man no longer
+set up his tepee in these secluded groves; the wapiti and red deer had
+fled to the north never to return, the snarling wolf had stolen into
+regions more barren; the ceremonial of the ancient people no longer made
+weird the lonely nights; the medicine-man's incantations, the harvest-
+dance, the green-corn-dance, the sun-dance had gone.  The braves, their
+women, and their tepees had been shifted to reservations where
+Governments solemnly tried to teach them to till the field, and grow
+corn, and drive the cart to market; while yet they remembered the herds
+of buffalo which had pounded down the prairie like storm-clouds and given
+their hides for the tepee; and the swift deer whose skins made the wigwam
+luxurious.
+
+Originally Manitou had been the home of Icelanders, Mennonites, and
+Doukhobors; settlers from lands where the conditions of earlier centuries
+prevailed, who, simple as they were in habits and in life, were
+ignorant, primitive, coarse, and none too cleanly.
+
+They had formed an unprogressive polyglot settlement, and the place
+assumed a still more primeval character when the Indian Reservation was
+formed near by.  When French Canadian settlers arrived, however, the
+place became less discordant to the life of a new democracy, though they
+did little to make it modern in the sense that Lebanon, across the river,
+where Ingolby lived, was modern from the day the first shack was thrown
+up.
+
+Manitou showed itself antagonistic to progress; it was old-fashioned, and
+primitively agricultural.  It looked with suspicion on the factories
+built after Ingolby came and on the mining propositions, which circled
+the place with speculation.  Unlike other towns of the West, it was
+insanitary and uneducated; it was also given to nepotism and a primitive
+kind of jobbery; but, on the whole, it was honest.  It was a settlement
+twenty years before Lebanon had a house, though the latter exceeded the
+population of Manitou in five years, and became the home of all
+adventuring spirits--land agents, company promoters, mining prospectors,
+railway men, politicians, saloon keepers, and up to-date dissenting
+preachers.  Manitou was, however, full of back-water people, religious
+fanatics, little farmers, guides, trappers, old coureurs-de-bois,
+Hudson's Bay Company factors and ex-factors, half-breeds; and all the
+rest.
+
+The real feud between the two towns began about the time of the arrival
+of Gabriel Druse, his daughter, and Madame Bulteel, the woman in black,
+and it had grown with great rapidity and increasing intensity.  Manitou
+condemned the sacrilegiousness of the Protestants, whose meeting-houses
+were used for "socials," "tea-meetings," "strawberry festivals," and
+entertainments of many kinds; while comic songs were sung at the table
+where the solemn Love Feast was held at the quarterly meetings.  At last
+when attempts were made to elect to Parliament an Irish lawyer who added
+to his impecuniousness, eloquence, a half-finished University education,
+and an Orangeman's prejudices of the best brand of Belfast or Derry,
+inter-civic strife took the form of physical violence.  The great bridge
+built by Ingolby between the two towns might have been ten thousand yards
+long, so deep was the estrangement between the two places.  They had only
+one thing in common--a curious compromise--in the person of Nathan
+Rockwell, an agnostic doctor, who had arrived in Lebanon with a
+reputation for morality somewhat clouded; though, where his patients in
+Manitou and Lebanon were concerned, he had been the "pink of propriety."
+
+Rockwell had arrived in Lebanon early in its career, and had remained
+unimportant until a railway accident occurred at Manitou and the resident
+doctors were driven from the field of battle, one by death, and one by
+illness.  Then it was that the silent, smiling, dark-skinned, cool-headed
+and cool-handed Rockwell stepped in, and won for himself the gratitude of
+all--from Monseigneur Lourde, the beloved Catholic priest, to Tekewani,
+the chief.  This accident was followed by an epidemic.
+
+That was at the time, also, when Fleda Druse returned from Winnipeg where
+she had been at school for one memorable and terrible six months, pining
+for her father, defying rules, and crying the night through for "the open
+world," as she called it.  So it was that, to her father's dismay and joy
+in one, she had fled from school, leaving all her things behind her; and
+had reached home with only the clothes on her back and a few cents in her
+pocket.
+
+Instantly on her return she had gone among the stricken people as
+fearlessly as Rockwell had done, but chiefly among the women and
+children; and it was said that the herbal medicine she administered was
+marvellous in its effect--so much so that Rockwell asked for the
+prescription, which she declined to give.
+
+Thus it was that the French Canadian mothers with daughters of their own,
+bright-eyed brunettes, ready for the man-market, regarded with toleration
+the girl who took their children away for picnics down the river or into
+the woods, and brought them back safe and sound at the end of the day.
+Not that they failed to be shocked sometimes, when, on her wild Indian
+pony, Fleda swept through Manitou like a wind and out into the prairie,
+riding, as it were, to the end of the world.  Try as they would, these
+grateful mothers of Manitou, they could not get as near to Fleda Druse as
+their children did, and they were vast distances from her father.
+
+"There, there, look at him," said old Madame Thibadeau to her neighbour
+Christine Brisson--"look at him with his great grey-beard, and his eyes
+like black fires, and that head of hair like a bundle of burnt flax!  He
+comes from the place no man ever saw, that's sure."
+
+"Ah, surelee, men don't grow so tall in any Christian country," announced
+Christine Brisson, her head nodding sagely.  "I've seen the pictures in
+the books, and there's nobody so tall and that looks like him--not
+anywhere since Adam."
+
+"Nom de pipe, sometimes-trulee, sometimes, I look up there at where he
+lives, and I think I see a thousand men on horses ride out of the woods
+behind his house and down here to gobble us all up.  That's the way I
+feel.  It's fancy, but I can't help that."  Dame Thibadeau rested her
+hands--on her huge stomach as though the idea had its origin there.
+
+"I've seen a lot of fancies come to pass," gloomily returned her friend.
+"It's a funny world.  I don't know what to make of its sometimes."
+
+"And that girl of his, the strangest creature, as proud as a peacock, but
+then as kind as kind to the children--of a good heart, surelee.  They say
+she has plenty of gold rings and pearls and bracelets, and all like that.
+Babette Courton, she saw them when she went to sew.  Why doesn't
+Ma'm'selle wear them?"
+
+Christine looked wise and smoothed out her apron as though it was a
+parchment.  "With such queer ones, who knows?  But, yes, as you say, she
+has a kind heart.  The children, well, they follow her everywhere."
+
+"Not the children only," sagely added the other.  "From Lebanon they
+come, the men, and plenty here, too; and there's that Felix Marchand, the
+worst of all in Manitou or anywhere."
+
+"I'd look sharp if Felix Marchand followed me," remarked Christine.
+"There are more papooses at the Reservation since he come back, and over
+in Lebanon--!"  She whispered darkly to her friend, and they nodded
+knowingly.
+
+"If he plays pranks in Manitou he'll get his throat cut, for sure.  Even
+with Protes'ants and Injuns it's bad enough," remarked Dame Thibadeau,
+panting with the thought of it.
+
+"He doesn't even leave the Doukhobors alone.  There's--" Again Christine
+whispered, and again that ugly look came to their faces which belongs to
+the thought of forbidden things.
+
+"Felix Marchand'll have much money--bad penny as he is," continued
+Christine in her normal voice.  "He'll have more money than he can put in
+all the trouser legs he has.  Old Hector, his father, has enough for a
+gover'ment.  But that M'sieu' Felix will get his throat cut if he follows
+Ma'm'selle Druse about too much.  She hates him--I've seen when they met.
+Old man Druse'll make trouble.  He don't look as he does for nothing."
+
+"Ah, that's so.  One day, we shall see what we shall see," murmured
+Christine, and waved a hand to a friend in the street.
+
+This conversation happened on the evening of the day that Fleda Druse
+shot the Carillon Rapids alone.  An hour after the two gossips had had
+their say Gabriel Druse paced up and down the veranda of his house,
+stopping now and then to view the tumbling, hurrying Sagalac, or to dwell
+upon the sunset which crimsoned and bronzed the western sky.  His walk
+had an air of impatience; he seemed disturbed of mind and restless of
+body.
+
+He gave an impression of great force.  He would have been picked out of a
+multitude, not alone because of his remarkable height, but because he had
+an air of command and the aloofness which shows a man sufficient unto
+himself.
+
+As he stood gazing reflectively into the sunset, a strange, plaintive,
+birdlike note pierced the still evening air.  His head lifted quickly,
+yet he did not look in the direction of the sound, which came from the
+woods behind the house.  He did not stir, and his eyes half-closed, as
+though he hesitated what to do.  The call was not that of a bird familiar
+to the Western world.  It had a melancholy softness like that of the
+bell-bird of the Australian bush.  Yet, in the insistence of the note, it
+was, too, a challenge or a summons.
+
+Three times during the past week he had heard it--once as he went by the
+market-place of Manitou; once as he returned in the dusk from Tekewani's
+Reservation, and once at dawn from the woods behind the house.  His
+present restlessness and suppressed agitation had been the result.
+
+It was a call he knew well.  It was like a voice from a dead world.  It
+asked, he knew, for an answering call, yet he had not given it.  It was
+seven days since he first heard it in the market-place, and in that seven
+days he had realized that nothing in this world which has ever been,
+really ceases to be.  Presently, the call was repeated.  On the three
+former occasions there had been no repetition.  The call had trembled in
+the air but once and had died away into unbroken silence.  Now, however,
+it rang out with an added poignancy.  It was like a bird calling to its
+vanished mate.
+
+With sudden resolution Druse turned.  Leaving the veranda, he walked
+slowly behind the house into the woods and stood still under the branches
+of a great cedar.  Raising his head, a strange, solemn note came from his
+lips; but the voice died away in a sharp broken sound which was more
+human than birdlike, which had the shrill insistence of authority.  The
+call to him had been almost ventriloquial in its nature.  His lips had
+not moved at all.
+
+There was silence for a moment after he had called into the void, as it
+were, and then there appeared suddenly from behind a clump of juniper, a
+young man of dark face and upright bearing.  He made a slow obeisance
+with a gesture suggestive of the Oriental world, yet not like the usual
+gesture of the East Indian, the Turk or the Persian; it was composite of
+all.
+
+He could not have been more than twenty-five years of age.  He was so
+sparely made, and his face being clean-shaven, he looked even younger.
+His clothes were the clothes of the Western man; and yet there was a
+manner of wearing them, there were touches which were evidence to the
+watchful observer that he was of other spheres.  His wide, felt, Western
+hat had a droop on one side and a broken treatment of the crown, which of
+itself was enough to show him a stranger to the prairie, while his brown
+velveteen jacket, held by its two lowest buttons, was reminiscent of an
+un-English life.  His eyes alone would have announced him as of some
+foreign race, though he was like none of the foreigners who had been the
+pioneers of Manitou.  Unlike as he and Gabriel Druse were in height,
+build, and movement, still there was something akin in them both.
+
+After a short silence evidently disconcerting to him, "Blessing and hail,
+my Ry," he said in a low tone.  He spoke in a strange language and with a
+voice rougher than his looks would have suggested.
+
+The old man made a haughty gesture of impatience.  "What do you want with
+me, my Romany 'chal'?" he asked sharply.--[A glossary of Romany words
+will be found at the end of the book.]
+
+The young man replied hastily.  He seemed to speak by rote.  His manner
+was too eager to suit the impressiveness of his words.  "The sheep are
+without a shepherd," he said.  "The young men marry among the Gorgios, or
+they are lost in the cities and return no more to the tents and the
+fields and the road.  There is disorder in all the world among the
+Romanys.  The ancient ways are forgotten.  Our people gather and settle
+upon the land and live as the Gorgios live.  They forget the way beneath
+the trees, they lose their skill in horses.  If the fountain is choked,
+how shall the water run?"
+
+A cold sneer came to the face of Gabriel Druse.  "The way beneath the
+trees!" he growled.  "The way of the open road is enough.  The way
+beneath the trees is the way of the thief, and the skill of the horse is
+the skill to cheat."
+
+"There is no other way.  It has been the way of the Romany since the time
+of Timur Beg and centuries beyond Timur, so it is told.  One man and all
+men must do as the tribe has done since the beginning."
+
+The old man pulled at his beard angrily.  "You do not talk like a Romany,
+but like a Gorgio of the schools."
+
+The young man's manner became more confident as he replied.  "Thinking on
+what was to come to me, I read in the books as the Gorgio reads.  I sat
+in my tent and worked with a pen; I saw in the printed sheets what the
+world was doing every day.  This I did because of what was to come."
+
+"And have you read of me in the printed sheets?  Did they tell you where
+I was to be found?" Gabriel Druse's eyes were angry, his manner was
+authoritative.
+
+The young man stretched out his hands eloquently.  "Hail and blessing, my
+Ry, was there need of printed pages to tell me that?  Is not everything
+known of the Ry to the Romany people without the written or printed
+thing?  How does the wind go?  How does the star sweep across the sky?
+Does not the whisper pass as the lightning flashes?  Have you forgotten
+all, my Ry?  Is there a Romany camp at Scutari?  Shall it not know what
+is the news of the Bailies of Scotland and the Caravans by the Tagus?  It
+is known always where my lord is.  All the Romanys everywhere know it,
+and many hundreds have come hither from overseas.  They are east, they
+are south, they are west."
+
+He made gesture towards these three points of the compass.  A dark frown
+came upon the old man's forehead.  "I ordered that none should seek to
+follow, that I be left in peace till my pilgrimage was done.  Even as the
+first pilgrims of our people in the days of Timur Beg in India, so I have
+come forth from among you all till the time be fulfilled."
+
+There was a crafty look in the old man's eyes as he spoke, and ages of
+dubious reasoning and purpose showed in their velvet depths.
+
+"No one has sought me but you in all these years," he continued.  "Who
+are you that you should come?  I did not call, and there was my command
+that none should call to me."
+
+A bolder look grew in the other's face.  His carriage gained in ease.
+"There is trouble everywhere--in Italy, in Spain, in France, in England,
+in Russia, in mother India"--he made a gesture of salutation and bowed
+low--"and our rites and mysteries are like water spilt upon the ground.
+If the hand be cut off, how shall the body move?  That is how it is.  You
+are vanished, my lord, and the body dies."
+
+The old man plucked his beard again fiercely and his words came with
+guttural force.  "That is fool's talk.  In the past I was never
+everywhere at once.  When I was in Russia, I was not in Greece; when I
+was in England, I was not in Portugal.  I was always 'vanished' from one
+place to another, yet the body lived."
+
+"But your word was passed along the roads everywhere, my Ry.  Your tongue
+was not still from sunrise to the end of the day.  Your call was heard
+always, now here, now there, and the Romanys were one; they held
+together."
+
+The old man's face darkened still more and his eyes flashed fire.  "These
+are lies you are telling, and they will choke you, my Romany 'chal'.  Am
+I deceived, I who have known more liars than any man under the sky?  Am I
+to be fooled, who have seen so many fools in their folly?  There is
+roguery in you, or I have never seen roguery."
+
+"I am a true Romany, my Ry," the other answered with an air of courage
+and a little defiance also.
+
+"You are a rogue and a liar, that is sure.  These wailings are your own.
+The Romany goes on his way as he has gone these hundreds of years.  If I
+am silent, my people will wait until I speak again; if they see me not
+they will wait till I enter their camps once more.  Why are you here?
+Speak, rogue and liar."  The wrathful old man, sure in his reading of the
+youth, towered above him commandingly.  It almost seemed as though he
+would do him bodily harm, so threatening was his attitude, but the young
+Romany raised his head, and with a note of triumph said:
+
+"I have come for my own, as it is my right."
+
+"What is your own?"
+
+"What has been yours until now, my Ry."
+
+A grey look stole slowly up the strong face of the exiled leader, for his
+mind suddenly read the truth behind the young man's confident words.
+
+"What is mine is always mine," he answered roughly.  "Speak!  What is it
+I have that you come for?"
+
+The young man braced himself and put a hand upon his lips.  "I come for
+your daughter, my Ry."  The old man suddenly regained his composure, and
+authority spoke in his bearing and his words.  "What have you to do with
+my daughter?"
+
+"She was married to me when I was seven years of age, as my Ry knows.
+I am the son of Lemuel Fawe--Jethro Fawe is my name.  For three thousand
+pounds it was so arranged.  On his death-bed three thousand pounds did
+my father give to you for this betrothal.  I was but a child, yet I
+remembered, and my kinsmen remembered, for it is their honour also.  I am
+the son of Lemuel Fawe, the husband of Fleda, daughter of Gabriel Druse,
+King and Duke and Earl of all the Romanys; and I come for my own."
+
+Something very like a sigh of relief came from Gabriel Druse's lips, but
+the anger in his face did not pass, and a rigid pride made the distance
+between them endless.  He looked like a patriarch giving judgment as he
+raised his hand and pointed with a menacing finger at Jethro Fawe, his
+Romany subject--and, according to the laws of the Romany tribes, his son-
+in-law.  It did not matter that the girl--but three years of age when it
+happened--had no memory of the day when the chiefs and great people
+assembled outside the tent of Lemuel Fawe when he lay dying, and, by the
+simple act of stepping over a branch of hazel, the two children were
+married: if Romany law and custom were to abide, then the two now were
+man and wife.  Did not Lemuel Fawe, the old-time rival of Gabriel Druse
+for the kinship of the Romanys, the claimant whose family had been rulers
+of the Romanys for generations before the Druses gained ascendancy--did
+not Fawe, dying, seek to secure for his son by marriage what he had
+failed to get for himself by other means?
+
+All these things had at one time been part of Gabriel Druse's covenant of
+life, until one year in England, when Fleda, at twelve years of age, was
+taken ill and would have died, but that a great lady descended upon their
+camp, took the girl to her own house, and there nursed and tended her,
+giving her the best medical aid the world could produce, so that the girl
+lived, and with her passionate nature loved the Lady Barrowdale as she
+might have loved her own mother, had that mother lived and she had ever
+known her.  And when the Lady Barrowdale sickened and died of the same
+sickness which had nearly been her own death, the promise she made then
+overrode all other covenants made for her.  She had promised the great
+lady who had given her own widowed, childless life for her own, that she
+would not remain a Gipsy, that she would not marry a Gipsy, but that if
+ever she gave herself to any man it would be to a Gorgio, a European, who
+travelled oftenest "the open road" leading to his own door.  The years
+which had passed since those tragic days in Gloucestershire had seen the
+shadows of that dark episode pass, but the pledge had remained; and
+Gabriel Druse had kept his word to the dead, because of the vow made to
+the woman who had given her life for the life of a Romany lass.
+
+The Romany tribes of all the nations did not know why their Ry had hidden
+himself in the New World; they did not know that the girl had for ever
+forsworn their race, and would never become head of all the Romanys,
+solving the problem of the rival dynasties by linking her life with that
+of Jethro Fawe.  But Jethro Fawe had come to claim his own.
+
+Now Gabriel Druse's eyes followed his own menacing finger with sharp
+insistence.  In the past such a look had been in his eyes when he had
+sentenced men to death.  They had not died by the gallows or the sword or
+the bullet, but they had died as commanded, and none had questioned his
+decree.  None asked where or how the thing was done when a fire sprang up
+in a field, or a quarry, or on a lonely heath or hill-top, and on the
+pyre were all the belongings of the condemned, being resolved into dust
+as their owner had been made earth again.
+
+"Son of Lemuel Fawe," the old man said, his voice rough with authority,
+"but that you are of the Blood, you should die now for this disobedience.
+When the time is fulfilled, I will return.  Until then, my daughter and I
+are as those who have no people.  Begone!  Nothing that is here belongs
+to you.  Begone, and come no more!"
+
+"I have come for my own--for my Romany 'chi', and I will not go without
+her.  I am blood of the Blood, and she is mine."
+
+"You have not seen her," said the old man craftily, and fighting hard
+against the wrath consuming him, though he liked the young man's spirit.
+"She has changed.  She is no longer Romany."
+
+"I have seen her, and her beauty is like the rose and the palm."
+
+"When have you seen her since the day before the tent of Lemuel Fawe now
+seventeen years ago?"  There was an uneasy note in the commanding tone.
+
+"I have seen her three times of late, and the last time I saw her was an
+hour or so since, when she rode the Rapids of Carillon."
+
+The old man started, his lips parted, but for a moment he did not speak.
+At last words came.  "The Rapids--speak.  What have you heard, Jethro,
+son of Lemuel?"
+
+"I did not hear, I saw her shoot the Rapids.  I ran to follow.  At
+Carillon I saw her arrive.  She was in the arms of a Gorgio of Lebanon--
+Ingolby is his name."
+
+A malediction burst from Gabriel Druse's lips, words sharp and terrible
+in their intensity.  For the first time since they had met the young man
+blanched.  The savage was alive in the giant.
+
+"Speak.  Tell all," Druse said, with hands clenching.
+
+Swiftly the young man told all he had seen, and described how he had run
+all the way--four miles--from Carillon, arriving before Fleda and her
+Indian escort.
+
+He had hardly finished his tale, shrinking, as he told it, from the
+fierceness of his chief, when a voice called from the direction of the
+house.
+
+"Father--father," it cried.
+
+A change passed over the old man's face.  It cleared as the face of the
+sun clears when a cloud drives past and is gone.  The transformation was
+startling.  Without further glance at his companion, he moved swiftly
+towards the house.  Once more Fleda's voice called, and before he could
+answer they were face to face.
+
+She stood radiant and elate, and seemed not apprehensive of disfavour or
+reproach.  Behind her was Tekewani and his braves.
+
+"You have heard?" she asked reading her father's face.
+
+"I have heard.  Have you no heart?" he answered.  "If the Rapids had
+drowned you!"
+
+She came close to him and ran her fingers through his beard tenderly.
+"I was not born to be drowned," she said softly.
+
+Now that she was a long distance from Ingolby, the fact that a man had
+held her in his arms left no shadow on her face.  Ingolby was now only
+part of her triumph of the Rapids.  She tossed a hand affectionately
+towards Tekewani and his braves.
+
+"How!" said Gabriel Druse, and made a gesture of salutation to the
+Indian chief.
+
+"How!" answered Tekewani, and raised his arm high in response.  An
+instant afterwards Tekewani and his followers were gone their ways.
+
+Suddenly Fleda's eyes rested on the young Romany who was now standing at
+a little distance away.  Apprehension came to her face.  She felt her
+heart stand still and her hands grow cold, she knew not why.  But she saw
+that the man was a Romany.
+
+Her father turned sharply.  A storm gathered in his face once more, and a
+murderous look came into his eyes.
+
+"Who is he?" Fleda asked, scarce above a whisper, and she noted the
+insistent, amorous look of the stranger.
+
+"He says he is your husband," answered her father harshly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+"BY THE RIVER STARZKE .  .  .  IT WAS SO DONE"
+
+There was absolute silence for a moment.  The two men fixed their gaze
+upon the girl.  The fear which had first come to her face passed
+suddenly, and a will, new-born and fearless, possessed it.  Yesterday
+this will had been only a trembling, undisciplined force, but since then
+she had been passed through the tests which her own soul, or Destiny, had
+set for her, and she had emerged a woman, confident and understanding, if
+tremulous.  In days gone by her adventurous, lonely spirit had driven her
+to the prairies, savagely riding her Indian pony through the streets of
+Manitou and out on the North Trail, or south through coulees, or westward
+into the great woods, looking for what: she never found.
+
+Her spirit was no longer the vague thing driving here and there with
+pleasant torture.  It had found freedom and light; what the Romany folk
+call its own 'tan', its home, though it be but home of each day's trek.
+That wild spirit was now a force which understood itself in a new if
+uncompleted way.  It was a sword free from its scabbard.
+
+The adventure of the Carillon Rapids had been a kind of deliverance of an
+unborn thing which, desiring the overworld, had found it.  A few hours
+ago the face of Ingolby, as she waked to consciousness in his arms, had
+taught her something suddenly; and the face of Felix Marchand had taught
+her even more.  Something new and strange had happened to her, and her
+father's uncouth but piercing mind saw the change in her.  Her quick,
+fluttering moods, her careless, undirected energy, her wistful
+waywardness, had of late troubled and vexed him, called on capacities in
+him which he did not possess; but now he was suddenly aware that she had
+emerged from passionate inconsistencies and in some good sense had found
+herself.
+
+Like a wind she had swept out of childhood into a woman's world where the
+eyes saw things unseen before, a world how many thousand leagues in the
+future; and here in a flash, also, she was swept like a wind back again
+to a time before there was even conscious childhood--a dim, distant time
+when she lived and ate and slept for ever in the field or the vale, in
+the quarry, beside the hedge, or on the edge of harvest-fields; when she
+was carried in strong arms, or sat in the shelter of a man's breast as a
+horse cantered down a glade, under an ardent sky, amid blooms never seen
+since then.  She was whisked back into that distant, unreal world by the
+figure of a young Romany standing beside a spruce-tree, and by her
+father's voice which uttered the startling words: "He says he is your
+husband!"
+
+Indignation and a bitter pride looked out of her eyes, as she heard the
+preposterous claim--as though she were some wild dweller of the jungle
+being called by her savage mate back to the lair she had forsaken.
+
+"Since when were you my husband?" she asked Jethro Fawe composedly.
+
+Her quiet scorn brought a quiver to his spirit; for he was of a people to
+whom anger and passion were part of every relationship of life, its
+stimulus and its recreation, its expression of the individual.
+
+His eyelids trembled, but he drew himself together.  "Seventeen years ago
+by the River Starzke in the Roumelian country, it was so done," he
+replied stubbornly.  "You were sealed to me, as my Ry here knows, and as
+you will remember, if you fix your mind upon it.  It was beyond the city
+of Starzke three leagues, under the brown scarp of the Dragbad Hills.
+It was in the morning when the sun was by a quarter of its course.  It
+happened before my father's tent, the tent of Lemuel Fawe.  There you and
+I were sealed before our Romany folk.  For three thousand pounds which my
+father gave to your father, you--"
+
+With a swift gesture she stopped him.  Walking close up to him, she
+looked him full in the eyes.  There was a contemptuous pride in her face
+which forced him to lower his eyelids sulkily.
+
+He would have understood a torrent of words--to him that would have
+regulated the true value of the situation; but this disdainful composure
+embarrassed him.  He had come prepared for trouble and difficulty, but he
+had rather more determination than most of his class and people, and his
+spirit of adventure was high.  Now that he had seen the girl who was his
+own according to Romany law, he felt he had been a hundred times
+justified in demanding her from her father, according to the pledge and
+bond of so many years ago.  He had nothing to lose but his life, and he
+had risked that before.  This old man, the head of the Romany folk, had
+the bulk of the fortune which had been his own father's and he had the
+logic of lucre which is the most convincing of all logic.  Yet with the
+girl holding his eyes commandingly, he was conscious that he was asking
+more than a Romany lass to share his 'tan', to go wandering from Romany
+people to Romany people, king and queen of them all when Gabriel Druse
+had passed away.  Fleda Druse would be a queen of queens, but there was
+that queenliness in her now which was not Romany--something which was
+Gorgio, which was caste, which made a shivering distance between them.
+
+As he had spoken, she saw it all as he described it.  Vaguely, cloudily,
+the scene passed before her.  Now and again in the passing years had
+filmy impressions floated before her mind of a swift-flowing river and
+high crags, and wooded hills and tents and horsemen and shouting, and a
+lad that held her hand, and banners waved over their heads, and galloping
+and shouting, and then a sudden quiet, and many men and women gathered
+about a tent, and a wailing thereafter.  After which, in her faint
+remembrance, there seemed to fall a mist, and a space of blankness, and
+then a starting up from a bed, and looking out of the doors of a tent,
+where many people gathered about a great fire, whose flames licked the
+heavens, and seemed to devour a Romany tent standing alone with a Romany
+wagon full of its household things.
+
+As Jethro Fawe had spoken, the misty, elusive visions had become living
+memories, and she knew that he had spoken the truth, and that these
+fleeting things were pictures of her sealing to Jethro Fawe and the death
+of Lemuel Fawe, and the burning of all that belonged to him in that last
+ritual of Romany farewell to the dead.
+
+She knew now that she had been bargained for like any slave--for three
+thousand pounds.  How far away it all seemed, how barbaric and revolting!
+Yet here it all was rolling up like a flood to her feet, to bear her away
+into a past with its sordidness and vagabondage, however gilded and
+graded above the lowest vagabondage.
+
+Here at Manitou she had tasted a free life which was not vagabondage, the
+passion of the open road which was not an elaborate and furtive evasion
+of the law and a defiance of social ostracism.  Here she and her father
+moved in an atmosphere of esteem touched by mystery, but not by
+suspicion; here civilization in its most elastic organization and
+flexible conventions, had laid its hold upon her, had done in this
+expansive, loosely knitted social system what could never have been
+accomplished in a great city--in London, Vienna, Rome, or New York.  She
+had had here the old free life of the road, so full of the scent of deep
+woods--the song of rivers, the carol of birds, the murmuring of trees,
+the mysterious and devout whisperings of the night, the happy communings
+of stray peoples meeting and passing, the gaiety and gossip of the
+market-place, the sound of church bells across a valley, the storms and
+wild lightnings and rushing torrents, the cries of frightened beasts, the
+wash and rush of rain, the sharp pain of frost, and the agonies of some
+lost traveller rescued from the wide inclemency, the soft starlight
+after, the balm of the purged air, and "rosy-fingered morn" blinking
+blithely at the world.  The old life of the open road she had had here
+without anything of its shame, its stigma, and its separateness, its
+discordance with the stationary forces of law and organized community.
+
+Wild moments there had been of late years when she longed for the faces
+of Romany folk gathered about the fire, while some Romany 'pral' drew all
+hearts with the violin or the dulcimer.  When Ambrose or Gilderoy or
+Christo responded to the pleadings of some sentimental lass, and sang to
+the harpist's strings:
+
+              "Cold blows the wind over my true love,
+               Cold blow the drops of rain;
+               I never, never had but one sweetheart;
+               In the green wood he was slain,"
+
+and to cries of "Again!  'Ay bor'!  again!" the blackeyed lover,
+hypnotizing himself into an ecstasy, poured out race and passion and war
+with the law, in the true Gipsy rant which is sung from Transylvania to
+Yetholm or Carnarvon or Vancouver:
+
+              "Time was I went to my true love,
+               Time was she came to me--"
+
+The sharp passion which moved her now as she stood before Jethro Fawe
+would not have been so acute yesterday; but to-day--she had lain in a
+Gorgio's arms to-day; and though he was nothing to her, he was still a
+Gorgio of Gorgios; and this man before her--her husband--was at best but
+a man of the hedges and the byre and the clay-pit, the quarry and the
+wood; a nomad with no home, nothing that belonged to what she was now a
+part of--organized, collective existence, the life of the house-dweller,
+not the life of the 'tan', the 'koppa', and the 'vellgouris'--the tent,
+the blanket, and the fair.
+
+"I was never bought, and I was never sold," she said to Jethro Fawe at
+last "not for three thousand pounds, not in three thousand years.  Look
+at me well, and see whether you think it was so, or ever could be so.
+Look at me well, Jethro Fawe."
+
+"You are mine--it was so done seventeen years ago," he answered,
+defiantly and tenaciously.
+
+"I was three years old, seventeen years ago," she returned quietly, but
+her eyes forced his to look at her, when they turned away as though their
+light hurt him.
+
+"It is no matter," he rejoined.  "It is the way of our people.  It has
+been so, and it will be so while there is a Romany tent standing or
+moving on."
+
+In his rage Gabriel Druse could keep silence no longer.
+
+"Rogue, what have you to say of such things?" he growled.  "I am the
+head of all.  I pass the word, and things are so and so.  By long and by
+last, if I pass the word that you shall sleep the sleep, it will be so,
+my Romany 'chal'."
+
+His daughter stretched out her hand to stop further speech from her
+father--"Hush!" she said maliciously, "he has come a long way for
+naught.  It will be longer going back.  Let him have his say.  It is his
+capital.  He has only breath and beauty."
+
+Jethro shrank from the sharp irony of her tongue as he would not have
+shrunk before her father's violence.  Biting rejection was in her tones.
+He knew dimly that the thing he shrank from belonged to nothing Romany in
+her, but to that scornful pride of the Gorgios which had kept the Romany
+outside the social pale.
+
+"Only breath and beauty!" she had said, and that she could laugh at his
+handsomeness was certain proof that it was not wilfulness which rejected
+his claims.  Now there was rage in his heart greater than had been in
+that of Gabriel Druse.
+
+"I have come a long way for a good thing," he said with head thrown back,
+"and if 'breath and beauty' is all I bring, yet that is because what my
+father had in his purse has made my 'Ry' rich"--he flung a hand out
+towards Gabriel Druse--"and because I keep to the open road as my father
+did, true to my Romany blood.  The wind and the sun and the fatness of
+the field have made me what I am, and never in my life had I an ache or
+a pain.  You have the breath and the beauty, too, but you have the gold
+also; and what you are and what you have is mine by the Romany law, and
+it will come to me, by long and by last."
+
+Fleda turned quietly to her father.  "If it is true concerning the three
+thousand pounds, give it to him and let him go.  It will buy him what he
+would never get by what he is."
+
+The old man flashed a look of anger upon her.  "He came empty, he shall
+go empty.  Against my commands, his insolence has brought him here.  And
+let him keep his eyes skinned, or he shall have no breath with which to
+return.  I am Gabriel Druse, lord over all the Romany people in all the
+world from Teheran to San Diego, and across the seas and back again; and
+my will shall be done."
+
+He paused, reflecting for a moment, though his fingers opened and shut in
+anger.  "This much I will do," he added.  "When I return to my people I
+will deal with this matter in the place where Lemuel Fawe died.  By the
+place called Starzke, I will come to reckoning, and then and then only."
+
+"When?" asked the young man eagerly.
+
+Gabriel Druse's eyes flashed.  "When I return as I will to return."  Then
+suddenly he added: "This much I will say, it shall be before--"
+
+The girl stopped him.  "It shall be when it shall be.  Am I a chattel to
+be bartered by any will except my own?  I will have naught to do with any
+Romany law.  Not by Starzke shall the matter be dealt with, but here by
+the River Sagalac.  This Romany has no claim upon me.  My will is my own;
+I myself and no other shall choose my husband, and he will never be a
+Romany."
+
+The young man's eyes suddenly took on a dreaming, subtle look, submerging
+the sulkiness which had filled him.  Twice he essayed to speak, but
+faltered.  At last, with an air, he said:
+
+"For seventeen years I have kept the faith.  I was sealed to you, and
+I hold by the sealing.  Wherever you went, it was known to me.  In my
+thoughts I followed.  I read the Gorgio books; I made ready for this day.
+I saw you as you were that day by Starzke, like the young bird in the
+nest; and the thought of it was with me always.  I knew that when I saw
+you again the brown eyes would be browner, the words at the lips would be
+sweeter--and so it is.  All is as I dreamed for these long years.  I was
+ever faithful.  By night and day I saw you as you were when Romany law
+made you mine for ever.  I looked forward to the day when I would take
+you to my 'tan', and there we two would--"
+
+A flush sprang suddenly to Fleda Druse's face, then slowly faded, leaving
+it pale and indignant.  Sharply she interrupted him.
+
+"They should have called you Ananias," she said scornfully.  "My father
+has called you a rogue, and now I know you are one.  I have not heard,
+but I know--I know that you have had a hundred loves, and been true to
+none.  The red scarfs you have given to the Romany and the Gorgio fly-
+aways would make a tent for all the Fawes in all the world."
+
+At first he flung up his head in astonishment at her words, then, as she
+proceeded, a flush swept across his face and his eyes filled up again
+with sullenness.  She had read the real truth concerning him.  He had
+gone too far.  He had been convincing while he had said what was true,
+but her instinct had suddenly told her what he was.  Her perception had
+pierced to the core of his life--a vagabondage, a little more gilded than
+was common among his fellows, made possible by his position as the
+successor to her father, and by the money of Lemuel Fawe which he had
+dissipated.
+
+He had come when all his gold was gone to do the one bold thing which
+might at once restore his fortunes.  He had brains, and he knew now that
+his adventure was in grave peril.
+
+He laughed in his anger.  "Is only the Gorgio to embrace the Romany lass?
+One fondled mine to-day in his arms down there at Carillon.  That's the
+way it goes!  The old song tells the end of it:
+
+             "'But the Gorgio lies 'neath the beech-wood tree;
+               He'll broach my tan no more;
+               And my love she sleeps afar from me,
+               But near to the churchyard door.
+
+               'Time was I went to my true love,
+               Time was she came to me--'"
+
+He got no farther.  Gabriel Druse was on him, gripping his arms so tight
+to his body that his swift motion to draw a weapon was frustrated.  The
+old man put out all his strength, a strength which in his younger days
+was greater than any two men in any Romany camp, and the "breath and
+beauty" of Jethro Fawe grew less and less.  His face became purple and
+distorted, his body convulsed, then limp, and presently he lay on the
+ground with a knee on his chest and fierce, bony hands at his throat.
+
+"Don't kill him--father, don't!" cried the girl, laying restraining
+hands on the old man's shoulders.  He withdrew his hands and released the
+body from his knee.  Jethro Fawe lay still.
+
+"Is he dead?" she whispered, awestricken.  "Dead?"  The old man felt the
+breast of the unconscious man.  He smiled grimly.  "He is lucky not to be
+dead."
+
+"What shall we do?" the girl asked again with a white face.
+
+The old man stooped and lifted the unconscious form in his arms as though
+it was that of a child.  "Where are you going?" she asked anxiously, as
+he moved away.
+
+"To the hut in the juniper wood," he answered.  She watched till he had
+disappeared with his limp burden into the depths of the trees.  Then she
+turned and went slowly towards the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE UNGUARDED FIRES
+
+The public knew well that Ingolby had solved his biggest business
+problem, because three offices of three railways--one big and two small--
+suddenly became merged under his control.  At which there was rejoicing
+at Lebanon, followed by dismay and indignation at Manitou, for one of the
+smaller merged railways had its offices there, and it was now removed to
+Lebanon; while several of the staff, having proved cantankerous, were
+promptly retired.  As they were French Canadians, their retirement became
+a public matter in Manitou and begot fresh quarrel between the rival
+towns.
+
+Ingolby had made a tactical mistake in at once removing the office of the
+merged railway from Manitou, and he saw it quickly.  It was not possible
+to put the matter right at once, however.
+
+There had already been collision between his own railway-men and the
+rivermen from Manitou, whom Felix Marchand had bribed to cause trouble:
+two Manitou men had been seriously hurt, and feeling ran high.  Ingolby's
+eyes opened wide when he saw Marchand's ugly game.  He loathed the
+dissolute fellow, but he realized now that his foe was a factor to be
+reckoned with, for Marchand had plenty of money as well as a bad nature.
+He saw he was in for a big fight with Manitou, and he had to think it
+out.
+
+So this time he went pigeon-shooting.
+
+He got his pigeons, and the slaughter did him good.  As though in keeping
+with the situation, he shot on both sides of the Sagalac with great good
+luck, and in the late afternoon sent his Indian lad on ahead to Lebanon
+with the day's spoil, while he loitered through the woods, a gun slung in
+the hollow of his arm.  He had walked many miles, but there was still a
+spring to his step and he hummed an air with his shoulders thrown back
+and his hat on the back of his head.  He had had his shooting, he had
+done his thinking, and he was pleased with himself.  He had shaped his
+homeward course so that it would bring him near to Gabriel Druse's house.
+
+He had seen Fleda only twice since the episode at Carillon, and met her
+only once, and that was but for a moment at a Fete for the hospital at
+Manitou, and with other people present--people who lay in wait for crumbs
+of gossip.
+
+Since the running of the Rapids, Fleda had filled a larger place in the
+eyes of Manitou and Lebanon.  She had appealed to the Western mind: she
+had done a brave physical thing.  Wherever she went she was made
+conscious of a new attitude towards herself, a more understanding
+feeling.  At the Fete when she and Ingolby met face to face, people had
+immediately drawn round them curious and excited.  These could not
+understand why the two talked so little, and had such an every-day manner
+with each other.  Only old Mother Thibadeau, who had a heart that sees,
+caught a look in Fleda's eyes, a warm deepening of colour, a sudden
+embarrassment, which she knew how to interpret.
+
+"See now, monseigneur," she said to Monseigneur Lourde, nodding towards
+Fleda and Ingolby, "there would be work here soon for you or Father
+Bidette if they were not two heretics."
+
+"Is she a heretic, then, madame?" asked the old white-headed priest, his
+eyes quizzically following Fleda.
+
+She is not a Catholic, and she must be a heretic, that's certain," was
+the reply.
+
+"I'm not so sure," mused the priest.  Smiling, he raised his hat as he
+caught Fleda's eyes.  He made as if to go towards her, but something in
+her look held him back.  He realized that Fleda did not wish to speak
+with him, and that she was even hurrying away from her father, who
+lumbered through the crowd as though unconscious of them all.
+
+Presently Monseigneur Lourde saw Fleda leave the Fete and take the road
+towards home.  There was a sense of excitement in her motions, and he
+also had seen that tremulous, embarrassed look in her eyes.  It puzzled
+him.  He did not connect it wholly with Ingolby as Madame Thibadeau had
+done.  He had lived so long among primitive people that he was more
+accustomed to study faces than find the truth from words, and he had
+always been conscious that this girl, educated and even intellectual, was
+at heart as primitive as the wildest daughter of the tepees of the North.
+There was also in her something of that mystery which belongs to the
+universal itinerary--that cosmopolitan something which is the native
+human.
+
+"She has far to go," the priest said to himself as he turned to greet
+Ingolby with a smile, bright and shy, but gravely reproachful, too.
+
+This happened on the day before the collision between the railway-men and
+the river-drivers, and the old priest already knew what trouble was
+afoot.
+
+There was little Felix Marchand did which was hidden from him.  He made
+his way to Ingolby to warn him.
+
+As Ingolby now walked in the woods towards Gabriel Druse's house, he
+recalled one striking phrase used by the aged priest in reference to the
+closing of the railway offices.
+
+"When you strike your camp, put out the fires," was the aphorism.
+
+Ingolby stopped humming to himself as the words came to his memory again.
+Bending his head in thought for a moment, he stood still, cogitating.
+
+"The dear old fellow was right," he said presently aloud with uplifted
+head.  "I struck camp, but I didn't put out the fires.  There's a lot of
+that in life."
+
+That is what had happened also to Gabriel Druse and his daughter.
+They had struck camp, but had not put out the camp-fires.  That which
+had been done by the River Starzke came again in its appointed time.
+The untended, unguarded fire may spread devastation and ruin, following
+with angry freedom the marching feet of those who builded it.
+
+"Yes, you've got to put out your fires when you quit the bivouac,"
+continued Ingolby aloud, as he gazed ahead of him through the opening
+greenery, beyond which lay Gabriel Druse's home.  Where he was the woods
+were thick, and here and there on either side it was almost impenetrable.
+Few people ever came through this wood.  It belonged in greater part to
+Gabriel Druse, and in lesser part to the Hudson's Bay Company and the
+Government; and as the land was not valuable till it was cleared, and
+there was plenty of prairie land to be had, from which neither stick nor
+stump must be removed, these woods were very lonely.  Occasionally a
+trapper or a sportsman wandered through them, but just here where Ingolby
+was none ever loitered.  It was too thick for game, there was no roadway
+leading anywhere, but only an overgrown path, used in the old days by
+Indians.  It was this path which Ingolby trod with eager steps.
+
+Presently, as he stood still at sight of a ground-hog making for its
+hiding-place, he saw a shadow fall across the light breaking through the
+trees some distance in front of him.  It was Fleda.  She had not seen
+him, and she came hurrying towards where he was with head bent, a
+brightly-ribboned hat swinging in her fingers.  She seemed part of the
+woods, its wild simplicity, its depth, its colour-already Autumn was
+crimsoning the leaves, touching them with amber tints, making the
+woodland warm and kind.  She wore a dress of golden brown which matched
+her hair, and at her throat was a black velvet ribbon with a brooch of
+antique paste which flashed the light like diamonds, but more softly.
+
+Suddenly, as she came on, she stopped and raised her head in a listening
+attitude, her eyes opening wide as if listening, too--it was as though
+she heard with them as well; alive to catch sounds which evaded capture.
+She was like some creature of an ancient wood with its own secret and
+immemorial history which the world could never know.  There was that in
+her face which did not belong to civilization or to that fighting world
+of which Ingolby was so eager a factor.  All the generations of the wood
+and road, the combe and the river, the quarry and the secluded boscage
+were in her look.  There was that about her which was at once elusive and
+primevally real.
+
+She was not of those who would be lost in the dust of futility.  Whatever
+she was, she was an independent atom in the mass of the world's breeding.
+Perhaps it was consciousness of the dynamic quality in the girl, her
+nearness to naked nature, which made Madame Bulteel say that she would
+"have a history."
+
+If she got twisted as she came wayfaring, if her mind became possessed of
+a false passion or purpose which she thought a true one, then tragedy
+would await her.  Yet in this quiet wood so near to the centuries that
+were before Adam was, she looked like a spirit of comedy listening till
+the Spirit of the Wood should break the silence.
+
+Ingolby felt his blood beat faster.  He had a feeling that he was looking
+at a wood-nymph who might flash out of his vision as a mere fantasy of
+the mind.  There shot through him the strangest feeling that if she were
+his, he would be linked with something alien to the world of which he
+was.
+
+Yet, recalling the day at Carillon when her cheek lay on his shoulder and
+her warm breast was pressed unresistingly against him, as he lifted her
+from his boat, he knew that he would have to make the hardest fight of
+his life if he meant not to have more of her than this brief
+acquaintance, so touched by sensation and romance.  He was, maybe,
+somewhat sensational; his career had, even in its present restricted
+compass, been spectacular; but romance, with its reveries and its
+moonshinings, its impulses and its blind adventures, had not been any
+part of his existence.
+
+Hers were not the first red lips which, voluntarily or involuntarily, had
+invited him; nor hers the first eyes which had sparkled to his glances;
+and this triumphant Titian head of hers was not the only one he had seen.
+
+When he had taken her hand at the Hospital Fete, her fingers, long and
+warm and fine, had folded round his own with a singular confidence, an
+involuntary enclosing friendliness; and now as he watched her listening
+--did she hear something?--he saw her hand stretch out as though
+commanding silence, the "hush!" of an alluring gesture.
+
+This assuredly was not the girl who had run the Carillon Rapids, for that
+adventuress was full of a vital force like a man's, and this girl had the
+evanishing charm of a dryad.
+
+Suddenly a change passed over her.  She was as one who had listened and
+had caught the note of song for which she waited; but her face clouded,
+and the rapt look gave way to an immediate distress.  The fantasy of the
+wood-nymph underwent translation in Ingolby's mind; she was now like a
+mortal, who, having been transformed, at immortal dictate was returning
+to mortal state again.
+
+To heighten the illusion, he thought he heard faint singing in the depths
+of the wood.  He put his hands to his ears for a moment, and took them
+away again to make sure that it was really singing and not his
+imagination; and when he saw Fleda's face again, there was fresh evidence
+that his senses had not deceived him.  After all, it was not strange that
+some one should be singing in that deepest wood beyond.
+
+Now Fleda moved forward towards where he stood, quickening her footsteps
+as though remembering something she must do.  He stepped out into the
+path and came to meet her.  She heard his footsteps, saw him, and stood
+still abruptly.
+
+She did not make a sound, but a hand went to her bosom quickly, as though
+to quiet her heart or to steady herself.  He had broken suddenly upon her
+intent thoughts, he had startled her as she had been seldom startled, for
+all her childhood training had been towards self-possession before
+surprise and danger.
+
+"This is not your side of the Sagalac," she said with a half-smile,
+regaining composure.
+
+"That is in dispute," he answered gaily.  "I want to belong to both sides
+of the Sagalac, I want both sides to belong to each other so that either
+side shall not be my side or your side, or--"
+
+"Or Monsieur Felix Marchand's side," she interrupted meaningly.
+
+"Oh, he's on the outside!" snapped the fighter, with a hardening mouth.
+
+She did not reply at once, but put her hat on, and tied the ribbons
+loosely under her chin, looking thoughtfully into the distance.
+
+"Is that the Western slang for saying he belongs nowhere?" she asked.
+
+"Nowhere here," he answered with a grim twist to the corner of his mouth,
+his eyes half-closing with sulky meaning.  "Won't you sit down?" he
+added quickly, in a more sprightly tone, for he saw she was about to move
+on.  He motioned towards a log lying beside the path and kicked some
+branches out of the way.
+
+After slight hesitation she sat down, burying her shoes in the fallen
+leaves.
+
+"You don't like Felix Marchand?" she remarked presently.
+
+"No.  Do you?"
+
+She met his eyes squarely--so squarely that his own rather lost their
+courage, and he blinked more quickly than is needed with a healthy eye.
+He had been audacious, but he had not surprised the garrison.
+
+"I have no deep reason for liking or disliking him, and you have," she
+answered firmly; yet her colour rose slightly, and he thought he had
+never seen skin that looked so like velvet-creamy, pink velvet.
+
+"You seemed to think differently at Carillon not long ago," he returned.
+
+"That was an accident," she answered calmly.  "He was drunk, and that is
+for forgetting--always."
+
+"Always!  Have you seen many men drunk?" he asked quickly.  He did not
+mean to be quizzical, but his voice sounded so, and she detected it.
+
+"Yes, many," she answered with a little ring of defiance in her tone--
+"many, often."
+
+"Where?" he queried recklessly.
+
+"In Lebanon," she retorted.  "In Lebanon--your side."
+
+How different she seemed from a few moments ago when she stood listening
+like a nymph for the song of the Spirit of the Wood!  Now she was gay,
+buoyant, with a chamois-like alertness and a beaming vigour.
+
+"Now I know what 'blind drunk' means," he replied musingly.  "In Manitou
+when men get drunk, the people get astigmatism and can't see the
+tangledfooted stagger."
+
+"It means that the pines of Manitou are straighter than the cedars of
+Lebanon," she remarked.
+
+"And the pines of Manitou have needles," he rejoined, meaning to give her
+the victory.
+
+"Is my tongue as sharp as that?" she asked, amusement in her eyes.
+
+"So sharp I can feel the point when I can't see it," he retorted.
+
+"I'm glad of that," she replied with an affectation of conceit.  "Of
+course if you live in Lebanon you need surgery to make you feel a point."
+
+"I give in--you have me," he remarked.
+
+"You give in to Manitou?" she asked provokingly.  "Certainly not--only
+to you.  I said, 'You have me.'"
+
+"Ah, you give in to that which won't hurt you--"
+
+"Wouldn't you hurt me?" he asked in a softening tone.
+
+"You only play with words," she answered with sudden gravity.  "Hurt you?
+I owe you what I can not pay back.  I owe you my life; but as nothing can
+be given in exchange for a life, I cannot pay you."
+
+"But like may be given for like," he rejoined in a tone suddenly full of
+meaning.
+
+"Again you are playing with words--and with me," she answered brusquely,
+and a little light of anger dawned in her eyes.  Did he think that he
+could say a thing of that sort to her--when he pleased?  Did he think
+that because he had done her a great service, he could say casually what
+belonged only to the sacred moments of existence?  She looked at him with
+rising indignation, but there suddenly came to her the conviction that he
+had not spoken with affronting gallantry, but that for him the moment had
+a gravity not to be marred by the place or the circumstance.
+
+"I beg your pardon if I spoke hastily," he answered presently.  "Yet
+there's many a true word spoken in jest."
+
+There was a moment's silence.  She realized that he was drawn to her, and
+that the attraction was not alone due to his having saved her at
+Carillon; that he was not taking advantage of the thing which must ever
+be a bond between them, whatever came of life.  When she had seen him at
+the Hospital Fete, a feeling had rushed over her that he had got nearer
+to her than any man had ever done.  Then--even then, she felt the thing
+which all lovers, actual, or in the making, feel--that they must do
+something for the being who to them is more than all else and all others.
+She was not in love with Ingolby.  How could she be in love with this man
+she had seen but a few times--this Gorgio.  Why was it that even as they
+talked together now, she felt the real, true distance between them--of
+race, of origin, of history, of life, of circumstance?  The hut in the
+wood where Gabriel Druse had carried Jethro Fawe was not three hundred
+yards away.
+
+She sighed, stirred, and a wild look came in her eyes--a look of
+rebellion or of protest.  Presently she recovered herself.  She was a
+creature of sudden moods.
+
+"What is it you want to do with Manitou and Lebanon?" she asked after a
+pause in which the thoughts of both had travelled far.
+
+"You really wish to know--you don't know?" he asked with sudden
+intensity.
+
+She regarded him frankly, smiled, then she laughed outright, showing her
+teeth very white and regular and handsome.  The boyish eagerness of his
+look, the whimsical twist of his mouth, which always showed when he was
+keenly roused--as though everything that really meant anything was part
+of a comet-like comedy--had caused her merriment.  All the hidden things
+in his face seemed to open out into a swift shrewdness and dry candour
+when he was in his mood of "laying all the cards upon the table."
+
+"I don't know," she answered quietly.  "I have heard things, but I should
+like to learn the truth from you.  What are your plans?"
+
+Her eyes were burning with inquiry.  She was suddenly brought to the
+gateways of a new world.  Plans--what had she or her people to do with
+plans!  What Romany ever constructed anything?  What did the building of
+a city or a country mean to a Romany 'chal' or a Romany 'chi', they who
+lived from field to field, from common to moor, from barn to city wall.
+A Romany tent or a Romany camp, with its families, was the whole
+territory of their enterprise, designs and patriotism.  They saw the
+thousand places where cities could be made, and built their fires on the
+sites of them, and camped a day, and were gone, leaving them waiting and
+barren as before.  They travelled through the new lands in America from
+the fringe of the Arctic to Patagonia, but they raised no roof-tree; they
+tilled no acre, opened no market, set up no tabernacle: they had neither
+home nor country.
+
+Fleda was the heir of all this, the product of generations of such
+vagabondage.  Had the last few years given her the civic sense, the home
+sense?  From the influence of the Englishwoman, who had made her forsake
+the Romany life, had there come habits of mind in tune with the women of
+the Sagalac, who were helping to build so much more than their homes?
+Since the incident of the Carillon Rapids she had changed, but what the
+change meant was yet in her unopened Book of Revelations.  Yet something
+stirred in her which she had never felt before.  She had come of a race
+of wayfarers, but the spirit of the builders touched her now.
+
+"What are my plans?"  Ingolby drew along breath of satisfaction.  "Well,
+just here where we are will be seen a great thing.  There's the Yukon and
+all its gold; there's the Peace River country and all its unploughed
+wheat-fields; there's the whole valley of the Sagalac, which alone can
+maintain twenty millions of people; there's the East and the British
+people overseas who must have bread; there's China and Japan going to
+give up rice, and eat the wheaten loaf; there's the U. S. A.  with its
+hundred millions of people--it'll be that in a few years--and its
+exhausted wheat-fields; and here, right here, is the bread-basket for all
+the hungry peoples; and Manitou and Lebanon are the centre of it.  They
+will be the distributing centre.  I want to see the base laid right.  I'm
+not going to stay here till it all happens, but I want to plan it all so
+that it will happen, then I'll go on and do a bigger thing somewhere
+else.  These two towns have got to come together; they must play one big
+game.  I want to lay the wires for it.  That's why I've got capitalists
+to start paper-works, engineering works, a foundry, and a sash-door-and-
+blind factory--just the beginning.  That's why I've put two factories on
+one side of the river and two on the other."
+
+"Was it really you who started those factories?" she asked
+incredulously.
+
+"Of course!  It was part of my plans.  I wasn't foolish enough to build
+and run them myself.  I looked for the right people that had the money
+and the brains, and I let them sweat--let them sweat it out.  I'm not a
+manufacturer; I'm an inventor and a builder.  I built the bridge over the
+river; and--"
+
+She nodded.  "Yes, the bridge is good; but they say you are a schemer,"
+she added suggestively.
+
+"Certainly.  But if I have schemes which'll do good, I ought to be
+supported.  I don't mind what they call me, so long as they don't call me
+too late for dinner."
+
+They both laughed.  It was seldom he talked like this, and never had he
+talked to such a listener before.  "The merging of the three railways was
+a good scheme, and I was the schemer," he continued.  "It might mean
+monopoly, but it won't work out that way.  It will simply concentrate
+energy and: save elbow-grease.  It will set free capital and capacity for
+other things."
+
+"They say there will be fewer men at work, not only in the offices but on
+the whole railway system, and they don't like that in Manitou--ah, no,
+they don't!" she urged.
+
+"They're right in a sense," he answered.  "But the men will be employed
+at other things, which won't represent waste and capital overlapping.
+Overlapping capital hits everybody in the end.  But who says all that?
+Who raises the cry of 'wolf' in Manitou?"
+
+"A good many people say it now," she answered, "but I think Felix
+Marchand said it first.  He is against you, and he is dangerous."
+
+He shrugged a shoulder.  "Oh, if any fool said it, it would be the same!"
+he answered.  "That's a fire easily lighted; though it sometimes burns
+long and hard."  He frowned, and a fighting look came into his face.
+
+"Then you know all that is working against you in Manitou--working harder
+than ever before?"
+
+"I think I do, but I probably don't know all.  Have you any special news
+about it?"
+
+"Felix Marchand is spending money among the men.  They are going on
+strike on your railways and in the mills."
+
+"What mills--in Manitou?" he asked abruptly.  "In both towns."
+
+He laughed harshly.  "That's a tall order," he said sharply.  "Both
+towns--I don't think so, not yet."
+
+"A sympathetic strike is what he calls it," she rejoined.
+
+"Yes, a row over some imagined grievance on the railway, and all the
+men in all the factories to strike--that's the new game of the modern
+labour agitator!  Marchand has been travelling in France," he added
+disdainfully, "but he has brought his goods to the wrong shop.  What do
+the priests--what does Monseigneur Lourde say to it all?"
+
+"I am not a Catholic," she replied gravely.  "I've heard, though, that
+Monseigneur is trying to stop the trouble.  But--"  She paused.
+
+"Yes--but?" he asked.  "What were you going to say?"
+
+"But there are many roughs in Manitou, and Felix Marchand makes friends
+with them.  I don't think the priests will be able to help much in the
+end, and if it is to be Manitou against Lebanon, you can't expect a great
+deal."
+
+"I never expect more than I get--generally less," he answered grimly;
+and he moved the gun about on his knees restlessly, fingering the lock
+and the trigger softly.
+
+"I am sure Felix Marchand means you harm," she persisted.
+
+"Personal harm?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He laughed sarcastically again.  "We are not in Bulgaria or Sicily," he
+rejoined, his jaw hardening; "and I can take care of myself.  What makes
+you say he means personal harm?  Have you heard anything?"
+
+"No, nothing, but I feel it is so.  That day at the Hospital Fete he
+looked at you in a way that told me.  I think such instincts are given
+to some people and some races.  You read books--I read people.  I wanted
+to warn you, and I do so.  This has been lucky in a way, this meeting.
+Please don't treat what I've said lightly.  Your plans are in danger and
+you also."  Was the psychic and fortune-telling instinct of the Romany
+alive in her and working involuntarily, doing that faithfully which her
+people did so faithlessly?  The darkness which comes from intense feeling
+had gathered underneath her eyes, and gave them a look of pensiveness not
+in keeping with the glow of her perfect health, the velvet of her cheek.
+
+"Would you mind telling me where you got your information?" he asked
+presently.
+
+"My father heard here and there, and I, also, and some I got from old
+Madame Thibadeau, who is a friend of mine.  I talk with her more than
+with any one else in Manitou.  First she taught me how to crochet, but
+she teaches me many other things, too."
+
+"I know the old girl by sight.  She is a character.  She would know a
+lot, that woman."
+
+He paused, seemed about to speak, hesitated, then after a moment hastily
+said: "A minute ago you spoke of having the instinct of your race, or
+something like that.  What is your race?  Is it Irish, or--do you mind my
+asking?  Your English is perfect, but there is something--something--"
+
+She turned away her head, a flush spreading over her face.  She was
+unprepared for the question.  No one had ever asked it directly of her
+since they had come to Manitou.  Whatever speculation there had been, she
+had never been obliged to tell any one of what race she was.  She spoke
+English with no perceptible accent, as she spoke Spanish, Italian,
+French, Hungarian and Greek; and there was nothing in her speech marking
+her as different from the ordinary Western woman.  Certainly she would
+have been considered pure English among the polyglot population of
+Manitou.
+
+What must she say?  What was it her duty to say?  She was living the life
+of a British woman, she was as much a Gorgio in her daily existence as
+this man be side her.  Manitou was as much home--nay, it was a thousand
+times more home--than the shifting habitat of the days when they wandered
+from the Caspians to John o' Groat's.
+
+For years all traces of the past had been removed as completely as though
+the tide had washed over them; for years it had been so, until the
+fateful day when she ran the Carillon Rapids.  That day saw her whole
+horizon alter; that day saw this man beside her enter on the stage of her
+life.  And on that very day, also, came Jethro Fawe out of the Past and
+demanded her return.
+
+That had been a day of Destiny.  The old, panting, unrealized,
+tempestuous longing was gone.  She was as one who saw danger and faced
+it, who had a fight to make and would make it.
+
+What would happen if she told this man that she was a Gipsy--the daughter
+of a Gipsy ruler, which was no more than being head of a clan of the
+world's transients, the leader of the world's nomads.  Money--her father
+had that, at least--much money; got in ways that could not bear the light
+at times, yet, as the world counts things, not dishonestly; for more than
+one great minister in a notable country in Europe had commissioned him,
+more than one ruler and crowned head had used him when "there was trouble
+in the Balkans," or the "sick man of Europe" was worse, or the Russian
+Bear came prowling.  His service had ever been secret service, when he
+lived the life of the caravan and the open highway.  He had no stable
+place among the men of all nations, and yet secret rites and mysteries
+and a language which was known from Bokhara to Wandsworth, and from
+Waikiki to Valparaiso, gave him dignity of a kind, clothed him with
+importance.
+
+Yet she wanted to tell this man beside her the whole truth, and see what
+he would do.  Would he turn his face away in disgust?  What had she a
+right to tell?  She knew well that her father would wish her to keep to
+that secrecy which so far had sheltered them--at least until Jethro
+Fawe's coming.
+
+At last she turned and looked him in the eyes, the flush gone from her
+face.
+
+"I'm not Irish--do I look Irish?" she asked quietly, though her heart
+was beating unevenly.
+
+"You look more Irish than anything else, except, maybe, Slav or
+Hungarian--or Gipsy," he said admiringly and unwittingly.
+
+"I have Gipsy blood in me," she answered slowly, "but no Irish or
+Hungarian blood."
+
+"Gipsy--is that so?" he said spontaneously, as she watched him so
+intently that the pulses throbbed at her temples.
+
+A short time ago Fleda might have announced her origin defiantly, now her
+courage failed her.  She did not wish him to be prejudiced against her.
+
+"Well, well," he added, "I only just guessed at it, because there's
+something unusual and strong in you, not because your eyes are so dark
+and your hair so brown."
+
+"Not because of my 'wild beauty'--I thought you were going to say that,"
+she added ironically and a little defiantly.  "I got some verses by post
+the other day from one of your friends in Lebanon--a stock-rider I think
+he was, and they said I had a 'wild beauty' and a 'savage sweetness.'"
+
+He laughed, yet he suddenly saw her sensitive vigilance, and by instinct
+he felt that she was watching for some sign of shock or disdain on his
+part; yet in truth he cared no more whether she had Gipsy blood in her
+than he would have done if she had said she was a daughter of the Czar.
+
+"Men do write that kind of thing," he added cheerfully, "but it's quite
+harmless.  There was a disease at college we called adjectivitis.  Your
+poet friend had it.  He could have left out the 'wild' and 'savage' and
+he'd have been pleasant, and truthful too--no, I apologize."
+
+He had seen her face darken under the compliment, and he hastened to put
+it right.
+
+"I loved a Gipsy once," he added whimsically to divert attention from his
+mistake, and with so genuine a sympathy in his voice that she was
+disarmed.  "I was ten and she was fifty at least.  Oh, a wonderful woman!
+I had a boy friend, a fat, happy, little joker he was; his name was
+Charley Long.  Well, this woman was his aunt.  When she moved through the
+town people looked twice.  She was tall and splendidly made, and her
+manner--oh, as if she owned the place.  She did own a lot--she had more
+money than any one else thereabouts, anyhow.  It was the tallest kind of
+a holiday when Charley and I walked out to the big white house-golly, but
+it was white--to visit her!  We didn't eat much the day before we went to
+see her; and we didn't eat much the day after, either. She used to feed
+us--I wish I could eat like that now! I can see her brown eyes following
+us about, full of fire, but soft and kind, too. She had a great temper,
+they said, but everybody liked her, and some loved her.  She'd had one
+girl, but she died of consumption, got camping out in bad weather.  Aunt
+Cynthy--that was what we called her, her name being Cynthia--never got
+over her girl's death.  She blamed herself for it.  She had had those
+fits of going back to the open-for weeks at a time.  The girl oughtn't to
+have been taken to camp out.  She was never strong, and it was the wrong
+place and the wrong time of year--all right in August and all wrong in
+October.
+
+"Well, always after her girl's death Aunt Cynthy was as I knew her,
+being good to us youngsters as no one else ever was, or could be.
+Her tea-table was a sight; and the rest of the meals were banquets.
+The first time I ever ate hedgehog was at her place. A little while ago,
+just before you came, I thought of her.  A hedgehog crossed the path
+here, and it brought those days back to me--Charley Long and Aunt Cynthy
+and all.  Yes, the first time I ever ate hedgehog; was in Aunt Cynthy's
+house.  Hi-yi, as old Tekewani says, but it was good!"
+
+"What is the Romany word for hedgehog?" Fleda asked in a low tone.
+
+"Hotchewitchi," he replied instantly.  "That's right, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, it is right," she answered, and her eyes had a far-away look, but
+there was a kind of trouble at her mouth.
+
+"Do you speak Romany?" she added a little breathlessly.
+
+"No, no. I only picked up words I heard Aunt Cynthy use now and then when
+she was in the mood."
+
+"What was the history of Aunt Cynthy?"
+
+"I only know what Charley Long told me.  Aunt Cynthy was the daughter
+of a Gipsy--they say the only Gipsy in that part of the country at the
+time--who used to buy and sell horses, and travel in a big van as
+comfortable as a house.  The old man suddenly died on the farm of
+Charley's uncle.  In a month the uncle married the girl.  She brought him
+thirty thousand dollars."
+
+Fleda knew that this man who had fired her spirit for the first time had
+told his childhood story to show her the view he took of her origin; but
+she did not like him less for that, though she seemed to feel a chasm
+between them still.  The new things moving in her were like breezes that
+stir the trees, not like the wind turning the windmill which grinds the
+corn.  She had scarcely yet begun to grind the corn of life.
+
+She did not know where she was going, what she would find, or where the
+new trail would lead her.  The Past dogged her footsteps, hung round her
+like the folds of a garment.  Even as she rejected it, it asserted its
+power, troubled her, angered her, humiliated her, called to her.
+
+She was glad of this meeting with Ingolby.  It had helped her.  She had
+set out to do a thing she dreaded, and it was easier now than it would
+have been if they had not met.  She had been on her way to the Hut in the
+Wood, and now the dread of the visit to Jethro Fawe had diminished.
+The last voice she would hear before she entered Jethro Fawe's prison
+was that of the man who represented to her, however vaguely, the life
+which must be her future--the settled life, the life of Society and not
+of the Saracen.
+
+After he had told his boyhood story they sat in silence for a moment or
+two, then she rose, and, turning to him, was about to speak.  At that
+instant there came distinctly through the wood a faint, trilling sound.
+Her face paled a little, and the words died upon her lips.  Ingolby,
+having turned his head as though to listen, did not see the change in her
+face, and she quickly regained her self-control.
+
+"I heard that sound before," he said, "and I thought from your look you
+heard it, too.  It's funny.  It is singing, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, it's singing," she answered.
+
+"Who is it--some of the heathen from the Reservation?"
+
+"Yes, some of the heathen," she answered.
+
+"Has Tekewani got a lodge about here?"
+
+"He had one here in the old days."
+
+"And his people go to it still-was that where you were going when I broke
+in on you?"
+
+"Yes, I was going there.  I am a heathen, also, you know."
+
+"Well, I'll be a heathen, too, if you'll show me how; if you think I'd
+pass for one.  I've done a lot of heathen things in my time."
+
+She gave him her hand to say good-bye.  "Mayn't I go with you?" he
+asked.
+
+"'I must finish my journey alone,'" she answered slowly, repeating a line
+from the first English book she had ever read.
+
+"That's English enough," he responded with a laugh.  "Well, if I mustn't
+go with you I mustn't, but my respects to Robinson Crusoe."  He slung the
+gun into the hollow of his arm.  "I'd like much to go with you," he
+urged.
+
+"Not to-day," she answered firmly.
+
+Again the voice came through the woods, a little louder now.
+
+"It sounds like a call," he remarked.
+
+"It is a call," she answered--"the call of the heathen."
+
+An instant after she had gone on, with a look half-smiling, half-
+forbidding, thrown over her shoulder at him.
+
+"I've a notion to follow her," he said eagerly, and he took a step in her
+direction.
+
+Suddenly she turned and came back to him.  "Your plans are in danger--
+don't forget Felix Marchand," she said, and then turned from him again.
+
+"Oh, I'll not forget," he answered, and waved his cap after her.  "No,
+I'll not forget monsieur," he added sharply, and he stepped out with a
+light of battle in his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+IN WHICH THE PRISONER GOES FREE
+
+As Fleda wound her way through the deeper wood, remembering the things
+which had just been said between herself and Ingolby, the colour came and
+went in her face.  To no man had she ever talked so long and intimately,
+not even in the far-off days when she lived the Romany life.
+
+Then, as daughter of the head of all the Romanys, she had her place
+apart; and the Romany lads had been few who had talked with her even as a
+child.  Her father had jealously guarded her until the time when she fell
+under the spell and influence of Lady Barrowdale.  Here, by the Sagalac,
+she had moved among this polyglot people with an assurance of her own
+separateness which was the position of every girl in the West, but
+developed in her own case to the nth degree.
+
+Never before had she come so near--not to a man, but to what concerned a
+man; and never had a man come so near to her or what concerned her inmost
+life.  It was not a question of opportunity or temptation--these always
+attend the footsteps of those who would adventure; but for long she had
+fenced herself round with restrictions of her own making; and the secrecy
+and strangeness of her father's course had made this not only possible,
+but in a sense imperative.
+
+The end to that had come.  Gaiety, daring, passion, elation, depression,
+were alive in her now, and in a sense had found an outlet in a handful of
+days--indeed since the day when Jethro Fawe and Max Ingolby had come into
+her life, each in his own way, for good or for evil.  If Ingolby came for
+good, then Jethro Fawe came for evil.  She would have revolted at the
+suggestion that Jethro Fawe came for good.
+
+Yet, during the last few days, she had been drawn again and again towards
+the hut in the wood.  It was as though a power stronger than herself had
+ordered her not to wander far from where the Romany claimant of herself
+awaited his fate.  As though Jethro knew she was drawn towards him, he
+had sung the Gipsy songs which she and Ingolby had heard in the distance.
+He might have shouted for relief in the hope of attracting the attention
+of some passer-by, and so found release and brought confusion and perhaps
+punishment to Gabriel Druse; but that was not possible to him.  First and
+last he was a Romany, good or bad; and it was his duty to obey his Ry of
+Rys, the only rule which the Romany acknowledged.  "Though he slay me,
+yet will I trust him," he would have said, if he had ever heard the
+phrase; but in his stubborn way he made the meaning of the phrase the
+pivot of his own action.  If he could but see Fleda face to face, he made
+no doubt that something would accrue to his advantage.  He would not give
+up the hunt without a struggle.
+
+Twice a day Gabriel Druse had placed food and water inside the door of
+the hut and locked him fast again, but had not spoken to him save once,
+and then but to say that his fate had not yet been determined.  Jethro's
+reply had been that he was in no haste, that he could wait for what he
+came to get; that it was his own--'ay bor'!  it was his own, and God or
+devil could not prevent the thing meant to be from the beginning of the
+world.
+
+He did not hear Fleda approach the hut; he was singing to himself a song
+he had learned in Montenegro.  There the Romany was held in high regard,
+because of the help his own father had given to the Montenegrin people,
+fighting for their independence, by admirable weapons of Gipsy
+workmanship, setting all the Gipsies in that part of the Balkans
+at work to supply them.
+
+This was the song he sang
+
+              "He gave his soul for a thousand days,
+               The sun was his in the sky,
+               His feet were on the neck of the world
+               He loved his Romany chi.
+
+              "He sold his soul for a thousand days,
+               By her side to walk, in her arms to lie;
+               His soul might burn, but her lips were his,
+               And the heart of his Romany chi."
+
+He repeated the last two lines into a rising note of exultation:
+
+              "His soul might burn, but her lips were his,
+               And the heart of his Romany chi."
+
+The key suddenly turned in the lock, the door opened on the last words of
+the refrain, and, without hesitation, Fleda stepped inside, closing the
+door behind her.
+
+"'Mi Duvel', but who would think--ah, did you hear me call then?" he
+asked, rising from the plank couch where he had been sitting.  He showed
+his teeth in a smile which was meant to be a welcome, but it had an
+involuntary malice.
+
+"I heard you singing," she answered composedly, "but I do not come here
+because I'm called."
+
+"But I do," he rejoined.  "You called me from over the seas, and I came.
+I was in the Balkans; there was trouble--Servia, Montenegro, and Austria
+were rattling the fire-irons again, and there was I as my father was
+before me.  But I heard you calling, and I came."
+
+"You never heard me call, Jethro Fawe," she returned quietly.  "My
+calling of you is as silent as the singing of the stars, where you are
+concerned.  And the stars do not sing."
+
+"But the stars do sing, and you call just the same," he responded with a
+twist to his moustache, and posing against the wall.  "I've heard the
+stars sing.  What's the noise they make in the heart, if it's not
+singing?  You don't hear with the ears only.  The heart hears.  It's only
+a manner of speaking, this talk about the senses.  One sense can do the
+same as all can do and a Romany ought to know how to use one or all.
+When your heart called I heard it, and across the seas I came.  And by
+long and by last, but I was right in coming."
+
+His impudence at once irritated her and provoked her admiration.  She
+knew by instinct how false he was, and how a lie was as common with him
+as the truth; but his submission to her father, his indifference to his
+imprisonment, forced her interest, even as she was humiliated by the fact
+that he was sib to her, bound by ties of clan and blood apart from his
+monstrous claim of marriage.  He was indeed such a man as a brainless or
+sensual woman could yield to with ease.  He had an insinuating animal
+grace, that physical handsomeness which marks so many of the Tziganies
+who fill the red coats of a Gipsy musical sextette!  He was not
+distinguished, yet there was an intelligence in his face, a daring at
+his lips and chin, which, in the discipline and conventions of organized
+society, would have made him superior.  Now, with all his sleek
+handsomeness, he looked a cross between a splendid peasant and a
+chevalier of industry.
+
+She compared him instinctively with Ingolby the Gorgio, as she looked at
+him.  What was it made the difference between the two?  It was the world
+in a man--personality, knowledge of life, the culture of the thousand
+things which make up civilization: it was personality got from life and
+power in contest with the ordered world.
+
+Yet was this so after all?  Tekewani was only an Indian brave who lived
+on the bounty of a government, and yet he had presence and an air of
+command.  Tekewani had been a nomad; he had not been bound to one place,
+settled in one city, held subservient to one flag.  But, no, she was
+wrong: Tekewani had been the servant and child of a system which was as
+fixed and historical as that of Russia or Spain.  He belonged to a people
+who had traditions and laws of their own; organized communities moving
+here and there, but carrying with them their system, their laws and their
+national feeling.
+
+There was the difference.  This Romany was the child of irresponsibility,
+the being that fed upon life, that did not feed life; that left one place
+in the world to escape into another; that squeezed one day dry, threw it
+away, and then went seeking another day to bleed; for ever fleeing from
+yesterday, and using to-day only as a camping-ground.  Suddenly, however,
+she came to a stop in her reflections.  Her father, Gabriel Druse, was of
+the same race as this man, the same unorganized, irresponsible, useless
+race, with no weight of civic or social duty upon its shoulders--where
+did he stand?  Was he no better than such as Jethro Fawe?  Was he
+inferior to such as Ingolby, or even Tekewani?
+
+She realized that in her father's face there was the look of one who had
+no place in the ambitious designs of men, who was not a builder, but a
+wayfarer.  She had seen the look often of late, and had never read it
+until now, when Jethro Fawe stared at her with the boldness of
+possession, with the insolence of a soul of lust which had had its
+victories.
+
+She read his look, and while one part of her shrank from him as from some
+noisome thing, another part of her--to her dismay and anger--understood
+him, and did not resent him.  It was the Past dragging at her life.  It
+was inherited predisposition, the unregulated passions of her forebears,
+the mating of the fields, the generated dominance of the body, which was
+not to be commanded into obscurity, but must taunt and tempt her while
+her soul sickened.  She put a hand on herself.  She must make this man
+realize once and for all that they were as far apart as Adam and
+Cagliostro.  "I never called to you," she said at last.  "I did not know
+of your existence, and, if I had, then I certainly shouldn't have
+called."
+
+"The Gorgios have taken away your mind, or you'd understand," he replied
+coolly.  "Your soul calls and those that understand come.  It isn't that
+you know who hears or who is coming--till he comes."
+
+"A call to all creation!" she answered disdainfully.  "Do you think you
+can impress me by saying things like that?"
+
+"Why not?  It's true.  Wherever you went in all these years the memory of
+you kept calling me, my little 'rinkne rakli'--my pretty little girl,
+made mine by the River Starzke over in the Roumelian country."
+
+"You heard what my father said--"
+
+"I heard what the Duke Gabriel said--'Mi Duvel', I heard enough what he
+said, and I felt enough what he did!"
+
+He laughed, and began to roll a cigarette mechanically, keeping his eyes
+fixed on her, however.
+
+"You heard what my father said and what I said, and you will learn that
+it is true, if you live long enough," she added meaningly.
+
+A look of startled perception flashed into his eyes.  If I live long
+enough, I'll turn you, my mad wife, into my Romany queen and the blessing
+of my 'tan'."
+
+"Don't mistake what I mean," she urged.  "I shall never be ruler of the
+Romanys.  I shall never hear--"
+
+"You'll hear the bosh played-fiddle, they call it in these heathen
+places--at your second wedding with Jethro Fawe," he rejoined insolently,
+lighting his cigarette.  "Home you'll come with me soon--'ay bor'!"
+
+"Listen to me," she answered with anger tingling in every nerve and
+fibre.  "I come of your race, I was what you are, a child of the hedge
+and the wood and the road; but that is all done.  Home, you say!  Home--
+in a tent by the roadside or--"
+
+"As your mother lived--where you were bornwell, well, but here's a Romany
+lass that's forgot her cradle!"
+
+"I have forgotten nothing.  I have only moved on.  I have only seen that
+there is a better road to walk than that where people, always looking
+behind lest they be followed, and always looking in front to find refuge,
+drop the patrin in the dust or the grass or the bushes for others to
+follow after--always going on and on because they dare not go back."
+
+Suddenly he threw his cigarette on the ground, and put his heel upon it
+in fury real or assumed.  "Great Heaven and Hell," he exclaimed, "here's
+a Romany has sold her blood to the devil!  And this is the daughter of
+Gabriel Druse, King and Duke of all the Romanys, him with ancestor King
+Panuel, Duke of Little Egypt, who had Sigismund, and Charles the Great,
+and all the kings for friends.  By long and by last, but this is a tale
+to tell to the Romanys of the world!"  For reply she went to the door and
+opened it wide.  "Then go and tell it, Jethro Fawe, to all the world.
+Tell them I am the renegade daughter of Gabriel Druse, ruler of them all.
+Tell them there is no fault in him, and that he will return to his own
+people in his own time, but that I, Fleda Druse, will never return--
+never!  Now, get you gone from here."
+
+The sunlight broke through the trees, and fell in a narrow path of light
+upon the doorway.  A little grey bird fluttered into the radiance and
+came tripping across the threshold; a whippoorwill called in the
+ashtrees; and the sweet smell of the thick woodland, of the bracken and
+fern, crept into the room.  The balm of a perfect evening of Summer was
+upon the face of nature.  The world seemed untroubled and serene; but in
+this hidden but two stormy spirits broke the peace to which the place and
+the time were all entitled.
+
+After Fleda's scornful words of release and dismissal, Jethro stood for a
+moment confounded and dismayed.  He had not reckoned with this.  During
+their talk it had come to him how simple it would be to overpower any
+check to his exit, how devilishly easy to put the girl at a disadvantage;
+but he drove the thought from him.  In the first place, he was by no
+means sure that escape was what he wanted--not yet, at any rate; in the
+second place, if Gabriel Druse passed the word along the subterranean
+wires of the Romany world that Jethro Fawe should vanish, he would not
+long cumber the ground.
+
+Yet it was not cowardice or fear of consequences which had held him back;
+it was a staggering admiration for this girl who had been given to him in
+marriage so many years ago.  He had fared far and wide in his adventures
+and amours when he had gold in plenty; and he had swung more than one
+Gorgio woman in the wild dance of sentiment, dazzling them by the
+splendour of his passion.  The fire gleaming in his dark eyes lighted a
+face which would have made memorable a picture by Guido.  He had fared
+far and wide, but he had never seen a woman who had seized his
+imagination as this girl was doing; who roused in him, not the old hot
+desire, but the hungry will to have a 'tan' of his own, and go travelling
+down the world with one who alone could satisfy him for all his days.
+
+As he sat in this improvised woodland prison he had had visions of a
+hundred glades and valleys through which he had passed in days gone by--
+in England, in Spain, in Italy, in Roumania, in Austria, in Australia,
+in India--where his camp-fires had burned.  In his visions he had seen
+her--Fleda Fawe, not Fleda Druse--laying the cloth and bringing out the
+silver cups, or stretching the Turkey rugs upon the ground to make a
+couch for two bright-eyed lovers to whom the night was as the day,
+radiant and full of joy.  He had shut his eyes and beheld hillsides where
+abandoned castles stood, and the fox and the squirrel and the hawk gave
+shade and welcome to the dusty pilgrims of the road; or, when the wild
+winds blew in winter, gave shelter and wood for the fire, and a sense of
+homeliness among the companionable trees.
+
+He had seen himself and this beautiful Romany 'chi' at some village fair,
+while the lesser Romany folk told fortunes, or bought and sold horses,
+and the lesser still tinkered or worked in gold or brass; he had seen
+them both in a great wagon with bright furnishings and brass-girt harness
+on their horses, lording it over all, rich, dominant and admired.  In his
+visions he had even seen a Romany babe carried in his arms to a Christian
+church and there baptized in grandeur as became the child of the head of
+the people.  His imagination had also seen his own tombstone in some
+Christian churchyard near to the church porch, where he would not be
+lonely when he was dead, but could hear the gossip of the people as they
+went in and out of church; and on the tombstone some such inscription as
+he had seen once at Pforzheim--"To the high-born Lord Johann, Earl of
+Little Egypt, to whose soul God be gracious and merciful."
+
+To be sure, it was a strange thing for a Romany to be buried in a Gorgio
+churchyard; but it was what had chanced to many great men of the Romanys,
+such as the high-born Lord Panuel at Steinbrock, and Peter of Kleinschild
+at Mantua--all of whom had great emblazoned monuments in Christian
+churches, just to show that in all-levelling death they condescended from
+high estate to mingle their ashes with the dust of the Gorgio.
+
+He had sought out his chieftain here in the new world in a spirit of
+adventure, cupidity and desire.  He had come like one who betrays, but he
+acknowledged to a higher force than his own and to superior rights when
+Gabriel Druse's strong arm brought him low; and, waking to life and
+consciousness again, he was aware that another force also had levelled
+him to the earth.  That force was this woman's spirit which now gave him
+his freedom so scornfully; who bade him begone and tell their people
+everywhere that she was no longer a Romany, while she would go, no doubt
+--a thousand times without doubt unless he prevented it--to the
+swaggering Gorgio who had saved her on the Sagalac.
+
+She stood waiting for him to go, as though he could not refuse his
+freedom.  As a bone is tossed to a dog, she gave it to him.
+
+"You have no right to set me free," he said coolly now.  "I am not your
+prisoner.  You tell me to take that word to the Romany people--that you
+leave them for ever.  I will not do it.  You are a Romany, and a Romany
+you must stay.  You belong nowhere else.  If you married a Gorgio, you
+would still sigh for the camp beneath the stars, for the tambourine and
+the dance--"
+
+"And the fortune-telling," she interjected sharply, "and the snail-soup,
+and the dirty blanket under the hedge, and the constable on the road
+behind, always just behind, watching, waiting, and--"
+
+"The hedge is as clean as the dirty houses where the low-class Gorgios
+sleep.  In faith, you are a long way from the River Starzke!" he added.
+"But you are my mad wife, and I must wait till you've got sense again."
+
+He sat down on the plank couch, and began to roll a cigarette once more.
+
+"You come fitted out like a Gorgio lass now, and you look like a Gorgio
+countess, and you have the manners of an Archduchess; but that's nothing;
+it will peel off like a blister when it's pricked.  Underneath is the
+Romany.  It's there, and it will show red and angry when we've stripped
+off the Gorgio.  It's the way with a woman, always acting, always
+imagining herself something else than what she is--if she's a beggar
+fancying herself a princess; if she's a princess fancying herself a
+flower-girl.  'Mi Duvel', but I know you all!"
+
+Every word he said went home.  She knew that there was truth in what he
+said, and that beneath all was the Romany blood; but she meant to conquer
+it.  She had made her vow to one in England that she loved, and she would
+not change.  Whatever happened, she had finished with Romany life, and to
+go back would only mean black tragedy in the end.  A month ago it was a
+vow and an inner desire which made her determined; to-day it was the vow
+and a man--a Gorgio whom she had but now left in the woods, gazing after
+her with the look which a woman so well interprets.
+
+"You mean you won't go free from here?  Because I was a Romany, and wish
+you no harm, I have come here to-day to let you go where you will--to go
+back to the place where the patrins show where your people travel.  I set
+you free, and you say what you think will hurt and shame me.  You have a
+cruel soul.  You would torture any woman till she died.  You shall not
+torture me.  You are as far from me as the River Starzke.  I could have
+let you stay here for my father to deal with, but I have set you free.
+I open the door for you, though you are nothing to me, and I am no more
+to you than one of the women you have fooled and left to eat the vile
+bread of the forsaken.  You have been, you are a wolf--a wolf."
+
+He got to his feet again, and the blood rushed to his face, so that it
+seemed almost black.  A torrent of mad words gathered in his throat, but
+they choked him, and in the pause his will asserted itself.  He became
+cool and deliberate.
+
+"You are right, my girl, I have sucked the orange and thrown the skin
+away, and I've picked flowers and cast them by, but that was before the
+first day I saw you as you now are.  You were standing by the Sagalac
+looking out to the west where the pack-trains were travelling into the
+sun over the mountains, and you had your hand on the neck of your pony.
+I was not ten feet away from you, behind a juniper-bush.  I looked at
+you, and I wished that I had never seen a woman before and could look at
+the world as you did then--it was like water from a spring, that look.
+You are right in what you say.  By long and by last I had a hard hand,
+and when I left what I'd struck down I never looked back.  But I saw you,
+and I wished I had never seen a woman before.  You have been here alone
+with me with that door shut.  Have I said or done anything that a Gorgio
+duke wouldn't do?  Ah, God's love, but you were bold to come!  I married
+you by the River Starzke; I looked upon you as my wife; and here you were
+alone with me!  I had my rights, and I had been trampled underfoot by
+your father--"
+
+"By your Chief."
+
+"'Ay bor', by my Chief!  I had my wrongs, and I had my rights, and you
+were mine by Romany law.  It was for me here to claim you--here where a
+Romany and his wife were alone together!"
+
+His eyes were fixed searchingly on hers, as though he would read the
+effect of his words before he replied, and his voice had a curious, rough
+note, as though with difficulty he quelled the tempest within him.
+"I have my rights, and you had spat upon me," he said with ferocious
+softness.
+
+She did not blench, but looked him steadily in the eyes.
+
+"I knew what would be in your mind," she answered, "but that did not keep
+me from coming.  You would not bite the hand that set you free."
+
+"You called me a wolf a minute ago."
+
+"But a wolf would not bite the hand that freed it from the trap.  Yet if
+such shame could be, I still would have had no fear, for I should have
+shot you as wolves are shot that come too near the fold."
+
+He looked at her piercingly, and the pupils of his eyes narrowed to a
+pin-point.  "You would have shot me--you are armed?" he questioned.
+
+"Am I the only woman that has armed herself against you and such as you?
+Do you not see?"
+
+"Mi Duvel, but I do see now with a thousand eyes!" he said hoarsely.
+
+His senses were reeling.  Down beneath everything had been the thought
+that, as he had prevailed with other women, he could prevail with her;
+that she would come to him in the end.  He had felt, but he had declined
+to see, the significance of her bearing, of her dress, of her speech, of
+her present mode of life, of its comparative luxury, its social
+distinction of a kind which lifted her above even the Gorgios by whom she
+was surrounded.  A fatuous belief in himself and in his personal powers
+had deluded him.  He had told the truth when he said that no woman had
+ever appealed to him as she did; that she had blotted out all other women
+from the book of his adventurous and dissolute life; and he had dreamed a
+dream of conquest of her when Fortune should hand out to him the key of
+the situation.  Did not the beautiful Russian countess on the Volga flee
+from her liege lord and share his 'tan'?  When he played his fiddle to
+the Austrian princess, did she not give him a key to the garden where she
+walked of an evening?  And this was a Romany lass, daughter of his
+Chieftain, as he was son of a great Romany chief; and what marvel could
+there be that she who had been made his child wife, should be conquered
+as others had been!
+
+"'Mi Duvel', but I see!" he repeated in a husky fierceness.  "I am your
+husband, but you would have killed me if I had taken a kiss from your
+lips, sealed to me by all our tribes and by your father and mine."
+
+"My lips are my own, my life is my own, and when I marry, I shall marry a
+man of my own choosing, and he will not be a Romany," she replied with a
+look of resolution which her beating heart belied.  "I'm not a pedlar's
+basket."
+
+"'Kek!  Kek'!  That's plain," he retorted.  "But the 'wolf' is no lamb
+either!  I said I would not go till your father set me free, since you
+had no right to do so, but a wife should save her husband, and her
+husband should set himself free for his wife's sake"--his voice rose in
+fierce irony--"and so I will now go free.  But I will not take the word
+to the Romany people that you are no more of them.  I am a true Romany.
+I disobeyed my 'Ry' in coming here because my wife was here, and I wanted
+her.  I am a true Romany husband who will not betray his wife to her
+people; but I will have my way, and no Gorgio shall take her to his home.
+She belongs to my tent, and I will take her there."
+
+Her gesture of contempt, anger and negation infuriated him.  "If I do not
+take you to my 'tan', it will be because I'm dead," he said, and his
+white teeth showed fiercely.
+
+"I have set you free.  You had better go," she rejoined quietly.
+
+Suddenly he turned at the doorway.  A look of passion burned in his eyes.
+His voice became soft and persuasive.  "I would put the past behind me,
+and be true to you, my girl," he said.  "I shall be chief over all the
+Romany people when Duke Gabriel dies.  We are sib; give me what is mine.
+I am yours--and I hold to my troth.  Come, beloved, let us go together."
+
+A sigh broke from her lips, for she saw that, bad as he was, there was a
+moment's truth in his words.  "Go while you can," she said.  "You are
+nothing to me."
+
+For an instant he hesitated, then, with a muttered oath, sprang out into
+the bracken, and was presently lost among the trees.
+
+For a long time she sat in the doorway, and again and again her eyes
+filled with tears.  She felt a cloud of trouble closing in upon her.  At
+last there was the sound of footsteps, and a moment later Gabriel Druse
+came through the trees towards her.  His eyes were sullen and brooding.
+
+"You have set him free?" he asked.
+
+She nodded.  "It was madness keeping him here," she said.
+
+"It is madness letting him go," he answered morosely.  "He will do harm.
+'Ay bor', he will!  I might have known--women are chicken-hearted.  I
+ought to have put him out of the way, but I have no heart any more--no
+heart; I have the soul of a rabbit."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Saw how futile was much competition
+When you strike your camp, put out the fires
+
+
+
+
+
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