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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The World For Sale, by Gilbert Parker, V2
+#109 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: The World For Sale, Volume 2.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6282]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 5, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
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+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD FOR SALE, PARKER, V2 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD FOR SALE
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE SULTAN
+
+Ingolby's square head jerked forwards in stern inquiry and his eyes
+fastened those of Jowett, the horsedealer.  "Take care what you're
+saying, Jowett," he said.  "It's a penitentiary job, if it can be proved.
+Are you sure you got it right?"
+
+Jowett had unusual shrewdness, some vanity and a humorous tongue.  He was
+a favourite in both towns, and had had the better of both in horse-
+dealing a score of times.
+
+That did not make him less popular.  However, it was said he liked low
+company, and it was true that though he had "money in the bank," and
+owned a corner lot or so, he seemed to care little what his company was.
+His most constant companion was Fabian Osterhaut, who was the common
+property of both towns, doing a little of everything for a living, from
+bill-posting to the solicitation of an insurance agent.
+
+For any casual work connected with public functions Osterhaut was
+indispensable, and he would serve as a doctor's assistant and help cut
+off a leg, be the majordomo for a Sunday-school picnic, or arrange a
+soiree at a meeting-house with equal impartiality.  He had been known to
+attend a temperance meeting and a wake in the same evening.  Yet no one
+ever questioned his bona fides, and if he had attended mass at Manitou in
+the morning, joined a heathen dance in Tekewani's Reserve in the
+afternoon, and listened to the oleaginous Rev. Reuben Tripple in the
+evening, it would have been taken as a matter of course.
+
+He was at times profane and impecunious, and he had been shifted from
+one boarding-house to another till at last, having exhausted credit in
+Lebanon, he had found a room in the house of old Madame Thibadeau in
+Manitou.  She had taken him in because, in years gone by, he had nursed
+her only son through an attack of smallpox on the Siwash River, and
+somehow Osterhaut had always paid his bills to her.  He was curiously
+exact where she was concerned.  If he had not enough for his week's board
+and lodging, he borrowed it, chiefly of Jowett, who used him profitably
+at times to pass the word about a horse, or bring news of a possible
+deal.
+
+"It's a penitentiary job, Jowett," Ingolby repeated.  "I didn't think
+Marchand would be so mad as that."
+
+"Say, it's all straight enough, Chief," answered Jowett, sucking his
+unlighted cigar.  "Osterhaut got wind of it--he's staying at old Mother
+Thibadeau's, as you know.  He moves round a lot, and he put me on to it.
+I took on the job at once.  I got in with the French toughs over at
+Manitou, at Barbazon's Tavern, and I gave them gin--we made it a gin
+night.  It struck their fancy--gin, all gin!  'Course there's nothing in
+gin different from any other spirit; but it fixed their minds, and took
+away suspicion.
+
+"I got drunk--oh, yes, of course, blind drunk, didn't I?  Kissed me, half
+a dozen of the Quebec boys did--said I was 'bully boy' and 'hell-fellow';
+said I was 'bon enfant'; and I said likewise in my best patois.  They
+liked that.  I've got a pretty good stock of monkey-French, and I let
+it go.  They laughed till they cried at some of my mistakes, but they
+weren't no mistakes, not on your life.  It was all done a-purpose.
+They said I was the only man from Lebanon they wouldn't have cut up and
+boiled, and they was going to have the blood of the Lebanon lot before
+they'd done.  I pretended to get mad, and I talked wild.  I said that
+Lebanon would get them first, that Lebanon wouldn't wait, but'd have it
+out; and I took off my coat and staggered about--blind-fair blind boozy.
+I tripped over some fool's foot purposely, just beside a bench against
+the wall, and I come down on that bench hard.  They laughed--Lord, how
+they laughed!  They didn't mind my givin' 'em fits--all except one or
+two.  That was what I expected.  The one or two was mad.  They begun
+raging towards me, but there I was asleep on the bench-stony blind,
+and then they only spit fire a bit.  Some one threw my coat over me.
+I hadn't any cash in the pockets, not much--I knew better than that--and
+I snored like a sow.  Then it happened what I thought would happen.  They
+talked.  And here it is.  They're going to have a strike in the mills,
+and you're to get a toss into the river.  That's to be on Friday.  But
+the other thing--well, they all cleared away but two.  They were the two
+that wanted to have it out with me.  They stayed behind.  There was I
+snoring like a locomotive, but my ears open all right.
+
+"Well, they give the thing away.  One of 'em had just come from Felix
+Marchand and he was full of it.  What was it?  Why, the second night of
+the strike your new bridge over the river was to be blown up.
+Marchand was to give these two toughs three hundred dollars each for
+doing it."
+
+"Blown up with what?" Ingolby asked sharply.
+
+"Dynamite."
+
+"Where would they get it?"
+
+"Some left from blasting below the mills."
+
+"All right!  Go on."
+
+"There wasn't much more.  Old Barbazon, the landlord, come in and they
+quit talking about it; but they said enough to send 'em to gaol for ten
+years."
+
+Ingolby blinked at Jowett reflectively, and his mouth gave a twist that
+lent to his face an almost droll look.
+
+"What good would it do if they got ten years--or one year, if the bridge
+was blown up?  If they got skinned alive, and if Marchand was handed over
+to a barnful of hungry rats to be gnawed to death, it wouldn't help.
+I've heard and seen a lot of hellish things, but there's nothing to equal
+that.  To blow up the bridge--for what?  To spite Lebanon, and to hurt
+me; to knock the spokes out of my wheel.  He's the dregs, is Marchand."
+
+"I guess he's a shyster by nature, that fellow," interposed Jowett.
+"He was boilin' hot when he was fifteen.  He spoiled a girl I knew when
+he was twenty-two, not fourteen she was--Lil Sarnia; and he got her away
+before--well, he got her away East; and she's in a dive in Winnipeg now.
+As nice a girl--as nice a little girl she was, and could ride any broncho
+that ever bucked.  What she saw in him--but there, she was only a child,
+just the mind of a child she had, and didn't understand.  He'd ha' been
+tarred and feathered if it'd been known.  But old Mick Sarnia said hush,
+for his wife's sake, and so we hushed, and Sarnia's wife doesn't know
+even now.  I thought a lot of Lil, as much almost as if she'd been my
+own; and lots o' times, when I think of it, I sit up straight, and the
+thing freezes me; and I want to get Marchand by the scruff of the neck.
+I got a horse, the worst that ever was--so bad I haven't had the heart to
+ride him or sell him.  He's so bad he makes me laugh.  There's nothing he
+won't do, from biting to bolting.  Well, I'd like to tie Mr. Felix
+Marchand, Esquire, to his back, and let him loose on the prairie, and
+pray the Lord to save him if he thought fit.  I fancy I know what the
+Lord would do.  And Lil Sarnia's only one.  Since he come back from the
+States, he's the limit, oh, the damnedest limit.  He's a pest all round-
+and now, this!"
+
+Ingolby kept blinking reflectively as Jowett talked.  He was doing two
+things at once with a facility quite his own.  He was understanding all
+Jowett was saying, but he was also weighing the whole situation.  His
+mind was gone fishing, figuratively speaking.  He was essentially a man
+of action, but his action was the bullet of his mind; he had to be quiet
+physically when he was really thinking.  Then he was as one in a dream
+where all physical motion was mechanical, and his body was acting
+automatically.  His concentration, and therefore his abstraction, was
+phenomenal.  Jowett's reminiscences at a time so critical did not disturb
+him--did not, indeed, seem to be irrelevant.  It was as though Felix
+Marchand was being passed in review before him in a series of aspects.
+He nodded encouragement to Jowett to go on.
+
+"It's because Marchand hates you, Chief.  The bump he got when you
+dropped him on the ground that day at Carillon hurts still.  It's a
+chronic inflammation.  Closing them railway offices at Manitou, and
+dislodging the officials give him his first good chance.  The feud
+between the towns is worse now than it's ever been.  Make no mistake.
+There's a whole lot of toughs in Manitou.  Then there's religion, and
+there's race, and there's a want-to-stand-still and leave-me-alone-
+feeling.  They don't want to get on.  They don't want progress.  They
+want to throw the slops out of the top windows into the street; they want
+their cesspools at the front door; they think that everybody's got to
+have smallpox some time or another, and the sooner they have it the
+better; they want to be bribed; and they think that if a vote's worth
+having it's worth paying for--and yet there's a bridge between these two
+towns!  A bridge--why, they're as far apart as the Yukon and Patagonia."
+
+"What'd buy Felix Marchand?" Ingolby asked meditatively.  "What's his
+price?"
+
+Jowett shifted with impatience.  "Say, Chief, I don't know what you're
+thinking about.  Do you think you could make a deal with Felix Marchand?
+Not much.  You've got the cinch on him.  You could send him to quod, and
+I'd send him there as quick as lightning.  I'd hang him, if I could, for
+what he done to Lil Sarnia.  Years ago when he was a boy he offered me a
+gold watch for a mare I had.  The watch looked as right as could be--
+solid fourteen-carat, he said it was.  He got my horse, and I got his
+watch.  It wasn't any more gold than he was.  It was filled--just plated
+with nine-carat gold.  It was worth about ten dollars."
+
+"What was the mare worth?" asked Ingolby, his mouth twisting again with
+quizzical meaning.
+
+"That mare--she was all right."
+
+"Yes, but what was the matter with her?"
+
+"Oh, a spavin--she was all right when she got wound up--go like Dexter or
+Maud S."
+
+"But if you were buying her what would you have paid for her, Jowett?
+Come now, man to man, as they say.  How much did you pay for her?"
+
+"About what she was worth, Chief, within a dollar or two."
+
+"And what was she worth?"
+
+"What I paid for her-ten dollars."
+
+Then the two men looked at each other full in the eyes, and Jowett threw
+back his head and laughed outright--laughed loud and hard.  "Well, you
+got me, Chief, right under the guard," he observed.
+
+Ingolby did not laugh outright, but there was a bubble of humour in his
+eyes.  "What happened to the watch?" he asked.
+
+"I got rid of it."
+
+"In a horse-trade?"
+
+"No, I got a town lot with it."
+
+"In Lebanon?"
+
+"Well, sort of in Lebanon's back-yard."
+
+"What's the lot worth now?"
+
+"About two thousand dollars!"
+
+"Was it your first town lot?"
+
+"The first lot of Mother Earth I ever owned."
+
+"Then you got a vote on it?"
+
+"Yes, my first vote."
+
+"And the vote let you be a town-councillor?"
+
+"It and my good looks."
+
+"Indirectly, therefore, you are a landowner, a citizen, a public servant,
+and an instrument of progress because of Felix Marchand.  If you hadn't
+had the watch you wouldn't have had that town lot."
+
+"Well, mebbe, not that lot."
+
+Suddenly Ingolby got to his feet and squared himself, and his face became
+alight with purpose.  His mind had come back from fishing, and he was
+ready now for action.  His plans were formed.  He was in for a fight, and
+he had made up his mind how, with the new information to his hand, he
+would develop his campaign further.
+
+"You didn't make a fuss about the watch, Jowett.  You might have gone to
+Felix Marchand or to his father and proved him a liar, and got even that
+way.  You didn't; you got a corner lot with it.  That's what I'm going to
+do.  I can have Felix Marchand put in the jug, and make his old father,
+Hector Marchand, sick; but I like old Hector Marchand, and I think he's
+bred as bad a pup as ever was.  I'm going to try and do with this
+business as you did with that watch.  I'm going to try and turn it to
+account and profit in the end.  Felix Marchand's profiting by a mistake
+of mine--a mistake in policy.  It gives him his springboard; and there's
+enough dry grass in both towns to get a big blaze with a very little
+match.  I know that things are seething.  The Chief Constable keeps me
+posted as to what's going on here, and pretty fairly as to what's going
+on in Manitou.  The police in Manitou are straight enough.  That's one
+comfort.  I've done Felix Marchand there.  I guess that the Chief
+Constable of Manitou and Monseigneur Lourde and old Mother Thibadeau are
+about the only people that Marchand can't bribe.  I see I've got to face
+a scrimmage before I can get what I want."
+
+"What you want you'll have, I bet," was the admiring response.
+
+"I'm going to have a good try.  I want these two towns to be one.
+That'll be good for your town lots, Jowett," he added whimsically.  "If
+my policy is carried out, my town lot'll be worth a pocketful of gold-
+plated watches or a stud of spavined mares."  He chuckled to himself, and
+his fingers reached towards a bell on the table, but he paused.  "When
+was it they said the strike would begin?" he asked.
+
+"Friday."
+
+"Did they say what hour?"
+
+"Eleven in the morning."
+
+"Third of a day's work and a whole day's pay," he mused.  "Jowett," he
+added, "I want you to have faith.  I'm going to do Marchand, and I'm
+going to do him in a way that'll be best in the end.  You can help as
+much if not more than anybody--you and Osterhaut.  And if I succeed,
+it'll be worth your while."
+
+"I ain't followin' you because it's worth while, but because I want to,
+Chief."
+
+"I know; but a man--every man--likes the counters for the game."  He
+turned to the table, opened a drawer, and took out a folded paper.  He
+looked it through carefully, wrote a name on it, and handed it to Jowett.
+
+"There's a hundred shares in the Northwest Railway, with my regards,
+Jowett.  Some of the counters of the game."
+
+Jowett handed it back at once with a shake of the head.  "I don't live in
+Manitou," he said.  "I'm almost white, Chief.  I've never made a deal
+with you, and don't want to.  I'm your man for the fun of it, and because
+I'd give my life to have your head on my shoulders for one year."
+
+"I'd feel better if you'd take the shares, Jowett.  You've helped me,
+and I can't let you do it for nothing."
+
+"Then I can't do it at all.  I'm discharged."  Suddenly, however, a
+humorous, eager look shot into Jowett's face.  "Will you toss for it?"
+he blurted out.  "Certainly, if you like," was the reply.
+
+"Heads I win, tails it's yours?"
+
+"Good."
+
+Ingolby took a silver dollar from his pocket, and tossed.  It came down
+tails.  Ingolby had won.
+
+"My corner lot against double the shares?" Jowett asked sharply, his
+face flushed with eager pleasure.  He was a born gambler.
+
+"As you like," answered Ingolby with a smile.  Ingolby tossed, and they
+stooped over to look at the dollar on the floor.  It had come up heads.
+"You win," said Ingolby, and turning to the table, took out another
+hundred shares.  In a moment they were handed over.
+
+"You're a wonder, Jowett," he said.  "You risked a lot of money.  Are you
+satisfied?"
+
+"You bet, Chief.  I come by these shares honestly now."
+
+He picked up the silver dollar from the floor, and was about to put it in
+his pocket.
+
+"Wait--that's my dollar," said Ingolby.
+
+"By gracious, so it is!" said Jowett, and handed it over reluctantly.
+
+Ingolby pocketed it with satisfaction.
+
+Neither dwelt on the humour of the situation.  They were only concerned
+for the rules of the game, and both were gamesters in their way.
+
+After a few brief instructions to Jowett, and a message for Osterhaut
+concerning a suit of workman's clothes, Ingolby left his offices and
+walked down the main street of the town with his normal rapidity,
+responding cheerfully to the passers-by, but not encouraging evident
+desire for talk with him.  Men half-started forward to him, but he held
+them back with a restraining eye.  They knew his ways.  He was responsive
+in a brusque, inquisitive, but good-humoured and sometimes very droll
+way; but there were times when men said to themselves that he was to be
+left alone; and he was so much master of the place that, as Osterhaut and
+Jowett frequently remarked, "What he says goes!"  It went even with those
+whom he had passed in the race of power.
+
+He had had his struggles to be understood in his first days in Lebanon.
+He had fought intrigue and even treachery, had defeated groups which were
+the forces at work before he came to Lebanon, and had compelled the
+submission of others.  All these had vowed to "get back at him," but when
+it became a question of Lebanon against Manitou they swung over to his
+side and acknowledged him as leader.  The physical collision between the
+rougher elements of the two towns had brought matters to a head, and
+nearly every man in Lebanon felt that his honour was at stake, and was
+ready "to have it out with Manitou."
+
+As he walked along the main street after his interview with Jowett, his
+eyes wandered over the buildings rising everywhere; and his mind reviewed
+as in a picture the same thinly inhabited street five years ago when he
+first came.  Now farmers' wagons clacked and rumbled through the prairie
+dust, small herds of cattle jerked and shuffled their way to the
+slaughter-yard, or out to the open prairie, and caravans of settlers with
+their effects moved sturdily forward to the trails which led to a new
+life beckoning from three points of the compass.  That point which did
+not beckon was behind them.  Flaxen-haired Swedes and Norwegians; square-
+jawed, round-headed North Germans; square-shouldered, loose-jointed
+Russians with heavy contemplative eyes and long hair, looked curiously at
+each other and nodded understandingly.  Jostling them all, with a jeer
+and an oblique joke here and there, and crude chaff on each other and
+everybody, the settler from the United States asserted himself.  He
+invariably obtruded himself, with quizzical inquiry, half contempt and
+half respect, on the young Englishman, who gazed round with phlegm upon
+his fellow adventurers, and made up to the sandy-faced Scot or the
+cheerful Irishman with his hat on the back of his head, who showed in the
+throng here and there.  This was one of the days when the emigrant and
+settlers' trains arrived both from the East and from "the States," and
+Front Street in Lebanon had, from early morning, been alive with the
+children of hope and adventure.
+
+With hands plunged deep in the capacious pockets of his grey jacket,
+Ingolby walked on, seeing everything; yet with his mind occupied
+intently, too, on the trouble which must be faced before Lebanon and
+Manitou would be the reciprocating engines of his policy.  Coming to a
+spot where a great gap of vacant land showed in the street-land which he
+had bought for the new offices of his railway combine--he stood and
+looked at it abstractedly.  Beyond it, a few blocks away, was the
+Sagalac, and beyond the Sagalac was Manitou, and a little way to the
+right was the bridge which was the symbol of his policy.  His eyes gazed
+almost unconsciously on the people and the horses and wagons coming and
+going upon the bridge.  Then they were lifted to the tall chimneys rising
+at two or three points on the outskirts of Manitou.
+
+"They don't know a good thing when they get it," he said to himself.
+"A strike--why, wages are double what they are in Quebec, where most of
+'em come from!  Marchand--"
+
+A hand touched his arm.  "Have you got a minute to spare, kind sir?"
+a voice asked.
+
+Ingolby turned and saw Nathan Rockwell, the doctor.  "Ah, Rockwell," he
+responded cheerfully, "two minutes and a half, if you like!  What is it?"
+
+The Boss Doctor, as he was familiarly called by every one, to identify
+him from the newer importations of medical men, drew from his pocket a
+newspaper.
+
+"There's an infernal lie here about me," he replied.  "They say that I--"
+
+He proceeded to explain the misstatement, as Ingolby studied the paper
+carefully, for Rockwell was a man worth any amount of friendship.
+
+"It's a lie, of course," Ingolby said firmly as he finished the
+paragraph.  "Well?"
+
+"Well, I've got to deal with it."
+
+"You mean you're going to deny it in the papers?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"I wouldn't, Rockwell."
+
+"You wouldn't?"
+
+"No.  You never can really overtake a newspaper lie.  Lots of the people
+who read the lie don't see the denial.  Your truth doesn't overtake the
+lie--it's a scarlet runner."
+
+"I don't see that.  When you're lied about, when a lie like that--"
+
+"You can't overtake it, Boss.  It's no use.  It's sensational, it runs
+too fast.  Truth's slow-footed.  When a newspaper tells a lie about you,
+don't try to overtake it, tell another."
+
+He blinked with quizzical good-humour.  Rockwell could not resist the
+audacity.  "I don't believe you'd do it just the same," he retorted
+decisively, and laughing.
+
+"I don't try the overtaking anyhow; I get something spectacular in my own
+favour to counteract the newspaper lie."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"For instance, if they said I couldn't ride a moke at a village
+steeplechase, I'd at once publish the fact that, with a jack-knife, I'd
+killed two pumas that were after me.  Both things would be lies, but the
+one would neutralize the other.  If I said I could ride a moke, nobody
+would see it, and if it were seen it wouldn't make any impression; but to
+say I killed two mountain-lions with a jack-knife on the edge of a
+precipice, with the sun standing still to look at it, is as good as the
+original lie and better; and I score.  My reputation increases."
+
+Nathan Rockwell's equilibrium was restored.  "You're certainly a wonder,"
+he declared.  "That's why you've succeeded."
+
+"Have I succeeded?"
+
+"Thirty-three-and what you are!"
+
+"What am I?"
+
+"Pretty well master here."
+
+"Rockwell, that'd do me a lot of harm if it was published.  Don't say it
+again.  This is a democratic country.  They'd kick at my being called
+master of anything, and I'd have to tell a lie to counteract it."
+
+"But it's the truth, and it hasn't to be overtaken."
+
+A grim look came into Ingolby's face.  "I'd like to be master-boss of
+life and death, holder of the sword and balances, the Sultan, here just
+for one week.  I'd change some things.  I'd gag some people that are
+doing terrible harm.  It's a real bad business.  The scratch-your-face
+period is over, and we're in the cut-your-throat epoch."
+
+Rockwell nodded assent, opened the paper again, and pointed to a column.
+"I expect you haven't seen that.  To my mind, in the present state of
+things, it's dynamite."
+
+Ingolby read the column hastily.  It was the report of a sermon delivered
+the evening before by the Rev. Reuben Tripple, the evangelical minister
+of Lebanon.  It was a paean of the Scriptures accompanied by a crazy
+charge that the Roman Church forbade the reading of the Bible.  It had
+a tirade also about the Scarlet Woman and Popish idolatry.
+
+Ingolby made a savage gesture.  "The insatiable Christian beast!" he
+growled in anger.  "There's no telling what this may do.  You know what
+those fellows are over in Manitou.  The place is full of them going to
+the woods, besides the toughs at the mills and in the taverns.  They're
+not psalm-singing, and they don't keep the Ten Commandments, but they're
+savagely fanatical, and--"
+
+"And there's the funeral of an Orangeman tomorrow.  The Orange Lodge
+attends in regalia."
+
+Ingolby started and looked at the paper again.  "The sneaking, praying
+liar," he said, his jaw setting grimly.  "This thing's a call to riot.
+There's an element in Lebanon as well that'd rather fight than eat.  It's
+the kind of lie that--"
+
+"That you can't overtake," said the Boss Doctor appositely; "and I don't
+know that even you can tell another that'll neutralize it.  Your
+prescription won't work here."
+
+An acknowledging smile played at Ingolby's mouth.  "We've got to have a
+try.  We've got to draw off the bull with a red rag somehow."
+
+"I don't see how myself.  That Orange funeral will bring a row on to us.
+I can just see the toughs at Manitou when they read this stuff, and know
+about that funeral."
+
+"It's announced?"
+
+"Yes, here's an invitation in the Budget to Orangemen to attend the
+funeral of a brother sometime of the banks of the Boyne!"
+
+"Who's the Master of the Lodge?" asked Ingolby.  Rockwell told him,
+urging at the same time that he see the Chief Constable as well, and
+Monseigneur Lourde at Manitou.
+
+"That's exactly what I mean to do--with a number of other things.
+Between ourselves, Rockwell, I'd have plenty of lint and bandages ready
+for emergencies if I were you."
+
+"I'll see to it.  That collision the other day was serious enough, and
+it's gradually becoming a vendetta.  Last night one of the Lebanon
+champions lost his nose."
+
+"His nose--how?"
+
+"A French river-driver bit a third of it off."
+
+Ingolby made a gesture of disgust.  "And this is the twentieth century!"
+
+They had moved along the street until they reached a barber-shop, from
+which proceeded the sound of a violin.  "I'm going in here," Ingolby
+said.  "I've got some business with Berry, the barber.  You'll keep me
+posted as to anything important?"
+
+"You don't need to say it.  Shall I see the Master of the Orange Lodge or
+the Chief Constable for you?" Ingolby thought for a minute.  "No, I'll
+tackle them myself, but you get in touch with Monseigneur Lourde.  He's
+grasped the situation, and though he'd like to have Tripple boiled in
+oil, he doesn't want broken heads and bloodshed."
+
+"And Tripple?"
+
+"I'll deal with him at once.  I've got a hold on him.  I never wanted to
+use it, but I will now without compunction.  I have the means in my
+pocket.  They've been there for three days, waiting for the chance."
+
+"It doesn't look like war, does it?" said Rockwell, looking up the
+street and out towards the prairie where the day bloomed like a flower.
+Blue above--a deep, joyous blue, against which a white cloud rested or
+slowly travelled westward; a sky down whose vast cerulean bowl flocks of
+wild geese sailed, white and grey and black, while the woods across the
+Sagalac were glowing with a hundred colours, giving tender magnificence
+to the scene.  The busy eagerness of a pioneer life was still a quiet,
+orderly thing, so immense was the theatre for effort and movement.  In
+these wide streets, almost as wide as a London square, there was room to
+move; nothing seemed huddled, pushing, or inconvenient.  Even the
+disorder of building lost its ugly crudity in the space and the sunlight.
+
+"The only time I get frightened in life is when things look like that,"
+Ingolby answered.  "I go round with a life-preserver on me when it seems
+as if 'all's right with the world.'"
+
+The violin inside the barber-shop kept scraping out its cheap music--a
+coon-song of the day.
+
+"Old Berry hasn't much business this morning," remarked Rockwell.
+"He's in keeping with this surface peace."
+
+"Old Berry never misses anything.  What we're thinking, he's thinking.
+I go fishing when I'm in trouble; Berry plays his fiddle.  He's a
+philosopher and a friend."
+
+"You don't make friends as other people do."
+
+"I make friends of all kinds.  I don't know why, but I've always had a
+kind of kinship with the roughs, the no-accounts, and the rogues."
+
+"As well as the others--I hope I don't intrude!"
+
+Ingolby laughed.  "You?  Oh, I wish all the others were like you.  It's
+the highly respectable members of the community I've always had to
+watch."
+
+The fiddle-song came squeaking out upon the sunny atmosphere.
+It arrested the attention of a man on the other side of the street--
+a stranger in strange Lebanon.  He wore a suit of Western clothes as a
+military man wears mufti, if not awkwardly, yet with a manner not wholly
+natural--the coat too tight across the chest, too short in the body.
+However, the man was handsome and unusual in his leopard way, with his
+brown curling hair and well-cared-for moustache.  It was Jethro Fawe.
+
+Attracted by the sound of the violin, he stayed his steps and smiled
+scornfully.  Then his look fell on the two figures at the door of the
+barber-shop, and his eyes flashed.
+
+Here was the man he wished to see--Max Ingolby, the man who stood between
+him and his Romany lass.  Here was a chance of speaking face to face with
+the man who was robbing him.  What he should do when they met must be
+according to circumstances.  That did not matter.  There was the impulse
+storming in his brain, and it drove him across the street as the Boss
+Doctor walked away, and Ingolby entered the shop.  All Jethro realized
+was that the man who stood in his way, the big, rich, masterful Gorgio
+was there.
+
+He entered the shop after Ingolby, and stood for an instant unseen.  The
+old negro barber with his curly white head, slave-black face, and large,
+shrewd, meditative eyes was standing in a corner with a violin under his
+chin, his cheek lovingly resting against it, as he drew his bow through
+the last bars of the melody.  He had smiled in welcome as Ingolby
+entered, instantly rising from his stool, but continuing to play.  He
+would not have stopped in the middle of a tune for an emperor, and he put
+Ingolby higher than an emperor.  For one who had been born a slave, and
+had still the scars of the overseer's whip on his back, he was very
+independent.  He cut everybody's hair as he wanted to cut it, trimmed
+each beard as he wished to trim it, regardless of its owner's wishes.
+If there was dissent, then his customer need not come again, that was
+all.  There were other barbers in the place, but Berry was the master
+barber.  To have your head massaged by him was never to be forgotten,
+especially if you found your hat too small for your head in the morning.
+Also he singed the hair with a skill and care, which had filled many a
+thinly covered scalp with luxuriant growth, and his hair-tonic, known as
+"Smilax," gave a pleasant odour to every meeting-house or church or
+public hall where the people gathered.  Berry was an institution even in
+this new Western town.  He kept his place and he forced the white man,
+whoever he was, to keep his place.
+
+When he saw Jethro Fawe enter the shop he did not stop playing, but his
+eyes searched the newcomer.  Following his glance, Ingolby turned round
+and saw the Romany.  His first impression was one of admiration, but
+suspicion was quickly added.  He was a good judge of men, and there was
+something secluded about the man which repelled him.  Yet he was
+interested.  The dark face had a striking racial peculiarity.
+
+The music died away, and old Berry lowered the fiddle from his chin and
+gave his attention to the Romany.
+
+"Yeth-'ir?" he said questioningly.
+
+For an instant Jethro was confused.  When he entered the shop he had not
+made up his mind what he should do.  It had been mere impulse and the
+fever of his brain.  As old Berry spoke, however, his course opened out.
+
+"I heard.  I am a stranger.  My fiddle is not here.  My fingers itch for
+the cat-gut.  Eh?"
+
+The look in old Berry's face softened a little.  His instinct had been
+against his visitor, and he had been prepared to send him to another
+shop-besides, not every day could he talk to the greatest man in the
+West.
+
+"If you can play, there it is," he said after a slight pause, and handed
+the fiddle over.
+
+It was true that Jethro Fawe loved the fiddle.  He had played it in many
+lands.  Twice, in order to get inside the palace of a monarch for a
+purpose--once in Berlin and once in London--he had played the second
+violin in a Tzigany orchestra.  He turned the fiddle slowly round,
+looking at it with mechanical intentness.  Through the passion of emotion
+the sure sense of the musician was burning.  His fingers smoothed the
+oval brown breast of the instrument with affection.  His eyes found joy
+in the colour of the wood, which had all the graded, merging tints of
+Autumn leaves.
+
+"It is old--and strange," he said, his eyes going from Berry to Ingolby
+and back again with a veiled look, as though he had drawn down blinds
+before his inmost thoughts.  "It was not made by a professional."
+
+"It was made in the cotton-field by a slave," observed old Berry sharply,
+yet with a content which overrode antipathy to his visitor.
+
+Jethro put the fiddle to his chin, and drew the bow twice or thrice
+sweepingly across the strings.  Such a sound had never come from Berry's
+violin before.  It was the touch of a born musician who certainly had
+skill, but who had infinitely more of musical passion.
+
+"Made by a slave in the cotton-fields!" Jethro said with a veiled look,
+and as though he was thinking of something else: "'Dordi', I'd like to
+meet a slave like that!"
+
+At the Romany exclamation Ingolby swept the man with a searching look.
+He had heard the Romany wife of Ruliff Zaphe use the word many years ago
+when he and Charley Long visited the big white house on the hill.  Was
+the man a Romany, and, if so, what was he doing here?  Had it anything to
+do with Gabriel Druse and his daughter?  But no--what was there strange
+in the man being a Romany and playing the fiddle?  Here and there in the
+West during the last two years, he had seen what he took to be Romany
+faces.  He looked to see the effect of the stranger's remark on old
+Berry.
+
+"I was a slave, and I was like that.  My father made that fiddle in the
+cotton-fields of Georgia," the aged barber said.
+
+The son of a race which for centuries had never known country or flag or
+any habitat, whose freedom was the soul of its existence, if it had a
+soul; a freedom defying all the usual laws of social order--the son of
+that race looked at the negro barber with something akin to awe.  Here
+was a man who had lived a life which was the staring antithesis of his
+own, under the whip as a boy, confined to compounds; whose vision was
+constricted to the limits of an estate; who was at the will of one man,
+to be sold and trafficked with like a barrel of herrings, to be worked at
+another's will--and at no price!  This was beyond the understanding of
+Jethro Fawe.  But awe has the outward look of respect, and old Berry who
+had his own form of vanity, saw that he had had a rare effect on the
+fellow, who evidently knew all about fiddles.  Certainly that was a
+wonderful sound he had produced from his own cotton-field fiddle.
+
+In the pause Ingolby said to Jethro Fawe, "Play something, won't you?
+I've got business here with Mr. Berry, but five minutes of good music
+won't matter.  We'd like to hear him play--wouldn't we, Berry?"
+
+The old man nodded assent.  "There's plenty of music in the thing," he
+said, "and a lot could come out in five minutes, if the right man played
+it."
+
+His words were almost like a challenge, and it reached to Jethro's
+innermost nature.  He would show this Gorgio robber what a Romany could
+do, and do as easily as the birds sing.  The Gorgio was a money-master,
+they said, but he would find that a Romany was a master, too, in his own
+way.  He thought of one of the first pieces he had ever heard, a rhapsody
+which had grown and grown, since it was first improvised by a Tzigany in
+Hungary.  He had once played it to an English lady at the Amphitryon Club
+in London, and she had swooned in the arms of her husband's best friend.
+He had seen men and women avert their heads when he had played it, daring
+not to look into each other's eyes.  He would play it now--a little of
+it.  He would play it to her--to the girl who had set him free in the
+Sagalac woods, to the ravishing deserter from her people, to the only
+woman who had told him the truth in all his life, and who insulated his
+magnetism as a ground-wire insulates lightning.  He would summon her here
+by his imagination, and tell her to note how his soul had caught the
+music of the spheres.  He would surround himself with an atmosphere of
+his own.  His rage, his love, and his malignant hate, his tenderness and
+his lust should fill the barber's shop with a flood which would drown the
+Gorgio raider.  He laughed to himself, almost unconsciously.  Then
+suddenly he leaned his cheek to the instrument and drew the bow across
+the strings with a savage softness.  The old cottonfield fiddle cried out
+with a thrilling, exquisite pain, but muffled, as a hand at the lips
+turns agony into a tender moan.  Some one--some spirit--in the fiddle
+was calling for its own.
+
+Five minutes later-a five minutes in which people gathered at the
+door of the shop, and heads were thrust inside in ravished wonder--the
+palpitating Romany lowered the fiddle from his chin, and stood for a
+minute looking into space, as though he saw a vision.
+
+He was roused by old Berry's voice.  "Das a fiddle I wouldn't sell for a
+t'ousand dollars.  If I could play like dat I wouldn't sell it for ten
+t'ousand.  You kin play a fiddle to make it worth a lot--you."
+
+The Romany handed back the instrument.  "It's got something inside it
+that makes it better than it is.  It's not a good fiddle, but it has
+something--ah, man alive, it has something!"  It was as though he was
+talking to himself.
+
+Berry made a quick, eager gesture.  "It's got the cotton-fields and the
+slave days in it.  It's got the whip and the stocks in it; it's got the
+cry of the old man that'd never see his children ag'in.  That's what the
+fiddle's got in it."
+
+Suddenly, in an apparent outburst of anger, he swept down on the front
+door and drove the gathering crowd away.
+
+"Dis is a barber-shop," he said with an angry wave of his hand; "it ain't
+a circuse."
+
+One man protested.  "I want a shave," he said.  He tried to come inside,
+but was driven back.
+
+"I ain't got a razor that'd cut the bristle off your face," the old
+barber declared peremptorily; "and, if I had, it wouldn't be busy on you.
+I got two customers, and that's all I'm going to take befo' I have my
+dinner.  So you git away.  There ain't goin' to be no more music."
+
+The crowd drew off, for none of them cared to offend this autocrat of the
+shears and razor.
+
+Ingolby had listened to the music with a sense of being swayed by a wind
+which blew from all quarters of the compass at once.  He loved music;
+it acted as a clearing-house to his mind; and he played the piano himself
+with the enthusiasm of a wilful amateur, who took liberties with every
+piece he essayed.  There was something in this fellow's playing which the
+great masters, such as Paganini, must have had.  As the music ceased, he
+did not speak, but remained leaning against the great red-plush barber's
+chair looking reflectively at the Romany.  Berry, however, said to the
+still absorbed musician: "Where did you learn to play?"
+
+The Romany started, and a flush crossed his face.  "Everywhere," he
+answered sullenly.
+
+"You've got the thing Sarasate had," Ingolby observed.  "I only heard him
+play but once--in London years ago: but there's the same something in it.
+I bought a fiddle of Sarasate.  I've got it now."
+
+"Here in Lebanon?"  The eyes of the Romany were burning.  An idea had
+just come into his brain.  Was it through his fiddling that he was going
+to find a way to deal with this Gorgio, who had come between him and his
+own?
+
+"Only a week ago it came," Ingolby replied.  "They actually charged me
+Customs duty on it.  I'd seen it advertised, and I made an offer and got
+it at last."
+
+"You have it here--at your house here?" asked old Berry in surprise.
+
+"It's the only place I've got.  Did you think I'd put it in a museum?
+I can't play it, but there it is for any one that can play.  How would
+you like to try it?" he added to Jethro in a friendly tone.  "I'd give a
+good deal to see it under your chin for an hour.  Anyhow, I'd like to
+show it to you.  Will you come?"
+
+It was like him to bring matters to a head so quickly.
+
+The Romany's eyes glistened.  "To play the Sarasate alone to you?" he
+asked.
+
+"That's it-at nine o'clock to-night, if you can."
+
+"I will come--yes, I will come," Jethro answered, the lids drooping over
+his eyes in which were the shadows of the first murder of the created
+world.
+
+"Here is my address, then."  Ingolby wrote something on his visiting-
+card.  "My man'll let you in, if you show that.  Well, good-bye."
+
+The Romany took the card, and turned to leave.  He had been dismissed by
+the swaggering Gorgio, as though he was a servant, and he had not even
+been asked his name, of so little account was he!  He could come and play
+on the Sarasate to the masterful Gorgio at the hour which the masterful
+Gorgio fixed--think of that!  He could be--a servant to the pleasure of
+the man who was stealing from him the wife sealed to him in the Roumelian
+country.  But perhaps it was all for the best--yes, he would make it all
+for the best!  As he left the shop, however, and passed down the street
+his mind remained in the barber-shop.  He saw in imagination the
+masterful Gorgio in the red-plush chair, and the negro barber bending
+over him, with black fingers holding the Gorgio's chin, and an open razor
+in the right hand lightly grasped.  A flash of malicious desire came into
+his eyes as the vision shaped itself in his imagination, and he saw
+himself, instead of the negro barber, holding the Gorgio chin and looking
+down at the Gorgio throat with the razor, not lightly, but firmly grasped
+in his right hand.  How was it that more throats were not cut in that
+way?  How was it that while the scissors passed through the beard of a
+man's face the points did not suddenly slip up and stab the light from
+helpless eyes?  How was it that men did not use their chances?  He went
+lightly down the street, absorbed in a vision which was not like the
+reality; but it was evidence that his visit to Max Ingolby's house was
+not the visit of a virtuoso alone, but of an evil spirit.
+
+As the Romany disappeared, Max Ingolby had his hand on the old barber's
+shoulder.  "I want one of the wigs you made for that theatrical
+performance of the Mounted Police, Berry," he said.  "Never mind what
+it's for.  I want it at once--one with the long hair of a French-Canadian
+coureur-de-bois.  Have you got one?"
+
+"Suh, I'll send it round-no, I'll bring it round as I come from dinner.
+Want the clothes, too?"
+
+"No.  I'm arranging for them with Osterhaut.  I've sent word by Jowett."
+
+"You want me to know what it's for?"
+
+"You can know anything I know--almost, Berry.  You're a friend of the
+right sort, and I can trust you."
+
+"Yeth-'ir, I bin some use to you, onct or twict, I guess."
+
+"You'll have a chance to be of use more than ever presently."
+
+"Suh, there's gain' to be a bust-up, but I know who's comin' out on the
+top.  That Felix Marchand and his roughs can't down you.  I hear and see
+a lot, and there's two or three things I was goin' to put befo' you;
+yeth-'ir."
+
+He unloaded his secret information to his friend, and was rewarded by
+Ingolby suddenly shaking his hand warmly.
+
+"That's the line," Ingolby said decisively.  "When do you go over to
+Manitou again to cut old Hector Marchand's hair?  Soon?"
+
+"To-day is his day--this evening," was the reply.
+
+"Good.  You wanted to know what the wig and the habitant's clothes are
+for, Berry--well, for me to wear in Manitou.  In disguise I'm going there
+tonight among them all, among the roughs and toughs.  I want to find out
+things for myself.  I can speak French as good as most of 'em, and I can
+chew tobacco and swear with the best."
+
+"You suhly are a wonder," said the old man admiringly.  "How you fin' the
+time I got no idee."
+
+"Everything in its place, Berry, and everything in its time.  I've got a
+lot to do to-day, but it's in hand, and I don't have to fuss.  You'll not
+forget the wig--you'll bring it round yourself?"
+
+"Suh.  No snoopin' into the parcel then.  But if you go to Manitou
+to-night, how can you have that fiddler?"
+
+"He comes at nine o'clock.  I'll go to Manitou later.  Everything in its
+own time."
+
+He was about to leave the shop when some one came bustling in.  Berry was
+between Ingolby and the door, and for an instant he did not see who it
+was.  Presently he heard an unctuous voice: "Ah, good day, good day, Mr.
+Berry.  I want to have my hair cut, if you please," it said.
+
+Ingolby smiled.  The luck was with him to-day so far.  The voice belonged
+to the Rev. Reuben Tripple, and he would be saved a journey to the manse.
+Accidental meetings were better than planned interviews.  Old Berry's
+grizzled beard was bristling with repugnance, and he was about to refuse
+Mr. Tripple the hospitality of the shears when Ingolby said: "You won't
+mind my having a word with Mr. Tripple first, will you, Berry?  May we
+use your back parlour?"
+
+A significant look from Ingolby's eyes gave Berry his cue.
+
+"Suh, Mr. Ingolby.  I'm proud."  He opened the door of another room.
+
+Mr. Tripple had not seen Ingolby when he entered, and he recognized him
+now with a little shock of surprise.  There was no reason why he should
+not care to meet the Master Man, but he always had an uncanny feeling
+when his eye met that of Ingolby.  His apprehension had no foundation in
+any knowledge, yet he had felt that Ingolby had no love for him, and this
+disturbed the egregious vanity of a narrow nature.  His slouching,
+corpulent figure made an effort to resist the gesture with which Ingolby
+drew him to the door, but his will succumbed, and he shuffled importantly
+into the other room.
+
+Ingolby shut the door quietly behind him, and motioned the minister to a
+chair beside the table.  Tripple sank down, mechanically smiling, placed
+his hat on the floor, and rested his hands on the table.  Ingolby could
+not help but notice how coarse the hands were--with fingers suddenly
+ending as though they had been cut off, and puffy, yellowish skin that
+suggested fat foods, or worse.
+
+Ingolby came to grips at once.  "You preached a sermon last night which
+no doubt was meant to do good, but will only do harm," he said abruptly.
+
+The flabby minister flushed, and then made an effort to hold his own.
+
+"I speak as I am moved," he said, puffing out his lips.  "You spoke on
+this occasion before you were moved--just a little while before,"
+answered Ingolby grimly.  "The speaking was last night, the moving comes
+today."
+
+"I don't get your meaning," was the thick rejoinder.  The man had a
+feeling that there was some real danger ahead.
+
+"You preached a sermon last night which might bring riot and bloodshed
+between these two towns, though you knew the mess that's brewing."
+
+"My conscience is my own.  I am responsible to my Lord for words which I
+speak in His name, not to you."
+
+"Your conscience belongs to yourself, but your acts belong to all of us.
+If there is trouble at the Orange funeral to-morrow it will be your
+fault.  The blame will lie at your door."
+
+"The sword of the Spirit--"
+
+"Oh, you want the sword, do you?  You want the sword, eh?"  Ingolby's jaw
+was set now like a millstone.  "Well, you can have it, and have it now.
+If you had taken what I said in the right way, I would not have done what
+I'm going to do.  I'm going to send you out of Lebanon.  You're a bad and
+dangerous element here.  You must go."
+
+"Who are you to tell me I must go?"
+
+The fat hands quivered on the table with anger and emotion, but also with
+fear of something.  "You may be a rich man and own railways, but--"
+
+"But I am not rich and I don't own railways.  Lately bad feeling has been
+growing on the Sagalac, and only a spark was needed to fire the ricks.
+You struck the spark in your sermon last night.  I don't see the end of
+it all.  One thing is sure--you're not going to take the funeral service
+to-morrow."
+
+The slack red lips of the man of God were gone dry with excitement, the
+loose body swayed with the struggle to fight it out.
+
+"I'll take no orders from you," the husky voice protested.  "My
+conscience alone will guide me.  I'll speak the truth as I feel it, and
+the people will stand by me."
+
+"In that case you WILL take orders from  me.  I'm going to save the town
+from what hurts it, if I can.  I've got no legal rights over you, but I
+have moral rights, and I mean to enforce them.  You gabble of conscience
+and truth, but isn't it a new passion with you--conscience and truth?"
+
+He leaned over the table and fastened the minister's eyes with his own.
+"Had you the same love of conscience and truth at Radley?"
+
+A whiteness passed over the flabby face, and the beady eyes took on a
+glazed look.  Fight suddenly died out of them.
+
+"You went on a missionary tour on the Ottawa River.  At Radley you toiled
+and rested from your toil--and feasted.  The girl had no father or
+brother, but her uncle was a railway-man.  He heard where you were, and
+he hired with my company to come out here as a foreman.  He came to drop
+on you.  The day after he came he had a bad accident.  I went to see him.
+He told me all; his nerves were unstrung, you observe.  He meant to ruin
+you, as you ruined the girl.  He had proofs enough.  The girl herself is
+in Winnipeg.  Well, I know life, and I know man and man's follies and
+temptations.  I thought it a pity that a career and a life like yours
+should be ruined--"
+
+A groan broke from the twitching lips before him, and a heavy sweat stood
+out on the round, rolling forehead.
+
+"If the man spoke, I knew it would be all up with you, for the world is
+very hard on men of God who fall.  I've seen men ruined before this,
+because of an hour's passion and folly.  I said to myself that you were
+only human, and that maybe you had paid heavy in remorse and fear.  Then
+there was the honour of the town of Lebanon.  I couldn't let the thing
+take its course.  I got the doctor to tell the man that he must go for
+special treatment to a hospital in Montreal, and I--well, I bought him
+off on his promising to keep his mouth shut.  He was a bit stiff in
+terms, because he said the girl needed the money.  The child died,
+luckily for you.  Anyhow I bought him off, and he went.  That was a year
+ago.  I've got all the proofs in my pocket, even to the three silly
+letters you wrote her when your senses were stronger than your judgment.
+I was going to see you about them to-day."
+
+He took from his pocket a small packet, and held them before the other's
+face.  "Have a good look at your own handwriting, and see if you
+recognize it," Ingolby continued.
+
+But the glazed, shocked eyes did not see.  Reuben Tripple had passed the
+several stages of horror during Ingolby's merciless arraignment, and he
+had nearly collapsed before he heard the end of the matter.  When he knew
+that Ingolby had saved him, his strength gave way, and he trembled
+violently.  Ingolby looked round and saw a jug of water.  Pouring out a
+glassful, he thrust it into the fat, wrinkled fingers.
+
+"Drink and pull yourself together," he said sternly.  The shaken figure
+straightened itself, and the water was gulped down.  "I thank you," he
+said in a husky voice.
+
+"You see I treated you fairly, and that you've been a fool?" Ingolby
+asked with no lessened determination.
+
+"I have tried to atone, and--"
+
+"No, you haven't had the right spirit to atone.  You were fat with vanity
+and self-conceit.  I've watched you."
+
+"In future I will--"
+
+"Well, that rests with yourself, but your health is bad, and you're not
+going to take the funeral tomorrow.  You've had a sudden breakdown, and
+you're going to get a call from some church in the East--as far East as
+Yokohama or Bagdad, I hope; and leave here in a few weeks.  You
+understand?  I've thought the thing out, and you've got to go.  You'll do
+no good to yourself or others here.  Take my advice, and wherever you go,
+walk six miles a day at least, work in a garden, eat half as much as you
+do, and be good to your wife.  It's bad enough for any woman to be a
+parson's wife, but to be a parson's wife and your wife, too, wants a lot
+of fortitude."
+
+The heavy figure lurched to the upright, and steadied itself with a force
+which had not yet been apparent.
+
+"I'll do my best--so help me God!" he said and looked Ingolby squarely
+in the face for the first time.
+
+"All right, see you keep your word," Ingolby replied, and nodded good-
+bye.
+
+The other went to the door, and laid a hand on the knob.
+
+Suddenly Ingolby stopped him, and thrust a little bundle of bills into
+his hand.  "There's a hundred dollars for your wife.  It'll pay the
+expense of moving," he said.
+
+A look of wonder, revelation and gratitude crept into Tripple's face.  "I
+will keep my word, so help me God!" he said again.
+
+"All right, good-bye," responded Ingolby abruptly, and turned away.
+
+A moment afterwards the door closed behind the Rev. Reuben Tripple and
+his influence in Lebanon.  "I couldn't shake hands with him," said
+Ingolby to himself, "but I'm glad he didn't sniffle.  There's some stuff
+in him--if it only has a chance."
+
+"I've done a good piece of business, Berry," he said cheerfully as he
+passed through the barber-shop.  "Suh, if you say so," said the barber,
+and they left the shop together.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN
+
+Promptly at nine o'clock Jethro Fawe knocked at Ingolby's door, and was
+admitted by the mulatto man-servant Jim Beadle, who was to Ingolby like
+his right hand.  It was Jim who took command of his house, "bossed" his
+two female servants, arranged his railway tours, superintended his
+kitchen--with a view to his own individual tastes; valeted him, kept his
+cigars within a certain prescribed limit by a firm actuarial principle
+which transferred any surplus to his own use; gave him good advice,
+weighed up his friends and his enemies with shrewd sense; and protected
+him from bores and cranks, borrowers and "dead-beats."
+
+Jim was accustomed to take a good deal of responsibility, and had more
+than once sent people to the right-about who had designs on his master,
+even though they came accredited.  On such occasions he did not lie to
+protect himself when called to account, but told the truth
+pertinaciously.  He was obstinate in his vanity, and carried off his
+mistakes with aplomb.  When asked by Ingolby what he called the Governor
+General when he took His Excellency over the new railway in Ingolby's
+private car, he said, "I called him what everybody called him.  I called
+him 'Succelency.'" And "Succelency" for ever after the Governor General
+was called in the West.  Jim's phonetic mouthful gave the West a roar of
+laughter and a new word to the language.  On another occasion Jim gave
+the West a new phrase to its vocabulary which remains to this day.
+Having to take the wife of a high personage of the neighbouring Republic
+over the line in the private car, he had astounded his master by
+presenting a bill for finger-bowls before the journey began.  Ingolby
+said to him, "Jim, what the devil is this--finger-bowls in my private
+car?  We've never had finger-bowls before, and we've had everybody as was
+anybody to travel with us."  Jim's reply was final.  "Say," he replied,
+"we got to have 'em.  Soon's I set my eyes on that lady I said: 'She's a
+finger-bowl lady.'"
+
+"'Finger-bowl lady' be hanged, Jim, we don't--" Ingolby protested, but
+Jim waved him down.
+
+"Say," he said decisively, "she'll ask for them finger-bowls--she'll ask
+for 'em, and what'd I do if we hadn't got 'em."
+
+She did ask for them; and henceforth the West said of any woman who put
+on airs and wanted what she wasn't born to: "She's a finger-bowl lady."
+
+It was Jim who opened the door to Jethro Fawe, and his first glance was
+one of prejudice.  His quick perception saw that the Romany wore clothes
+not natural to him.  He felt the artificial element, the quality of
+disguise.  He was prepared to turn the visitor away, no matter what he
+wanted, but Ingolby's card handed to him by the Romany made him pause.
+He had never known his master give a card like that more than once or
+twice in the years they had been together.  He fingered the card,
+scrutinized it carefully, turned it over, looked heavenward reflectively,
+as though the final permission for the visit remained with him, and
+finally admitted the visitor.
+
+"Mr. Ingolby ain't in," he said.  "He went out a little while back.  You
+got to wait," he added sulkily, as he showed the Romany into Ingolby's
+working-room.
+
+As Jim did so, he saw lying on a chair a suit of clothes on top of which
+were a wig and false beard and moustache.  Instantly he got between the
+visitor and the make-up.  The parcel was closed when he was in the room a
+half-hour before.  Ingolby had opened it since, had been called out, and
+had forgotten to cover the things up or put them away.
+
+"Sit down," Jim said to the Romany, still covering the disguise.  Then he
+raised them in his arms, and passed with them into another room,
+muttering angrily to himself.
+
+The Romany had seen, however.  They were the first things on which his
+eyes had fallen when he entered the room.  A wig, a false beard, and
+workman's clothes!  What were they for?  Were these disguises for the
+Master Gorgio?  Was he to wear them?  If so, he--Jethro Fawe--would watch
+and follow him wherever he went.  Had these disguises to do with Fleda--
+with his Romany lass?
+
+His pulses throbbed; he was in an overwrought mood.  He was ready for any
+illusion, susceptible to any vagary of the imagination.
+
+He looked round the room.  So this was the way the swaggering, masterful
+Gorgio lived?
+
+Here were pictures and engravings which did not seem to belong to a new
+town in a new land, where everything was useful or spectacular.  Here was
+a sense of culture and refinement.  Here were finished and unfinished
+water-colours done by Ingolby's own hand or bought by him from some hard-
+up artist earning his way mile by mile, as it were.  Here were books, not
+many, but well-bound and important-looking, covering fields in which
+Jethro Fawe had never browsed, into which, indeed, he had never entered.
+If he had opened them he would have seen a profusion of marginal notes in
+pencil, and slips of paper stuck in the pages to mark important passages.
+
+He turned from them to the welcome array of weapons on the walls-rifles,
+shotguns, Indian bows, arrows and spears, daggers, and great sheath-
+knives such as are used from the Yukon to Bolivia, and a sabre with a
+faded ribbon of silk tied to the handle.  This was all that Max Ingolby
+had inherited from his father--that artillery sabre which he had worn in
+the Crimea and in the Indian Mutiny.  Jethro's eyes wandered eagerly over
+the weapons, and, in imagination, he had each one in his hand.  From the
+pained, angry confusion he felt when he looked at the books had emerged a
+feeling of fanaticism, of feud and war, in which his spirit regained its
+own kind of self-respect.  In looking at the weapons he was as good a man
+as any Gorgio.  Brains and books were one thing, but the strong arm, the
+quick eye, and the deft lunge home with the sword or dagger were better;
+they were of a man's own skill, not the acquired skill of another's
+brains which books give.  He straightened his shoulders till he looked
+like a modern actor playing the hero in a romantic drama, and with quick
+vain motions he stroked and twisted his brown moustache, and ran his
+fingers through his curling hair.  In truth he was no coward; and his
+conceit would not lessen his courage when the test of it came.
+
+As his eyes brightened from gloom and sullenness to valiant enmity, they
+suddenly fell on a table in a corner where lay a black coffin-shaped
+thing of wood.  In this case, he knew, was the Sarasate violin.
+Sarasate--once he had paid ten lira to hear Sarasate play the fiddle in
+Turin, and the memory of it was like the sun on the clouds to him now.
+In music such of him as was real found a home.  It fed everything in him
+--his passion, his vanity; his vagabond taste, his emotions, his self-
+indulgence, his lust.  It was the means whereby he raised himself to
+adventure and to pilgrimage, to love and license and loot and spying and
+secret service here and there in the east of Europe.  It was the
+flagellation of these senses which excited him to do all that man may do
+and more.
+
+He was going to play to the masterful Gorgio, and he would play as he had
+never played before.  He would pour the soul of his purpose into the
+music--to win back or steal back, the lass sealed to him by the Starzke
+River.
+
+"Kismet!" he said aloud, and he rose from the chair to go to the violin,
+but as he did so the door opened and Ingolby entered.
+
+"Oh, you're here, and longing to get at it," he said pleasantly.
+
+He had seen the look in the eyes of the Romany as he entered, and noted
+which way his footsteps were tending.  "Well, we needn't lose any time,
+but will you have a drink and a smoke first?" he added.
+
+He threw his hat in a corner, and opened a spirittable where shone a half
+dozen cut-glass, tumblers and several well-filled bottles, while boxes of
+cigars and cigarettes flanked them.  It was the height of modern luxury
+imported from New York, and Jethro eyed it with envious inward comment.
+The Gorgio had the world on his key-chain!  Every door would open to him
+--that was written on his face--unless Fate stepped in and closed all
+doors!
+
+The door of Fleda's heart had already been opened, but he had not yet
+made his bed in it, and there was still time to help Fate, if her mystic
+finger beckoned.
+
+Jethro nodded in response to Ingolby's invitation to drink.  "But I do
+not drink much when I play," he remarked.  "There's enough liquor in the
+head when the fiddle's in the hand.  'Dadia', I do not need the spirit to
+make the pulses go!"
+
+"As little as you like then, if you'll only play as well as you did this
+afternoon," Ingolby said cheerily.  "I will play better," was the reply.
+
+"On Sarasate's violin--well, of course."
+
+"Not only because it is Sarasate's violin, 'Kowadji'!"  "Kowadji!  Oh,
+come now, you may be a Gipsy, but that doesn't mean that you're an
+Egyptian or an Arab.  Why Arabic--why 'kowadji'?"
+
+The other shrugged his shoulders.  "Who can tell I speak many languages.
+I do not like the Mister.  It is ugly in the ear.  Monsieur, signor,
+effendi, kowadji, they have some respect in them."
+
+"You wanted to pay me respect, eh?"
+
+"You have Sarasate's violin!"
+
+"I have a lot of things I could do without."
+
+"Could you do without the Sarasate?"
+
+"Long enough to hear you play it, Mr.--what is your name, may I ask?"
+
+"My name is Jethro Fawe."
+
+"Well, Jethro Fawe, my Romany 'chal', you shall show me what a violin can
+do."
+
+"You know the Romany lingo?" Jethro asked, as Ingolby went over to the
+violin-case.
+
+"A little--just a little."
+
+"When did you learn it?"  There was a sudden savage rage in Jethro's
+heart, for he imagined Fleda had taught Ingolby.
+
+"Many a year ago when I could learn anything and remember anything and
+forget anything."  Ingolby sighed.  "But that doesn't matter, for I know
+only a dozen words or so, and they won't carry me far."
+
+He turned the violin over in his hands.  "This ought to do a bit more
+than the cotton-field fiddle," he said dryly.
+
+He snapped the strings, looking at it with the love of the natural
+connoisseur.  "Finish your drink and your cigarette.  I can wait," he
+added graciously.  "If you like the cigarettes, you must take some away
+with you.  You don't drink much, that's clear, therefore you must smoke.
+Every man has some vice or other, if it's only hanging on to virtue too
+tight."
+
+He laughed eagerly.  Strange that he should have a feeling of greater
+companionship for a vagabond like this than for most people he met.  Was
+it some temperamental thing in him?  "Dago," as he called the Romany
+inwardly, there was still a bond between them.  They understood the glory
+of a little instrument like this, and could forget the world in the light
+on a great picture.  There was something in the air they breathed which
+gave them easier understanding of each other and of the world.
+
+Suddenly with a toss Jethro drained the glass of spirit, though he had
+not meant to do so.  He puffed the cigarette an instant longer, then
+threw it on the floor, and was about to put his foot on it, when Ingolby
+stopped him.
+
+"I'm a slave," he said.  "I've got a master.  It's Jim.  Jim's a hard
+master, too.  He'd give me fits if we ground our cigarette ashes into the
+carpet."
+
+He threw the refuse into a flower-pot.
+
+"That squares Jim.  Now let's turn the world inside out," he proceeded.
+He handed the fiddle over.  "Here's the little thing that'll let you do
+the trick.  Isn't it a beauty, Jethro Fawe?"
+
+The Romany took it, his eyes glistening with mingled feelings.  Hatred
+was in his soul, and it showed in the sidelong glance as Ingolby turned
+to place a chair where he could hear and see comfortably; yet he had the
+musician's love of the perfect instrument, and the woods and the streams
+and the sounds of night and the whisperings of trees and the ghosts that
+walked in lonely places and called across the glens--all were pouring
+into his brain memories which made his pulses move far quicker than the
+liquor he had drunk could do.
+
+"What do you wish?" he asked as he tuned the fiddle.
+
+Ingolby laughed good-humouredly.  "Something Eastern; something you'd
+play for yourself if you were out by the Caspian Sea.  Something that has
+life in it."
+
+Jethro continued to tune the fiddle carefully and abstractedly.  His eyes
+were half-closed, giving them a sulky look, and his head was averted.  He
+made no reply to Ingolby, but his head swayed from side to side in that
+sensuous state produced by self-hypnotism, so common among the half-
+Eastern races.  By an effort of the will they send through the nerves a
+flood of feeling which is half-anaesthetic, half-intoxicant.  Carried
+into its fullest expression it drives a man amok or makes of him a
+howling dervish, a fanatic, or a Shakir.  In lesser intensity it produces
+the musician of the purely sensuous order, or the dancer that performs
+prodigies of abandoned grace.  Suddenly the sensuous exaltation had come
+upon Jethro Fawe.  It was as though he had discharged into his system
+from some cells of his brain a flood which coursed like a stream of soft
+fire.
+
+In the pleasurable pain of such a mood he drew his bow across the strings
+with a sweeping stroke, and then, for an instant, he ran hither and
+thither on the strings testing the quality and finding the range and
+capacity of the instrument.  It was a scamper of hieroglyphics which
+could only mean anything to a musician.
+
+"Well, what do you think of him?" Ingolby asked as the Romany lowered
+the bow.  "Paganini--Joachim--Sarasate--any one, it is good enough," was
+the half-abstracted reply.
+
+"It is good enough for you--almost, eh?"
+
+Ingolby meant his question as a compliment, but an evil look shot into
+the Romany's face, and the bow twitched in his hand.  He was not Paganini
+or Sarasate, but that was no reason why he should be insulted.
+
+Ingolby's quick perception saw, however, what his words had done, and he
+hastened to add: "I believe you can get more out of that fiddle than
+Sarasate ever could, in your own sort of music anyhow.  I've never heard
+any one play half so well the kind of piece you played this afternoon.
+I'm glad I didn't make a fool of myself buying the fiddle.  I didn't, did
+I?  I gave five thousand dollars for it."
+
+"It's worth anything to the man that loves it," was the Romany's
+response.  He was mollified by the praise he had received.
+
+He raised the fiddle slowly to his chin, his eyes wandering round the
+room, then projecting themselves into space, from which they only
+returned to fix themselves on Ingolby with the veiled look which sees but
+does not see--such a look as an oracle, or a death-god, or a soulless
+monster of some between-world, half-Pagan god would wear.  Just such a
+look as Watts's "Minotaur" wears in the Tate Gallery in London.
+
+In an instant he was away in a world which was as far off from this world
+as Jupiter is from Mars.  It was the world of his soul's origin--a place
+of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and
+green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of
+vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive
+with quarrelling!  and affrighted beasts.  It was a place where birds
+sang divinely, yet where obscene fowls of prey hovered in the blue or
+waited by the dying denizens of the desert or the plain; where dark-eyed
+women heard, with sidelong triumph, the whispers of passion; where sweet-
+faced children fled in fear from terrors undefined; where harpies and
+witch-women and evil souls waited in ambush; or scurried through the
+coverts where men brought things to die; or where they fled for futile
+refuge from armed foes.  It was a world of unbridled will, this, where
+the soul of Jethro Fawe had its origin; and to it his senses fled
+involuntarily when he put Sarasate's fiddle to his chin this Autumn
+evening.
+
+From that well of the First Things--the first things of his own life, the
+fount from which his forebears drew, backwards through the centuries,
+Jethro Fawe quickly drank his fill; and then into the violin he poured
+his own story--no improvisation, but musical legends and classic
+fantasies and folk-breathings and histories of anguished or joyous haters
+or lovers of life; treated by the impressionist who made that which had
+been in other scenes to other men the thing of the present and for the
+men who are.  That which had happened by the Starzke River was now of the
+Sagalac River.  The passions and wild love and irresponsible deeds of the
+life he had lived in years gone by were here.
+
+It was impossible for Ingolby to resist the spell of the music.  Such
+abandonment he had never seen in any musician, such riot of musical
+meaning he had never heard.  He was conscious of the savagery and the
+bestial soul of vengeance which spoke through the music, and drowned the
+joy and radiance and almost ghostly and grotesque frivolity of the
+earlier passages; but it had no personal meaning to him, though at times
+it seemed when the Romany came near and bent over him with the ecstatic
+attack of the music, as though there was a look in the black eyes like
+that of a man who kills.  It had, of course, nothing to do with him; it
+was the abandonment of a highly emotional nature, he thought.
+
+It was only after he had been playing, practically without ceasing, for
+three-quarters of an hour, that there came to Ingolby the true
+interpretation of the Romany mutterings through the man's white, wolf-
+like teeth.  He did not shrink, however, but kept his head and watched.
+
+Once, as the musician flung his body round in a sweep of passion, Ingolby
+saw the black eyes flash to the weapons on the wall with a malign look
+which did not belong to the music alone, and he took a swift estimate of
+the situation.  Why the man should have any intentions against him, he
+could not guess, except that he might be one of the madmen who have a
+vendetta against the capitalist.  Or was he a tool of Felix Marchand?  It
+did not seem possible, and yet if the man was penniless and an anarchist
+maybe, there was the possibility.  Or--the blood rushed to his face--or
+it might be that the Gipsy's presence here, this display of devilish
+antipathy, as though it were all part of the music, was due, somehow, to
+Fleda Druse.
+
+The music swelled to a swirling storm, crashed and flooded the feelings
+with a sense of shipwreck and chaos, through which a voice seemed to cry-
+the quiver and delicate shrillness of one isolated string--and then fell
+a sudden silence, as though the end of all things had come; and on the
+silence the trembling and attenuated note which had quivered on the
+lonely string, rising, rising, piercing the infinite distance and sinking
+into silence again.
+
+In the pause which followed the Romany stood panting, his eyes fixed on
+Ingolby with an evil exaltation which made him seem taller and bigger
+than he was, but gave him, too, a look of debauchery like that on the
+face of a satyr.  Generations of unbridled emotion, of license of the
+fields and the covert showed in his unguarded features.
+
+"What did the single cry--the motif--express?" Ingolby asked coolly.
+"I know there was catastrophe, the tumblings of avalanches, but the voice
+that cried-the soul of a lover, was it?"
+
+The Romany's lips showed an ugly grimace.  "It was the soul of one that
+betrayed a lover, going to eternal tortures."
+
+Ingolby laughed carelessly.  "It was a fine bit of work.  Sarasate would
+have been proud of his fiddle if he could have heard.  Anyhow he couldn't
+have played that.  Is it Gipsy music?"
+
+"It is the music of a 'Gipsy,' as you call it."
+
+"Well, it's worth a year's work to hear," Ingolby replied admiringly, yet
+acutely conscious of danger.  "Are you a musician by trade?" he asked.
+
+"I have no trade."  The glowing eyes kept scanning the wall where the
+weapons hung, and as though without purpose other than to get a pipe from
+the rack on the wall, Ingolby moved to where he could be prepared for any
+rush.  It seemed absurd that there should be such a possibility; but the
+world was full of strange things.
+
+"What brought you to the West?" he asked as he filled a pipe, his back
+almost against the wall.
+
+"I came to get what belonged to me."
+
+Ingolby laughed ironically.  "Most of us are here for that purpose.  We
+think the world owes us such a lot."
+
+"I know what is my own."
+
+Ingolby lit his pipe, his eyes reflectively scanning the other.
+
+"Have you got it again out here--your own?"
+
+"Not yet, but I will."
+
+Ingolby took out his watch, and looked at it.  "I haven't found it easy
+getting all that belongs to me."
+
+"You have found it easier getting what belongs to some one else," was the
+snarling response.
+
+Ingolby's jaw hardened.  What did the fellow mean?  Did he refer to
+money, or--was it Fleda Druse?  "See here," he said, "there's no need to
+say things like that.  I never took anything that didn't belong to me,
+that I didn't win, or earn or pay for--market price or 'founder's
+shares'"--he smiled grimly.  "You've given me the best treat I've had in
+many a day.  I'd walk fifty miles to hear you play my Sarasate--or even
+old Berry's cotton-field fiddle.  I'm as grateful as I can be, and I'd
+like to pay you for it; but as you're not a professional, and it's one
+gentleman to another as it were, I can only thank you--or maybe help you
+to get what's your own, if you're really trying to get it out here.
+Meanwhile, have a cigar and a drink."
+
+He was still between the Romany and the wall, and by a movement forward
+sought to turn Jethro to the spirit-table.  Probably this manoeuvring was
+all nonsense, that he was wholly misreading the man; but he had always
+trusted his instincts, and he would not let his reason rule him entirely
+in such a situation.  He could also ring the bell for Jim, or call to
+him, for while he was in the house Jim was sure to be near by; but he
+felt he must deal with the business alone.
+
+The Romany did not move towards the spirit-table, and Ingolby became
+increasingly vigilant.
+
+"No, I can't pay you anything, that's clear," he said; "but to get your
+own--I've got some influence out here--what can I do?  A stranger is up
+against all kinds of things if he isn't a native, and you're not.  Your
+home and country's a good way from here, eh?"
+
+Suddenly the Romany faced him.  "Yes.  I come from places far from here.
+Where is the Romany's home?  It is everywhere in the world, but it is
+everywhere inside his tent.  Because his country is everywhere and
+nowhere, his home is more to him than it is to any other.  He is alone
+with his wife, and with his own people.  Yes, and by long and by last,
+he will make the man pay who spoils his home.  It is all he has.  Good or
+bad, it is all he has.  It is his own."
+
+Ingolby had a strange, disturbing premonition that he was about to hear
+what would startle him, but he persisted.  "You said you had come here to
+get your own--is your home here?"
+
+For a moment the Romany did not answer.  He had worked himself into a
+great passion.  He had hypnotized himself, he had acted for a while as
+though he was one of life's realities; but suddenly there passed through
+his veins the chilling sense of the unreal, that he was only acting a
+part, as he had ever done in his life, and that the man before him could,
+with a wave of the hand, raise the curtain on all his disguises and
+pretences.  It was only for an instant, however, for there swept through
+him the feeling that Fleda had roused in him--the first real passion, the
+first true love--if what such as he felt can be love--that he had ever
+known; and he saw her again as she was in the but in the wood defying
+him, ready to defend herself against him.  All his erotic anger and
+melodramatic fervour were alive in him once more.
+
+He was again a man with a wrong, a lover dispossessed.  On the instant
+his veins filled with passionate blood.  The Roscian strain in him had
+its own tragic force and reality.
+
+"My home is where my own is, and you, have taken my own from me, as I
+said," he burst out.  "There was all the world for you, but I had only my
+music and my wife, and you have taken my wife from me.  'Mi Duvel', you
+have taken, but you shall give back again, or there will be only one of
+us in the world!  The music I have played for you--that has told you all:
+the thing that was music from the beginning of Time, the will of the
+First of All.  Fleda Druse, she was mine, she is my wife, and you, the
+Gorgio, come between, and she will not return to me."
+
+A sudden savage desire came to Ingolby to strike the man in the face--
+this Gipsy vagabond the husband of Fleda Druse!  It was too monstrous.
+It was an evil lie, and yet she had said she was a Romany, and had said
+it with apparent shame or anxiety.  She had given him no promise, had
+pledged no faith, had admitted no love, and yet already in his heart of
+hearts he thought upon her as his own.  Ever since the day he had held
+her in his arms at the Carillon Rapids her voice had sounded in his ears,
+and a warmth was in his heart which had never been there in all his days.
+This waif of barbarism even to talk of Fleda Druse as though he was of
+the same sphere as herself invited punishment-but to claim her as his
+wife!  It was shameless.  An ugly mood came on him, the force that had
+made him what he was filled all his senses.  He straightened himself;
+contempt of the Ishmael showed at his lips.
+
+"I think you lie, Jethro Fawe," he said quietly, and his eyes were hard
+and piercing.  "Gabriel Druse's daughter is not--never was--any wife of
+yours.  She never called you husband.  She does not belong to the refuse
+of the world."
+
+The Romany made a sudden rush towards the wall where the weapons hung,
+but two arms of iron were flung out and caught him, and he was hurled
+across the room.  He crashed against a table, swayed, missed a chair
+where rested the Sarasate violin, then fell to the floor; but he
+staggered to his feet again, all his senses in chaos.
+
+"You almost fell on the fiddle.  If you had hurt it I'd have hurt you,
+Mr. Fawe," Ingolby said with a grim smile.  "That fiddle's got too much
+in it to waste it."
+
+"Mi Duvel!  Mi Duvel!" gasped the Romany in his fury.
+
+"You can say that as much as you like, but if you play any more of your
+monkey tricks here, my Paganini, I will wring your neck," Ingolby
+returned, his six feet of solid flesh making a movement of menace.
+
+"And look," he added, "since you are here, and I said what I meant, that
+I'd help you to get your own, I'll keep my word.  But don't talk in
+damned riddles.  Talk white men's language.  You said that Gabriel
+Druse's daughter was your wife.  Explain what you meant, and no
+nonsense."
+
+The Romany made a gesture of acquiescence.  "She was made mine according
+to Romany law by the River Starzke seventeen years ago.  I was the son of
+Lemuel Fawe, rightful King of all the Romanys.  Gabriel Druse seized the
+headship, and my father gave him three thousand pounds that we should
+marry, she and I, and so bring the headship to the Fawes again when
+Gabriel Druse should die; and so it was done by the River Starzke in the
+Roumelian country."
+
+Ingolby winced, for the man's words rang true.  A cloud came over his
+face, but he said nothing.  Jethro saw the momentary advantage.  "You did
+not know?" he asked.  "She did not tell you she was made my wife those
+years ago?  She did not tell you she was the daughter of the Romany King?
+So it is, you see, she is afraid to tell the truth."
+
+Ingolby's knitted bulk heaved with desire to injure.  "Your wife--you
+melodious sinner!  Do you think such tomfoolery has any effect in this
+civilized country?  She is about as much your wife as I am your brother.
+Don't talk your heathenish rot here.  I said I'd help you to get your
+own, because you played the fiddle as few men can play it, and I owe you
+a lot for that hour's music; but there's nothing belonging to Gabriel
+Druse that belongs to you, and his daughter least of all.  Look out--
+don't sit on the fiddle, damn you!"
+
+The Romany had made a motion as if to sit down on the chair where the
+fiddle was, but stopped short at Ingolby's warning.  For an instant
+Jethro had an inclination to seize the fiddle and break it across his
+knees.  It would be an exquisite thing to destroy five thousand dollars'
+worth of this man's property at a single wrench and blow.  But the spirit
+of the musician asserted itself before the vengeful lover could carry out
+his purpose; as Ingolby felt sure it would.  Ingolby had purposely given
+the warning about the fiddle, in the belief that it might break the
+unwelcome intensity of the scene.  He detested melodrama, and the scene
+came precious near to it.  Men had been killed before his eyes more than
+once, but there had been no rodomontade even when there had been a woman
+in the case.
+
+This Romany lover, however, seemed anxious to make a Sicilian drama out
+of his preposterous claim, and it sickened him.  Who was the fellow that
+he should appear in the guise of a rival to himself!  It was humiliating
+and offensive.  Ingolby had his own kind of pride and vanity, and they
+were both hurt now.  He would have been less irritable if this rival had
+been as good a man as himself or better.  He was so much a gamester that
+he would have said, "Let the best man win," and have taken his chances.
+
+His involuntary strategy triumphed for the moment.  The Romany looked at
+the fiddle for an instant with murderous eyes, but the cool, quiet voice
+of Ingolby again speaking sprayed his hot virulence.
+
+"You can make a good musician quite often, but a good fiddle is a prize-
+packet from the skies," Ingolby said.  "When you get a good musician and
+a good fiddle together it's a day for a salute of a hundred guns."
+
+Half-dazed with unregulated emotion, Jethro acted with indecision for a
+moment, and the fiddle was safe.  But he had suffered the indignity of
+being flung like a bag of bones across the room, and the microbe of
+insane revenge was in him.  It was not to be killed by the cold humour of
+the man who had worsted him.  He returned to the attack.
+
+"She is mine, and her father knows it is so.  I have waited all these
+years, and the hour has come.  I will--"
+
+Ingolby's eyes became hard and merciless again.  "Don't talk your Gipsy
+rhetoric.  I've had enough.  No hour has come that makes a woman do what
+she doesn't want to do in a free country.  The lady is free to do what
+she pleases here within British law, and British law takes no heed of
+Romany law or any other law.  You'll do well to go back to your Roumelian
+country or whatever it is.  The lady will marry whom she likes."
+
+"She will never marry you," the Romany said huskily and menacingly.
+
+"I have never asked her, but if I do, and she said yes, no one could
+prevent it."
+
+"I would prevent it."
+
+"How?"
+
+"She is a Romany: she belongs to the Romany people; I will find a way."
+
+Ingolby had a flash of intuition.
+
+"You know well that if Gabriel Druse passed the word, your life wouldn't
+be worth a day's purchase.  The Camorra would not be more certain or more
+deadly.  If you do anything to hurt the daughter of Gabriel Druse, you
+will pay the full price, and you know it.  The Romanys don't love you
+better than their rightful chief."
+
+"I am their rightful chief."
+
+"Maybe, but if they don't say so, too, you might as well be their
+rightful slave.  You are a genius in your way.  Take my advice and return
+to the trail of the Gipsy.  Or, there's many an orchestra would give you
+a good salary as leader.  You've got no standing in this country.  You
+can't do anything to hurt me except try to kill me, and I'll take my
+chance of that.  You'd better have a drink now and go quietly home to
+bed.  Try and understand that this is a British town, and we don't settle
+our affairs by jumping from a violin rhapsody to a knife or a gun."  He
+jerked his head backwards towards the wall.  "Those things are for
+ornament, not for use.  Come, Fawe, have a drink and go home like a good
+citizen for one night only."
+
+The Romany hesitated, then shook his head and muttered chaotically.
+
+"Very well," was the decisive reply.  Ingolby pressed a bell, and, in an
+instant, Jim Beadle was in the room.  He had evidently been at the
+keyhole.  "Jim," he said, "show the gentleman out."
+
+But suddenly he caught up a box of cigars from the table and thrust it
+into the Romany's hands.  "They're the best to be got this side of
+Havana," he said cheerily.  "They'll help you put more fancy still into
+your playing.  Good night.  You never played better than you've done
+during the last hour, I'll stake my life on that.  Good night.  Show Mr.
+Fawe out, Jim."
+
+The Romany had not time to thrust back the cigars upon his host, and
+dazed by the strategy of the thing, by the superior force and mind of the
+man who a moment ago he would have killed, he took the box and turned
+towards the door, taking his hat dazedly from Jim.
+
+At the door, however, catching sight of the sly grin on the mulatto
+servant's face, his rage and understanding returned to him, and he faced
+the masterful Gorgio once again.
+
+"By God, I'll have none of it!" he exclaimed roughly and threw the box
+of cigars on the floor of the room.  Ingolby was not perturbed.  "Don't
+forget there's an east-bound train every day," he said menacingly, and
+turned his back as the door closed.
+
+In another minute Jim entered the room.  "Get the clothes and the wig and
+things, Jim.  I must be off," he said.
+
+"The toughs don't get going till about this time over at Manitou,"
+responded Jim.  Then he told his master about the clothes having been
+exposed in the room when the Romany arrived.  "But I don't think he seen
+them," Jim added with approval of his own conduct.  "I got 'em out quick
+as lightning.  I covered 'em like a blanket."
+
+"All right, Jim; it doesn't matter.  That fellow's got other things to
+think of than that."
+
+He was wrong, however.  The Romany was waiting outside in the darkness
+not far away--watching and waiting.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+FOR LUCK
+
+Felix Marchand was in the highest spirits.  His clean-shaven face was
+wrinkled with smiles and sneers.  His black hair was flung in waves of
+triumph over his heavily-lined forehead; one hand was on his hip with
+brave satisfaction, the other with lighted cigarette was tossed upwards
+in exultation.
+
+"I've got him.  I've got him--like that!" he said transferring the
+cigarette to his mouth, and clenching his right hand as though it could
+not be loosed by an earthquake.  "For sure, it's a thing finished as the
+solder of a pannikin--like that."
+
+He caught up a tin quart-pot from the bar-counter and showed the soldered
+bottom of it.
+
+He was alone in the bar of Barbazon's Hotel except for one person--the
+youngest of the officials who had been retired from the offices of the
+railways when Ingolby had merged them.  This was a man who had got his
+position originally by nepotism, and represented the worst elements of a
+national life where the spoils system is rooted in the popular mind.  He
+had, however, a little residue of that discipline which, working in a
+great industrial organization, begets qualms as to extreme courses.
+
+He looked reflectively at the leaden pot and said in reply: "I'd never
+believe in anything where that Ingolby is concerned till I had it in the
+palm of my hand.  He's as deep as a well, and when he's quietest it's
+good to look out.  He takes a lot of skinning, that badger."
+
+"He's skinned this time all right," was Marchand's reply.  "To-morrow'll
+be the biggest day Manitou's had since the Indian lifted his wigwam and
+the white man put down his store.  Listen--hear them!  They're coming!"
+
+He raised a hand for silence, and a rumbling, ragged roar of voices could
+be heard without.
+
+"The crowd have gone the rounds," he continued.  "They started at
+Barbazon's and they're winding up at Barbazon's.  They're drunk enough
+to-night to want to do anything, and to-morrow when they've got sore
+heads they'll do anything.  They'll make that funeral look like a
+squeezed orange; they'll show Lebanon and Master Ingolby that we're to be
+bosses of our own show.  The strike'll be on after the funeral, and after
+the strike's begun there'll be--eh, bien sur!"
+
+He paused sharply, as though he had gone too far.  "There'll be what?"
+whispered the other; but Marchand made no reply, save to make a warning
+gesture, for Barbazon, the landlord, had entered behind the bar.
+
+"They're coming back, Barbazon," Marchand said to the landlord, jerking
+his head towards the front door.  The noise of the crowd was increasing,
+the raucous shouts were so loud that the three had to raise their voices.
+"You'll do a land-office business to-night," he declared.
+
+Barbazon had an evil face.  There were rumours that he had been in gaol
+in Quebec for robbery, and that after he had served his time he had dug
+up the money he had stolen and come West.  He had started the first
+saloon at Manitou, and had grown with the place in more senses than one.
+He was heavy and thick-set, with huge shoulders, big hands, and beady
+eyes that looked out of a stolid face where long hours, greed and vices
+other than drink had left their mark.  He never drank spirits, and was
+therefore ready to take advantage of those who did drink.  More than one
+horse and canoe and cow and ox, and acre of land, in the days when land
+was cheap, had come to him across the bar-counter.  He could be bought,
+could Barbazon, and he sold more than wine and spirits.  He had a wife
+who had left him twice because of his misdemeanours, but had returned and
+straightened out his house and affairs once again; and even when she went
+off with Lick Baldwin, a cattle-dealer, she was welcomed back without
+reproaches by Barbazon, chiefly because he had no morals, and her
+abilities were of more value to him than her virtue.  On the whole, Gros
+Barbazon was a bad lot.
+
+At Marchand's words Barbazon shrugged his shoulders.  "The more spent
+to-night, the less to spend to-morrow," he growled.
+
+"But there's going to be spending for a long time," Marchand answered.
+"There's going to be a riot to-morrow, and there's going to be a strike
+the next day, and after that there's going to be something else."
+
+"What else?" Barbazon asked, his beady eyes fastened on Marchand's face.
+
+"Something worth while-better than all the rest."  Barbazon's low
+forehead seemed to disappear almost, as he drew the grizzled shock of
+hair down, by wrinkling his forehead with a heavy frown.
+
+"It's no damn good, m'sieu'," he growled.  "Am I a fool?  They'll spend
+money to-night, and tomorrow, and the next day, and when the row is on;
+and the more they spend then, the less they'll have to spend by-and-by.
+It's no good.  The steady trade for me--all the time.  That is my idee.
+And the something else--what?  You think there's something else that'll
+be good for me?  Nom de Dieu, there's nothing you're doing, or mean to
+do, but'll hurt me and everybody."
+
+"That's your view, is it, Barbazon?" exclaimed Marchand loudly, for the
+crowd was now almost at the door.  "You're a nice Frenchman and patriot.
+That crowd'll be glad to hear you think they're fools.  Suppose they took
+it into their heads to wreck the place?"
+
+Barbazon's muddy face got paler, but his eyes sharpened, and he leaned
+over the bar-counter, and said with a snarl: "Go to hell, and say what
+you like; and then I'll have something to say about something else,
+m'sieu'."
+
+Marchand was about to reply angrily, but he instantly changed his mind,
+and before Barbazon could stop him, he sprang over the counter and
+disappeared into the office behind the bar.
+
+"I won't steal anything, Barbazon," he said over his shoulder as he
+closed the door behind him.
+
+"I'll see to that," Barbazon muttered stolidly, but with malicious eyes.
+
+The front door was flung open now, and the crowd poured into the room,
+boisterous, reckless, though some were only sullen, watchful and angry.
+These last were mostly men above middle age, and of a fanatical and
+racially bitter type.  They were not many, but in one sense they were the
+backbone and force of the crowd, probably the less intelligent but the
+more tenacious and consistent.  They were black spots of gathering storm
+in an electric atmosphere.
+
+All converged upon the bar.  Two assistants rushed the drinks along the
+counter with flourishes, while Barbazon took in the cash and sharply
+checked the rougher element, who were inclined to treat the bar as a
+place for looting.  Most of them, however, had a wholesome fear of
+Barbazon, and also most of them wished to stand well with him--credit
+was a good thing, even in a saloon.
+
+For a little time the room was packed, then some of the more restless
+spirits, their thirst assuaged, sallied forth to taste the lager and old
+rye elsewhere, and "raise Cain" in the streets.  When they went, it
+became possible to move about more freely in the big bar-room, at the end
+of which was a billiard-table.  It was notable, however, that the more
+sullen elements stayed.  Some of them were strangers to each other.
+Manitou was a distributing point for all radiations of the compass, and
+men were thrown together in its streets who only saw one another once or
+twice a year-when they went to the woods in the Fall or worked the rivers
+in the Summer.  Some were Mennonites, Doukhobors and Finlanders, some
+Swedes, Norwegians and Icelanders.  Others again were birds of passage
+who would probably never see Manitou in the future, but they were mostly
+French, and mostly Catholic, and enemies of the Orange Lodges wherever
+they were, east or west or north or south.  They all had a common ground
+of unity--half-savage coureurs-de-bois, river-drivers, railway-men,
+factory hands, cattlemen, farmers, labourers; they had a gift for
+prejudice, and taking sides on something or other was as the breath
+of the nostrils to them.
+
+The greater number of the crowd were, however, excitable, good-natured
+men, who were by instinct friendly, save when their prejudices were
+excited; and their oaths and exclamations were marvels of droll
+ingenuity.  Most of them were still too good-humoured with drink to be
+dangerous, but all hoped for trouble at the Orange funeral on principle,
+and the anticipated strike had elements of "thrill."  They were of a
+class, however, who would swing from what was good-humour to deadly anger
+in a minute, and turn a wind of mere prejudice into a hurricane of life
+and death with the tick of a clock.  They would all probably go to the
+Orange funeral to-morrow in a savage spirit.  Some of them were loud in
+denunciation of Ingolby and "the Lebanon gang"; they joked coarsely over
+the dead Orangeman, but their cheerful violence had not yet the
+appearance of reality.
+
+One man suddenly changed all that.  He was a river-driver of stalwart
+proportions, with a red handkerchief round his neck, and with loose
+corded trousers tucked into his boots.  He had a face of natural ugliness
+made almost repulsive by marks of smallpox.  Red, flabby lips and an
+overhanging brow made him a figure which men would avoid on a dark night.
+
+"Let's go over to Lebanon to-night and have it out," he said in French.
+"That Ingolby--let's go break his windows and give him a dip in the
+river.  He's the curse of this city.  Holy, once Manitou was a place to
+live in, now it's a place to die in!  The factories, the mills, they're
+full of Protes'ants and atheists and shysters; the railway office is gone
+to Lebanon.  Ingolby took it there.  Manitou was the best town in
+the West; it's no good now.  Who's the cause?  Ingolby's the cause.  Name
+of God, if he was here I'd get him by the throat as quick as winkin'."
+
+He opened and shut his fingers with spasmodic malice, and glared round
+the room.  "He's going to lock us out if we strike," he added.  "He's
+going to take the bread out of our mouths; he's going to put his heel on
+Manitou, and grind her down till he makes her knuckle to Lebanon--to a
+lot of infidels, Protes'ants, and thieves.  Who's going to stand it?  I
+say-bagosh, I say, who's going to stand it!"
+
+"He's a friend of the Monseigneur," ventured a factory-hand, who had a
+wife and children to support, and however partisan, was little ready for
+that which would stop his supplies.
+
+"Sacre bapteme!  That's part of his game," roared the big river-driver in
+reply.  "I'll take the word of Felix Marchand about that.  Look at him!
+That Felix Marchand doesn't try to take the bread out of people's mouths.
+He gives money here, he gives it there.  He wants the old town to stay as
+it is and not be swallowed up."
+
+"Three cheers for Felix Marchand !" cried some one in the throng.  All
+cheered loudly save one old man with grizzled hair and beard, who leaned
+against the wall half-way down the room smoking a corncob pipe.  He was a
+French Canadian in dress and appearance, and he spat on the floor like a
+navvy--he had filled his pipe with the strongest tobacco that one man
+ever offered to another.  As the crowd cheered for Felix Marchand, he
+made his way up towards the bar slowly.  He must have been tall when he
+was young; now he was stooped, yet there was still something very sinewy
+about him.
+
+"Who's for Lebanon?" cried the big river-driver with an oath.  "Who's
+for giving Lebanon hell, and ducking Ingolby in the river?"
+
+"I am--I am--I am--all of us!" shouted the crowd.  "It's no good waiting
+for to-morrow.  Let's get the Lebs by the scruff to-night.  Let's break
+Ingolby's windows and soak him in the Sagalac.  Allons--allons gai!"
+
+Uproar and broken sentences, threats, oaths, and objurgations sounded
+through the room.  There was a sudden movement towards the door, but the
+exit of the crowd was stopped by a slow but clear voice speaking in
+French.
+
+"Wait a minute, my friends!" it cried.  "Wait a minute.  Let's ask a few
+questions first."
+
+"Who's he?" asked a dozen voices.  "What's he going to say?"  The mob
+moved again towards the bar.
+
+The big river-driver turned on the grizzled old man beside the bar-
+counter with bent shoulders and lazy, drawling speech.
+
+"What've you got to say about it, son?" he asked threateningly.
+
+"Well, to ask a few questions first--that's all," the old man replied.
+
+"You don't belong here, old cock," the other said roughly.
+
+"A good many of us don't belong here," the old man replied quietly.  "It
+always is so.  This isn't the first time I've been to Manitou.  You're a
+river-driver, and you don't live here either," he continued.
+
+"What've you got to say about it?  I've been coming and going here for
+ten years.  I belong--bagosh, what do you want to ask?  Hurry up.  We've
+got work to do.  We're going to raise hell in Lebanon."
+
+"And give hell to Ingolby," shouted some one in the crowd.
+
+"Suppose Ingolby isn't there?" questioned the old man.
+
+"Oh, that's one of your questions, is it?" sneered the big river-driver.
+"Well, if you knew him as we do, you'd know that it's at night-time he
+sits studyin' how he'll cut Lebanon's throat.  He's home, all right.
+He's in Lebanon anyhow, and we'll find him."
+
+"Well, but wait a minute--be quiet a bit," said the old man, his eyes
+blinking slowly at the big riverdriver.  "I've been 'round a good deal,
+and I've had some experience in the world.  Did you ever give that
+Ingolby a chance to tell you what his plans were?  Did you ever get close
+to him and try to figure what he was driving at?  There's no chance of
+getting at the truth if you don't let a man state his case--but no.  If
+he can't make you see his case then is the time to jib, not before."
+
+"Oh, get out!" cried a rowdy English road-maker in the crowd.  "We know
+all right what Ingolby's after."
+
+"Eh, well, what is he after?" asked the old man looking the other in the
+eye.
+
+"What's he after?  Oof-oof-oof, that's what he's after.  He's for his own
+pocket, he's for being boss of all the woolly West.  He's after keeping
+us poor and making himself rich.  He's after getting the cinch on two
+towns and three railways, and doing what he likes with it all; and we're
+after not having him do it, you bet.  That's how it is, old hoss."
+
+The other stroked his beard with hands which, somehow, gave little
+indication of age, and then, with a sudden jerk forward of his head, he
+said: "Oh, it's like that, eh?  Is that what M'sieu' Marchand told you?
+That's what he said, is it?"
+
+The big river-driver, eager to maintain his supreme place as leader,
+lunged forward a step, and growled a challenge.
+
+"Who said it?  What does it matter if M'sieu' Marchand said it--it's
+true.  If I said it, it's true.  All of us in this room say it, and it's
+true.  Young Marchand says what Manitou says."
+
+The old man's eyes grew brighter--they were exceedingly sharp for one so
+old, and he said quite gently now:
+
+"M. Marchand said it first, and you all say it afterwards--ah, bah!  But
+listen to me; I know Max Ingolby that you think is such a villain; I know
+him well.  I knew him when he was a little boy and--"
+
+"You was his nurse, I suppose!" cried the Englishman's voice amid a roar
+of laughter.
+
+"Taught him his A-B-C-was his dear, kind teacher, eh?" hilariously cried
+another.
+
+The old man appeared not to hear.  "I have known him all the years since.
+He has only been in the West a few years, but he has lived in the world
+exactly thirty-three years.  He never willingly did anybody harm--never.
+Since he came West, since he came to the Sagalac, he's brought work to
+Lebanon and to Manitou.  There are hundreds more workmen in both the
+towns than there were when he came.  It was he made others come with much
+money and build the factories and the mills.  Work means money, money
+means bread, bread means life--so."
+
+The big river-driver, seeing the effect of the old man's words upon the
+crowd, turned to them with an angry gesture and a sneer.
+
+"I s'pose Ingolby has paid this old skeesicks for talking this swash.
+We know all right what Ingolby is, and what he's done.  He's made war
+between the two towns--there's hell to pay now on both sides of the
+Sagalac.  He took away the railway offices from here, and threw men out
+of work.  He's done harm to Manitou--he's against Manitou every time."
+
+Murmurs of approval ran through the crowd, though some were silent,
+looking curiously at the forceful and confident old man.  Even his bent
+shoulders seemed to suggest driving power rather than the weight of
+years.  He suddenly stretched out a hand in command as it were.
+
+"Comrades, comrades," he said, "every man makes mistakes.  Even if it was
+a mistake for Ingolby to take away the offices from Manitou, he's done a
+big thing for both cities by combining the three railways."
+
+"Monopoly," growled a voice from the crowd.  "Not monopoly," the old man
+replied with a ring to his voice, which made it younger, fresher.  "Not
+monopoly, but better management of the railways, with more wages, more
+money to spend on things to eat and drink and wear, more dollars in the
+pocket of everybody that works in Manitou and Lebanon.  Ingolby works,
+he doesn't loaf."
+
+"Oh, gosh all hell, he's a dynamo," shouted a voice from the crowd.
+"He's a dynamo running the whole show-eh!"
+
+The old man seemed to grow shorter, but as he thrust his shoulders
+forward, it was like a machine gathering energy and power.
+
+"I'll tell you, friends, what Ingolby is trying to do," he said in a low
+voice vibrating with that force which belongs neither to age nor youth,
+but is the permanent activity uniting all ages of a man.  "Of course,
+Ingolby is ambitious and he wants power.  He tries to do the big things
+in the world because there is the big thing to do--for sure.  Without
+such men the big things are never done, and other men have less work to
+do, and less money and poorer homes.  They discover and construct and
+design and invent and organize and give opportunities.  I am a working
+man, but I know what Ingolby thinks.  I know what men think who try to do
+the big things.  I have tried to do them."
+
+The crowd were absolutely still now, but the big river-driver shook
+himself free of the eloquence, which somehow swayed them all, and said:
+
+"You--you look as if you'd tried to do big things, you do, old skeesicks.
+I bet you never earned a hundred dollars in your life."  He turned to the
+crowd with fierce gestures.  "Let's go to Lebanon and make the place
+sing," he roared.  "Let's get Ingolby out to talk for himself, if he
+wants to talk.  We know what we want to do, and we're not going to be
+bossed.  He's for Lebanon and we're for Manitou.  Lebanon means to boss
+us, Lebanon wants to sit on us because we're Catholics, because we're
+French, because we're honest."
+
+Again a wave of revolution swept through the crowd.  The big river-driver
+represented their natural instincts, their native fanaticism, their
+prejudices.  But the old man spoke once more.
+
+"Ingolby wants Lebanon and Manitou to come together, not to fall apart,"
+he declared.  "He wants peace.  If he gets rich here he won't get rich
+alone.  He's working for both towns.  If he brings money from outside,
+that's good for both towns.  If he--"
+
+"Shut your mouth, let Ingolby speak for himself," snarled the big river-
+driver.  "Take his dollars out of your pocket and put them on the bar,
+the dollars Ingolby gives you to say all this.  Put them dollars of
+Ingolby's up for drinks, or we'll give you a jar that'll shake you, old
+wart-hog."
+
+At that instant a figure forced itself through the crowd, and broke into
+the packed circle which was drawing closer upon the old man.
+
+It was Jethro Fawe.  He flung a hand out towards the old man.
+
+"You want Ingolby--well, that's Ingolby," he shouted.
+
+Like lightning the old man straightened himself, snatched the wig and
+beard away from his head and face, and with quiet fearlessness said:
+
+"Yes, I am Ingolby."
+
+For an instant there was absolute silence, in which Ingolby weighed his
+chances.  He was among enemies.  He had meant only to move among the
+crowd to discover their attitude, to find things out for himself.  He had
+succeeded, and his belief that Manitou could be swayed in the right
+direction if properly handled, was correct.  Beneath the fanaticism and
+the racial spirit was human nature; and until Jethro Fawe had appeared,
+he had hoped to prevent violence and the collision at to-morrow's
+funeral.
+
+Now the situation was all changed.  It was hard to tell what sharp turn
+things might take.  He was about to speak, but suddenly from the crowd
+there was spat out at him the words, "Spy!  Sneak!  Spy!"
+
+Instantly the wave of feeling ran against him.  He smiled frankly,
+however, with that droll twist of his mouth which had won so many, and
+the raillery of his eyes was more friendly than any appeal.
+
+"Spy, if you like, my friends," he said firmly and clearly.  "Moses sent
+spies down into the Land of Promise, and they brought back big bunches of
+grapes.  Well, I've come down into a land of promise.  I wanted to know
+just how you all feel without being told it by some one else.  I knew if
+I came here as Max Ingolby I shouldn't hear the whole truth; I wouldn't
+see exactly how you see, so I came as one of you, and you must admit, my
+French is as good as yours almost."
+
+He laughed and nodded at them.
+
+"There wasn't one of you that knew I wasn't a Frenchman.  That's in my
+favour.  If I know the French language as I do, and can talk to you in
+French as I've done, do you think I don't understand the French people,
+and what you want and how you feel?  I'm one of the few men in the West
+that can talk your language.  I learned it when I was a boy, so that I
+might know my French fellow-countrymen under the same flag, with the same
+King and the same national hope.  As for your religion, God knows, I wish
+I was as good a Protestant as lots of you are good Catholics.  And I tell
+you this, I'd be glad to have a minister that I could follow and respect
+and love as I respect and love Monseigneur Lourde of Manitou.  I want to
+bring these two towns together, to make them a sign of what this country
+is, and what it can do; to make hundreds like ourselves in Manitou and
+Lebanon work together towards health, wealth, comfort and happiness.
+Can't you see, my friends, what I'm driving at?  I'm for peace and work
+and wealth and power--not power for myself alone, but power that belongs
+to all of us.  If I can show I'm a good man at my job, maybe better than
+others, then I have a right to ask you to follow me.  If I can't, then
+throw me out.  I tell you I'm your friend--Max Ingolby is your friend."
+
+"Spy!  Spy!  Spy!" cried a new voice.
+
+It came from behind the bar.  An instant after, the owner of the voice
+leaped up on the counter.  It was Felix Marchand.  He had entered by the
+door behind the bar into Barbazon's office.
+
+"When I was in India," Marchand cried, "I found a snake in the bed.  I
+killed it before it stung me.  There's a snake in the bed of Manitou--
+what are you going to do with it?"
+
+The men swayed, murmured, and shrill shouts of "Marchand!  Marchand!
+Marchand !" went up.  The crowd heaved upon Ingolby.  "One minute!" he
+called with outstretched arm and commanding voice.  They paused.
+Something in him made him master of them even then.
+
+At that moment two men were fiercely fighting their way through the crowd
+towards where Ingolby was.  They were Jowett and Osterhaut.  Ingolby saw
+them coming.
+
+"Go back--go back!" he called to them.
+
+Suddenly a drunken navvy standing on a table in front of and to the left
+of Ingolby seized a horseshoe hanging on the wall, and flung it with an
+oath.
+
+It caught Ingolby in the forehead, and he fell to the floor without a
+sound.
+
+A minute afterwards the bar was empty, save for Osterhaut, Jowett, old
+Barbazon, and his assistants.
+
+Barbazon and Jowett lifted the motionless figure in their arms, and
+carried it into a little room.
+
+Then Osterhaut picked up the horseshoe tied with its gay blue ribbons,
+now stained with blood, and put it in his pocket.
+
+"For luck," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE SENTENCE OF THE PATRIN
+
+Fleda waked suddenly, but without motion; just a wide opening of the eyes
+upon the darkness, and a swift beating of the heart, but not the movement
+of a muscle.  It was as though some inward monitor, some gnome of the
+hidden life had whispered of danger to her slumbering spirit.  The waking
+was a complete emergence, a vigilant and searching attention.
+
+There was something on her breast weighing it down, yet with a pressure
+which was not weight alone, and maybe was not weight at all as weight is
+understood.  Instantly there flashed through her mind the primitive
+belief that a cat will lie upon the breasts of children and suck their
+breath away.  Strange and even absurd as it was, it seemed to her that a
+cat was pressing and pressing down upon her breast.  There could be no
+mistaking the feline presence.  Now with a sudden energy of the body, she
+threw the Thing from her, and heard it drop, with the softness of feline
+feet, on the Indian rug upon the floor.
+
+Then she sprang out of bed, and, feeling for the matches, lit a candle on
+the small table beside her bed, and moved it round searching for what she
+thought to be a cat.  It was not to be seen.  She looked under the bed;
+it was not there: under the washstand, under the chest of drawers, under
+the improvised dressing-table; and no cat was to be found.  She 173
+looked under the chair over which hung her clothes, even behind the
+dresses and the Indian deerskin cape hanging on the door.
+
+There was no life of any kind save her own in the room, so far as she
+could see.  She laughed nervously, though her heart was still beating
+hard.  That it should beat hard was absurd, for what had she to fear--she
+who had lived the wild open-air life of many lands, had slept among hills
+infested by animals the enemy of man, and who when a little girl had
+faced beasts of prey alone.  Yet here in her own safe room on the
+Sagalac, with its four walls, but its unlocked doors--for Gabriel Druse
+said that he could not bear that last sign of his exile--here in the
+fortress of the town-dweller there was a strange trembling of her pulses
+in the presence of a mere hallucination or nightmare--the first she had
+had ever.  Her dreams in the past had always been happy and without the
+black fancies of nightmare.  On the night that Jethro Fawe had first
+confronted her father and herself, and he had been carried to the hut in
+the Wood, her sleep had been disturbed and restless, but dreamless; in
+her sleep on the night of the day of his release, she had been tossed
+upon vague clouds of mental unrest; but that was the first really
+disordered sleep she had ever known.
+
+Holding the candle above her head, she looked in the mirror on her
+dressing-table, and laughed nervously at the shocked look in her eyes,
+at the hand pressed upon the bosom whose agitations troubled the delicate
+linen at her breast.  The pale light of the candle, the reflection from
+the white muslin of her dressing-table and her nightwear, the strange,
+deep darkness of her eyes, the ungathered tawny hair falling to her
+shoulders, gave an unusual paleness to her face.
+
+"What a ninny I am!" she said aloud as she looked at herself, her tongue
+chiding her apprehensive eyes, her laugh contemptuously adding its
+comment on her tremulousness.  "It was a real nightmare--a waking
+nightmare, that's what it was."
+
+She searched the room once more, however-every corner, under the bed, the
+chest of drawers and the dressing-table, before she got into bed again,
+her feet icily cold.  And yet again before settling down she looked
+round, perplexed and inquiring.  Placing the matches beside the
+candlestick, she blew out the light.  Then, half-turning on her side with
+her face to the wall, she composed herself to sleep.
+
+Resolutely putting from her mind any sense of the supernatural, she shut
+her eyes with confidence of coming sleep.  While she was, however, still
+within the borders of wakefulness, and wholly conscious, she felt the
+Thing jump from the floor upon her legs, and crouch there with that
+deadening pressure which was not weight.  Now with a start of anger she
+raised herself, and shot out a determined hand to seize the Thing,
+whatever it was.  Her hand grasped nothing, and again she distinctly
+heard a soft thud as of something jumping on the floor.  Exasperated, she
+drew herself out of bed, lit the candle again, and began another search.
+Nothing was to be seen; but she had now the curious sense of an unseen
+presence.  She went to the door, opened it, and looked out into the
+narrow hall.  Nothing was to be seen there.  Then she closed the door
+again, and stood looking at it meditatively for a moment.  It had a lock
+and key; yet it had never been locked in the years they had lived on the
+Sagalac.  She did not know whether the key would turn in the lock.  After
+a moment's hesitation, she shrugged her shoulders and turned the key.  It
+rasped, proved stubborn, but at last came home with a click.  Then she
+turned to the window.  It was open about three inches at the bottom.  She
+closed it tight, and fastened it, then stood for a moment in the middle
+of the room looking at both door and window.
+
+She was conscious of a sense of suffocation.  Never in her life had she
+slept with door or window or tentflap entirely closed.  Never before had
+she been shut in all night behind closed doors and sealed windows.  Now,
+as the sense of imprisonment was felt, her body protested; her spirit
+resented the funereal embrace of security.  It panted for the freedom
+which gives the challenge to danger and the courage to face it.
+
+She went to the window and opened it slightly at the top, and then sought
+her bed again; but even as she lay down, something whispered to her mind
+that it was folly to lock the door and yet leave the window open, if it
+was but an inch.  With an exclamation of self-reproach, and a vague
+indignation at something, she got up and closed the window once more.
+
+Again she composed herself to sleep, lying now with her face turned to
+the window and the door.  She was still sure that she had been the victim
+of a hallucination which, emerging from her sleep, had invaded the
+borders of wakefulness, and then had reproduced itself in a waking
+illusion--an imitation of its original existence.
+
+Resolved to conquer any superstitious feeling, she invoked sleep, and was
+on its borders once more when she was startled more violently than
+before.
+
+The Thing had sprung again upon her feet and was crouched there.  Wide
+awake, she waited for a moment to make sure that she was not mad, or that
+she was not asleep or in a half-dream.  In the pause, she felt the Thing
+draw up towards her knees, dragging its body along with tiger-like
+closeness, and with that strange pressure which was not weight but power.
+
+With a cry which was no longer doubt, but agonized apprehension, she
+threw the Thing from her with a motion of both hands and feet; and, as
+she did so, she felt a horrible cold air breathing from a bloodless body,
+chill her hand.
+
+In another instant she was on her feet again.  With shaking fingers she
+lighted the candle yet once more, after which she lighted a lamp standing
+upon the chest of drawers.  The room was almost brilliantly bright now.
+With a gesture of incredulity she looked round.  The doors and windows
+were sealed tight, and there was nothing to be seen; yet she was more
+than ever conscious of a presence grown more manifest.  For a moment she
+stood staring straight before her at the place where it seemed to be.
+She realized its malice and its hatred, and an intense anger and hatred
+took possession of her.  She had always laughed at such things even when
+thrilled by wonder and manufactured terrors.  But now there was a sense
+of conflict, of evil, of the indefinable things in which so many
+believed.
+
+Suddenly she remembered an ancient Sage of her tribe, who, proficient in
+mysteries and secret rites gathered from nations as old as Phoenicia and
+Egypt and as modern as Switzerland, held the Romanys of the world in awe,
+for his fame had travelled where he could not follow.  To Fleda in her
+earliest days he had been like one inspired, and as she now stood facing
+the intangible Thing, she recalled an exorcism which the Sage had recited
+to her, when he had sufficiently startled her senses by tales of the
+Between World.  This exorcism was, as he had told her, more powerful than
+that which the Christian exorcists used, and the symbol of exorcism was
+not unlike the sign of the Cross, to which was added genuflection of
+Assyrian origin.
+
+At any other time Fleda would have laughed at the idea of using the
+exorcism; but all the ancient superstition of the Romany people latent in
+her now broke forth and held her captive.  Standing with candle raised
+above her head, her eyes piercing the space before her, she recalled
+every word of the exorcism which had caught the drippings from the
+fountains of Chaldean, Phoenician, and Egyptian mystery.
+
+Solemnly and slowly the exorcism came from her lips, and at the end her
+right hand made the cabalistic sign; then she stood like one transfixed
+with her arm extended towards the Thing she could not see.
+
+Presently there passed from her a sense of oppression.  The air seemed to
+grow lighter, restored self-possession came; there was a gentle breathing
+in the room like that of a sleeping child.  It was a moment before she
+realized that the breathing was her own, and she looked round her like
+one who had come out of a trance.
+
+"It is gone," she said aloud.  "It is gone."  A great sigh came from her.
+
+Mechanically she put down the candle, smoothed the pillows of her bed,
+adjusted the coverings, and prepared to lie down; but, with a sudden
+impulse, she turned to the window and the door.
+
+"It is gone," she said again.  With a little laugh of hushed triumph, she
+turned and made again the cabalistic sign at the bed, where the Thing had
+first assaulted her, and then at that point in the room near the door
+where she had felt it crouching.
+
+"Oh, Ewie Gal," she added, speaking to that Romany Sage long since laid
+to rest in the Roumelian country, "you did not talk to me for nothing.
+You were right--yes, you were right, old Ewie Gal.  It was there,"--she
+looked again at the place where the Thing had been--"and your curse drove
+it away."
+
+With confidence she went to the door and unlocked it.  Going to the
+window she opened it also, but she compromised sufficiently to open it
+at the top instead of at the bottom.  Presently she laid her head on her
+pillow with a sigh of content.
+
+Once again she composed herself to sleep in the darkness.  But now there
+came other invasions, other disturbers of the night.  In her imagination
+a man came who had held her in his arms one day on the Sagalac River, who
+had looked into her eyes with a masterful but respectful tenderness.  As
+she neared the confines of sleep, he was somehow mingled with visions of
+things which her childhood had known--moonlit passes in the Bosnian,
+Roumelian, and Roumanian hills, green fields by the Danube, with peasant
+voices drowsing in song before the lights went out; a gallop after dun
+deer far away up the Caspian mountains, over waste places, carpeted with
+flowers after a benevolent rain; mornings in Egypt, when the camels
+thudded and slid with melancholy ease through the sands of the desert,
+while the Arab drivers called shrilly for Allah to curse or bless; a
+tender sunset in England seen from the top of a castle when all the
+western sky was lightly draped with saffron, gold and mauve and delicate
+green and purple.
+
+Now she slept again, with the murmur of the Sagalac in her ears, and
+there was a smile at her lips.  If one could have seen her through the
+darkness, one would have said that she was like some wild creature of a
+virgin world, whom sleep had captured and tamed; for, behind the
+refinement which education and the vigilant influence with which Madame
+Bulteel had surrounded her, there was in her the spirit of primitive
+things: of the open road and the wilderness, of the undisciplined and
+vagrant life, however marked by such luxury as the ruler of all the
+Romanys could buy and use in pilgrimage.  There was that in her which
+would drag at her footsteps in this new life.
+
+For a full hour or more she slept, then there crept through the fantasies
+of sleep something that did not belong to sleep--again something from the
+wakeful world, strange, alien, troubling.  At first it was only as though
+a wind stirred the air of dreams, then it was like the sounds that gather
+behind the coming rage of a storm, and again it was as though a night-
+prowler plucked at the sleeve of a home-goer.  Presently, with a stir of
+fright and a smothered cry, she waked to a sound which was not of the
+supernatural or of the mind's illusions, but no less dreadful to her
+because of that.  In some cryptic way it was associated with the direful
+experience through which she had just passed.
+
+What she heard in the darkness was a voice which sang there by her
+window--at it or beneath it--the words of a Romany song.
+
+It was a song of violence, which she had heard but a short time before in
+the trees behind her father's house, when a Romany claimed her as his
+wife:
+
+                   "Time was I went to my true love,
+                    Time was she came to me--"
+
+Only one man would sing that song at her window, or anywhere in this
+Western world.  This was no illusion of her overwrought senses.  There,
+outside her window, was Jethro Fawe.
+
+She sat up and listened, leaning on one arm, and staring into the half-
+darkness beyond the window, the blind of which she had not drawn down.
+There was no moon, but the stars were shining brightly, relieving the
+intensity of the dark.  Through the whispering of the trees, and hushing
+the melancholy of a night-bird's song, came the wild low note of the
+Romany epic of vengeance.  It had a thrill of exultation.  Something in
+the voice, insistent, vibrating, personal, made every note a thrust of
+victory.  In spite of her indignation at the insolent serenade, she
+thrilled; for the strain of the Past was in her, and it had been fighting
+with her all night, breaking in upon the Present, tugging at the cords of
+youth.
+
+The man's daring roused her admiration, even as her anger mounted.  If
+her father heard the singing, there could be no doubt that Jethro Fawe's
+doom would be sealed.  Gabriel Druse would resent this insolence to the
+daughter of the Ry of Rys.  Word would be passed as silently as the
+electric spark flies, and one day Jethro Fawe would be found dead, with
+no clue to his slayer, and maybe no sign of violence upon him; for while
+the Romany people had remedies as old as Buddha, they had poisons as old
+as Sekhet.
+
+Suddenly the song ceased, and for a moment there was silence save for the
+whispering trees and the night-bird's song.  Fleda rose from her bed, and
+was about to put on her dressing-gown, when she was startled by a voice
+loudly whispering her name at her window, as it seemed.
+
+
+"Daughter of the Ry of Rys !" it called.
+
+In anger she started forward to the window, then, realizing that she was
+in her nightgown, caught up her red dressing-gown and put it on.  As she
+did so she understood why the voice had sounded so near.  Not thirty feet
+from her window there was a solitary oak-tree among the pines, in which
+was a seat among the branches, and, looking out, she could see a figure
+that blackened the starlit duskiness.
+
+"Fleda--daughter of the Ry of Rys," the voice called again.
+
+She gathered her dressing-gown tight about her, and, going to the window,
+raised it high and leaned out.
+
+"What do you want?" she asked sharply.
+
+"Wife of Jethro Fawe, I bring you news," the voice said, and she saw a
+hat waved with mock courtesy.  In spite of herself, Fleda felt a shiver
+of premonition pass through her.  The Thing which had threatened her in
+the night seemed to her now like the soul of this dark spirit in the
+trees.
+
+Resentment seized her.  "I have news for you, Jethro Fawe," she replied.
+"I set you free, and I gave my word that no harm should come to you, if
+you went your ways and did not come again.  You have come, and I shall do
+nothing now to save you from the Ry's anger.  Go at once, or I will wake
+him."
+
+"Will a wife betray her husband?" he asked in soft derision.
+
+Stung by his insolence, "I would not throw a rope to you, if you were
+drowning," she declared.  "I am a Gorgio, and the thing that was done by
+the Starzke River is nothing to me.  Now, go."
+
+"You have forgotten my news," he said: "It is bad news for the Gorgio
+daughter of the Romany Ry."  She was silent in apprehension.  He waited,
+but she did not speak.
+
+"The Gorgio of Gorgios of the Sagalac has had a fall," he said.
+
+Her heart beat fast for an instant, and then the presentiment came to her
+that the man spoke the truth.  In the presence of the accomplished thing,
+she became calm.
+
+"What has happened?" she asked quietly.
+
+"He went prowling in Manitou, and in Barbazon's Tavern they struck him
+down."
+
+"Who struck him down?" she asked.  It seemed to her that the night-bird
+sang so loud that she could scarcely hear her own voice.
+
+"A drunken Gorgio," he replied.  "The horseshoe is for luck all the world
+over, and it brought its luck to Manitou to-night.  It struck down a
+young Master Gorgio who in white beard and long grey hair went spying."
+
+She knew in her heart that he spoke the truth.  "He is dead?" she asked
+in a voice that had a strange quietness.
+
+"Not yet," he answered.  "There is time to wish him luck."
+
+She heard the ribald laugh with a sense of horror and loathing.  "The
+hand that brought him down may have been the hand of a Gorgio, but behind
+the hand was Jethro Fawe," she said in a voice grown passionate again.
+"Where is he?" she added.
+
+"At his own house.  I watched them take him there.  It is a nice house--
+good enough for a Gorgio house-dweller.  I know it well.  Last night I
+played his Sarasate fiddle for him there, and I told him all about you
+and me, and what happened at Starzke, and then--"
+
+"You told him I was a Romany, that I was married to you?" she asked in a
+low voice.
+
+"I told him that, and asked him why he thought you had deceived him, had
+held from him the truth.  He was angry and tried to kill me."
+
+"That is a lie," she answered.  "If he had tried to kill you he would
+have done so."
+
+Suddenly she realized the situation as it was--that she was standing at
+her window in the night, scantily robed, talking to a man in a tree
+opposite her window; and that the man had done a thing which belonged to
+the wild places which she had left so far behind.
+
+It flashed into her mind--what would Max Ingolby think of such a thing?
+She flushed.  The new Gorgio self of her flushed, and yet the old Romany
+self, the child of race and heredity had taken no exact account of the
+strangeness of this situation.  It had not seemed unnatural.  Even if he
+had been in her room itself, she would have felt no tithe of the shame
+that she felt now in asking herself what the Master Gorgio would think,
+if he knew.  It was not that she had less modesty, that any stir of sex
+was in her veins where the Romany chal was concerned; but in the life she
+had once lived less delicate cognizance was taken of such things, and
+something of it stayed.
+
+"Listen," Jethro said with sudden lowering of the voice, and imparting
+into his tones an emotion which was in part an actor's gift, but also in
+large degree a passion now eating at his heart, "you are my wife by all
+the laws of our people.  Nothing can change it.  I have waited for you,
+and I will wait, but you shall be mine in the end.  You see to-night--
+'Mi Duvel', you see that fate is with me!  The Gorgio has bewitched you.
+He goes down to-night in that tavern there by the hand of a Gorgio, and
+the Romany has his revenge.  Fate is always with me, and I will be the
+gift of the gods to the woman that takes me.  The luck is mine always.
+It will be always with me.  I am poor to-day, I shall be rich to-morrow.
+I was rich, and I lost it all; and I was poor, and became rich again.
+Ah, yes, there are ways!  Sometimes it is a Government, sometimes a
+prince that wants to know, and Jethro Fawe, the Romany, finds it out, and
+money fills his pockets.  I am here, poor, because last year when I lost
+all, I said, 'It is because my Romany lass is not with me.  I have not
+brought her to my tan, but when she comes then the gold will be here as
+before, and more when it is wanted.'  So, I came, and I hear the road
+calling, and all the camping places over all the world, and I see the
+patrins in every lane, and my heart is lifted up.  I am glad.  I rejoice.
+My heart burns with love.  I will forget everything, and be true to the
+queen of my soul.  Men die, and Gabriel Druse, he will die one day, and
+when the time comes, then it would be that you and I would beckon, and
+all the world would come to us."
+
+He stretched out a hand to her in the half-darkness.  "I send the blood
+of my heart to you," he continued.  "I am a son of kings.  Fleda,
+daughter of the Ry of Rys, come to me.  I have been bad, but I can be
+good.  I have killed, but I will live at peace.  I have cursed, but I
+will speak the word of blessing.  I have trespassed, but I will keep to
+my own, if you will come to me."
+
+Suddenly he dropped to the ground, lighting on his feet like an animal
+with a soft rebound.  Stretching up his arms, he made soft murmuring of
+endearment.
+
+She had listened, fascinated in spite of herself by the fire and meaning
+of his words.  She felt that in most part it was true, that it was meant;
+and, whatever he was, he was yet a man offering his heart and life,
+offering a love that she despised, and yet which was love and passion of
+a kind.  It was a passion natural to the people from whom she came, and
+to such as Jethro Fawe it was something more than sensual longing and the
+aboriginal desire of possession.  She realized it, and was not wholly
+revolted by it, even while her mind was fleeing to where the Master
+Gorgio lay wounded, it might be unto death; even while she knew that this
+man before her, by some means, had laid Ingolby low.  She was all at once
+a human being torn by contending forces.
+
+Jethro's drop to the ground broke the sudden trance into which his words
+had thrown her.  She shook herself as with an effort of control.  Then
+leaning over the window-sill, and, looking down at him, now grown so
+distinct that she could see his features, her eyes having become used to
+the half-light of the approaching dawn, she said with something almost
+like gentleness:
+
+"Once more I say, you must go and come no more.  You are too far off from
+me.  You belong to that which is for the ignorant, or the low, the
+vicious and the bad.  Behind the free life of the Romany is only the
+thing that the beasts of the field have.  I have done with it for ever.
+Find a Romany who will marry you.  As for me, I would rather die than do
+so, and I should die before it could come to pass.  If you stay here
+longer I will call the Ry."
+
+Presently the feeling that he had been responsible for the disaster to
+Ingolby came upon her with great force, and as suddenly as she had
+softened towards this man she hardened again.
+
+"Go, before there comes to you the death you deserve," she added, and
+turned away.
+
+At that moment footsteps sounded near, and almost instantly there emerged
+from a pathway which made a short cut to the house, the figure of old
+Gabriel Druse.  They had not heard him till he was within a few feet of
+where Jethro Fawe stood.  His walking had been muffled in the dust of the
+pathway.
+
+The Ry started when he saw Jethro Fawe; then he made a motion as though
+he would seize the intruder, who was too dumbfounded to flee; but he
+recovered himself, and gazed up at the open window.
+
+"Fleda!" he called.
+
+She came to the window again.
+
+"Has this man come here against your will?" he asked, not as though
+seeking information, but confirmation of his own understanding.
+
+"He is not here by my will," she answered.  "He came to sing the Song of
+Hate under my window, to tell me that he had--"
+
+"That I had brought the Master Gorgio to the ground," said Jethro, who
+now stood with sullen passiveness looking at Gabriel Druse.
+
+"From the Master Gorgio, as you call him, I have just come," returned the
+old man.  "When I heard the news, I went to him.  It was you who betrayed
+him to the mob, and--"
+
+"Wait, wait," Fleda cried in agitation.  "Is--is he dead?"
+
+"He is alive, but terribly hurt; and he may die," was the reply.
+
+Then the old man turned to the Romany with a great anger and
+determination in his face.  He stretched out an arm, making a sign as
+cabalistic as that which Fleda had used against her invisible foe in the
+bedroom.
+
+"Go, Jethro Fawe of all the Fawes," he said.  "Go, and may no patrins
+mark your road!"
+
+Jethro Fawe shrank back, and half raised his arm, as though to fend
+himself from a blow.
+
+The patrin is the clue which Gipsies leave behind them on the road they
+go, that other Gipsies who travel in it may know they have gone before.
+It may be a piece of string, a thread of wool, a twig, or in the dust the
+ancient cross of the Romany, which preceded the Christian cross and
+belonged to the Assyrian or Phoenician world.  The invocation that no
+patrins shall mark the road of a Romany is to make him an outcast, and
+for the Ry of Rys to utter the curse is sentence of death upon a Romany,
+for thenceforward every hand of his race is against him, free to do him
+harm.
+
+It was that which made Jethro Fawe shrink and cower for a moment.  Fleda
+raised her hand suddenly in protest to Gabriel Druse.
+
+"No, no, not that," Fleda murmured brokenly to her father, with eyes that
+looked the pain and horror she felt.  Though she repudiated the bond by
+which the barbarian had dared to call her wife, she heard an inner voice
+that said to her: "What was done by the Starzke River was the seal of
+blood and race, and this man must be nearer than the stranger, dearer
+than the kinsman, forgiven of his crimes like a brother, saved from
+shame, danger or death when she who was sealed to him can save him."
+
+She shuddered as she heard the inner voice.  She felt that this Other
+Self of her, the inner-seeing soul which had the secret of the far paths,
+had spoken truly.  Even as she begged her father to withdraw the
+sentence, it flashed into her mind that the grim Thing of the night was
+the dark spirit of hatred between Jethro Fawe and the Master Gorgio
+seeking embodiment, as though Jethro's evil soul detached itself from his
+body to persecute her.
+
+At her appeal, Jethro raised his head.  His courage came back, the old
+insolent self-possession took hold of him again.  The sentence which the
+Ry had passed was worse than death (and it meant death, too), for it made
+him an outcast from his people, and to be outcast was to be thrown into
+the abyss.  It was as though a man without race or country was banished
+into desolate space.  In a vague way he felt its full significance, and
+the shadow of it fell on him.
+
+"No, no, no," Fleda repeated hoarsely, with that new sense of
+responsibility where Jethro was concerned.
+
+Jethro's eyes were turned upon her now.  In the starlit night, just
+yielding to the dawn, she could faintly see his burning look, could feel,
+as it were, his hands reach out to claim her; and she felt that while he
+lived she was not wholly free.  She realized that the hand of nomad,
+disorderly barbarism was dragging her with a force which was inhuman, or,
+maybe, superhuman.
+
+Gabriel Druse could know nothing of the elements fighting in his
+daughter's soul; he only knew that her interest in the Master Gorgio was
+one he had never seen before, and that she abhorred the Romany who had
+brought Ingolby low.  He had shut his eyes to the man's unruliness and
+his daughter's intervention to free him; but now he was without pity.  He
+had come from Ingolby's bedside, and had been told a thing which shook
+his rugged nature to its centre--a thing sad as death itself, which he
+must tell his daughter.
+
+To Fleda's appeal he turned a stony face.  There was none of that rage in
+his words which had marked the scene when Jethro Fawe first came to claim
+what he could not have.  There was something in him now more deadly and
+inevitable.  It made him like some figure of mythology, implacable,
+fateful.  His great height, his bushy beard and stormy forehead, the eyes
+over which shaggy eyebrows hung like the shrubs on a cliff-edge, his face
+lined and set like a thing in bronze--all were signs of a power which, in
+passion, would be like that of OEdipus: in the moment of justice or doom
+would, with unblinking eyes, slay and cast aside as debris is tossed upon
+the dust-heap.
+
+As he spoke now his voice was toneless.  His mind was flint, and his
+tongue was but the flash of the flint.  He looked at his daughter for a
+moment with no light of fatherhood in his face, then turned from her to
+Jethro Fawe with slow decision and a gesture of authority.  His eyes
+fastened on the face of the son of Lemuel Fawe, as though it was that
+old enemy himself.
+
+"I have said what I have said, and there is no more to be spoken.  The
+rule of the Ry will be as water for ever after if these things may be
+done to him and his.  For generations have the Rys of all the Rys been
+like the trees that bend only to the whirlwind; and when they speak there
+is no more to be said.  When it ceases to be so, then the Rys will vanish
+from the world, and be as stubble of the field ready for the burning.  I
+have spoken.  Go!  And no patrins shall lie upon your road."
+
+A look of savage obedience and sullen acquiescence came into Jethro
+Fawe's face, and he took off his hat as one who stands in the presence of
+his master.  The strain of generations, the tradition of the race without
+a country was stronger than the revolt in his soul.  He was young, his
+blood was hot and brawling in his veins, he was all carnal, with the
+superior intelligence of the trained animal, but custom was stronger than
+all.  He knew now that whatever he might do, some time, not far, his doom
+would fall upon him suddenly, as a wind shoots up a ravine from the
+desert, or a nightbird rises from the dark.
+
+He set his feet stubbornly, and raised his sullen face and fanatical
+eyes.  The light of morning was creeping through the starshine, and his
+features showed plainly.
+
+"I am your daughter's husband," he said.  "Nothing can change that.  It
+was done by the River Starzke, and it was the word of the Ry of Rys.  It
+stands for ever.  There is no divorce except death for the Romany."
+
+"The patrins cease to mark the way," returned the old man with a swift
+gesture.  "The divorce of death will come."
+
+Jethro's face grew still paler, and he opened his lips to speak, but
+paused, seeing Fleda, with a backward look of pity and of horror, draw
+back into the darkness of her room.
+
+He made a motion of passion and despair.  His voice was almost shrill
+when he spoke.  "Till that divorce comes, the daughter of the Ry of Rys
+is mine!" he cried sharply.  "I will not give my wife to a Gorgio thief.
+His hands shall not caress her, his eyes shall not feed upon her--"
+
+"His eyes will not feed upon her," interrupted the old man, "So cease
+the prattle which can alter nothing.  Begone."
+
+For a moment Jethro Fawe stood like one who did not understand what was
+said to him, but suddenly a look of triumph and malice came into his
+face, and his eyes lighted with a reckless fire.  He threw back his head,
+and laughed with a strange, offensive softness.  Then, waving a hand to
+the window from which Fleda had gone, he swung his cap on his head and
+plunged into the trees.
+
+A moment afterwards his voice came back exultingly, through the morning
+air:
+
+              "But a Gorgio sleeps 'neath the greenwood tree
+               He'll broach my tan no more:
+               And my love, she sleeps afar from me
+               But near to the churchyard door."
+
+As the old man turned heavily towards the house, and opened the outer
+door, Fleda met him.
+
+"What did you mean when you said that Ingolby's eyes would not feed upon
+me?" she asked in a low tone of fear.
+
+A look of compassion came into the old man's face.  He took her hand.
+
+"Come and I will tell you," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+"LET THERE BE LIGHT"
+
+In Ingolby's bedroom, on the night of the business at Barbazon's Tavern,
+Dr. Rockwell received a shock.  His face, naturally colourless, was
+almost white, and his eyes were moist.  He had what the West called
+nerve.  That the crisis through which he had passed was that of a
+friend's life did not lessen the poignancy of the experience.  He had a
+singularly reserved manner and a rare economy of words; also, he had the
+refinement and distinction of one who had, oforetime, moved on the higher
+ranges of social life.  He was always simply and comfortably and in a
+sense fashionably dressed, yet there was nothing of the dude about him,
+and his black satin tie gave him an air of old-worldishness which somehow
+compelled an extra amount of respect.  This, in spite of the fact that he
+had been known as one who had left the East and come into the wilds
+because of a woman not his wife.
+
+It was not, however, strictly true to say that he had come West because
+of a woman, for it was on account of three women, who by sudden
+coincidence or collusion sprang a situation from which the only relief
+was flight.  In that he took refuge, not because he was a coward, but
+because it was folly to fight a woman, or three women, and because it was
+the only real solution of an ungovernable situation.  At first he had
+drifted from one town to another, dissolute and reckless, apparently
+unable to settle down, or to forget the unwholesome three.  But one day
+there was a terrible railway accident on a construction train, and
+Lebanon and Manitou made a call upon his skill, and held him in bondage
+to his profession for one whole month.  During this time he performed two
+operations which the surgeons who had been sent out by the Railway
+Directors at Montreal declared were masterpieces.
+
+When that month was up he was a changed man, and he opened an office in
+Lebanon.  Men trusted him despite his past, and women learned that there
+was never a moment when his pulses beat unevenly in their presence.
+Nathan Rockwell had had his lesson and it was not necessary to learn it
+again.  To him, woman, save as a subject of his skill, was a closed book.
+He regarded them as he regarded himself, with a kindly cynicism.  He
+never forgot that his own trouble could and would have been avoided had
+it not been for woman's vanity and consequent cruelty.  The unwholesome
+three had shared his moral lapse with wide-open eyes, and were in no
+sense victims of his; but, disregarding their responsibility, they had,
+from sheer jealousy, wrecked his past, and, to their own surprise, had
+wrecked themselves as well.  They were of those who act first and then
+think--too late.
+
+Thus it was that both men and women called Rockwell a handsome man, but
+thought of him as having only a crater of exhausted fires in place of a
+heart.  They came to him with their troubles--even the women of Manitou
+who ought to have gone to the priest.
+
+He moved about Lebanon as one who had authority, and desired not to use
+it; as one to whom life was like a case in surgery to be treated with
+scientific, coolness, with humanity, but not with undue sympathy; yet the
+early morning of the day after Ingolby had had his accident at Barbazon's
+Hotel found him the slave of an emotion which shook him from head to
+foot.  He had saved his friend's life by a most skilful operation, but he
+had been shocked beyond control when, an hour after the operation was
+over, and consciousness returned to the patient in the brilliantly
+lighted room, Ingolby said:
+
+"Why don't you turn on the light?"
+
+It was thus Rockwell knew that the Master Man, the friend of Lebanon and
+Manitou, was stone blind.  When Ingolby's voice ceased, a horrified
+silence filled the room for a moment.  Even Jim Beadle, his servant,
+standing at the foot of the bed, clapped a hand to his mouth to stop a
+cry, and the nurse turned as white as the apron she wore.
+
+Dumbfounded as Rockwell was, with instant professional presence of mind
+he said:
+
+"No, Ingolby, you must be kept in darkness a while yet."  Then he whipped
+out a silk handkerchief from his pocket.  "We will have light," he
+continued, "but we must bandage you first to keep out the glare and
+prevent pain.  The nerves of the eyes have been injured."
+
+Hastily and tenderly he bound the handkerchief round the sightless eyes.
+Having done so, he said to the nurse with unintentional quotation from
+the Gospel of St. John, and a sad irony: "Let there be light."
+
+It all gave him time to pull himself together and prepare for the moment
+when he must tell Ingolby the truth.  In one sense the sooner it was told
+the better, lest Ingolby should suddenly discover it for himself.
+Surprise and shock must be avoided.  So now he talked in his low,
+soothing voice, telling Ingolby that the operation had put him out of
+danger, that the pain now felt came chiefly from the nerves of the eye,
+and that quiet and darkness were necessary.  He insisted on Ingolby
+keeping silent, and he gave a mild opiate which induced several hours'
+sleep.
+
+During this time Rockwell prepared himself for the ordeal which must be
+passed as soon as possible; gave all needed directions, and had a
+conference with the assistant Chief Constable to whom he confided the
+truth.  He suggested plans for preserving order in excited Lebanon, which
+was determined to revenge itself on Manitou; and he gave some careful and
+specific instructions to Jowett the horse-dealer.  Also, he had conferred
+with Gabriel Druse, who had helped bear the injured man to his own home.
+He had noted with admiration the strange gentleness of the giant Romany
+as he, alone, carried Ingolby in his arms, and laid him on the bed from
+which he was to rise with all that he had fought for overthrown, himself
+the blind victim of a hard fate.  He had noticed the old man straighten
+himself with a spring and stand as though petrified when Ingolby said:
+"Why don't you turn on the light?"  As he looked round in that instant of
+ghastly silence he had observed almost mechanically that the old man's
+lips were murmuring something.  Then the thought of Fleda Druse shot into
+Rockwell's mind, and it harassed him during the hours Ingolby slept, and
+after the giant Gipsy had taken his departure just before the dawn.
+
+"I'm afraid it will mean more there than anywhere else," he said sadly to
+himself.  "There was evidently something between those two; and she isn't
+the kind to take it philosophically.  Poor girl!  Poor girl!  It's a
+bitter dose, if there was anything in it," he added.
+
+He watched beside the sick-bed till the dawn stared in and his patient
+stirred and waked, then he took Ingolby's hand, grown a little cooler,
+in both his own.  "How are you feeling, old man?" he asked cheerfully.
+"You've had a good sleep-nearly three and a half hours.  Is the pain in
+the head less?"
+
+"Better, Sawbones, better," Ingolby replied cheerfully.  "They've
+loosened the tie that binds--begad, it did stretch the nerves.  I had
+gripes of colic once, but the pain I had in my head was twenty times
+worse, till you gave the opiate."
+
+"That's the eyes," said Rockwell.  "I had to lift a bit of bone, and the
+eyes saw it and felt it, and cried out-shrieked, you might say.  They've
+got a sensitiveness all their own, have the eyes."
+
+"It's odd there aren't more accidents to them," answered Ingolby--"just a
+little ball of iridescent pulp with strings tied to the brain."
+
+"And what hurts the head may destroy the eyes sometimes," Rockwell
+answered cautiously.  "We know so little of the delicate union between
+them, that we can't be sure we can put the eyes right again when, because
+of some blow to the head, the ricochet puts the eyes out of commission."
+
+"That's what's the matter with me, then?" asked Ingolby, feeling the
+bandage on his eyes feverishly, and stirring in his bed with a sense of
+weariness.
+
+"Yes, the ricochet got them, and has put them out of commission," replied
+Rockwell, carefully dwelling upon each word, and giving a note of meaning
+to his tone.
+
+Ingolby raised himself in bed, but Rockwell gently forced him down again.
+"Will my eyes have to be kept bandaged long?  Shall I have to give up
+work for any length of time?" Ingolby asked.
+
+"Longer than you'll like," was the enigmatical reply.  "It's the devil's
+own business," was the weary answer.  "Every minute's valuable to me now.
+I ought to be on deck morning, noon, and night.  There's all the trouble
+between the two towns; there's the strike on hand; there's that business
+of the Orange funeral, and more than all a thousand times, there's--"
+he paused.
+
+He was going to say, "There's that devil Marchand's designs on my
+bridge," but he thought better of it and stopped.  It had been his
+intention to deal with Marchand directly, to get a settlement of their
+differences without resort to the law, to prevent the criminal act
+without deepening a feud which might keep the two towns apart for years.
+Bad as Marchand was, to prevent his crime was far better than punishing
+him for it afterwards.  To have Marchand arrested for conspiracy to
+commit a crime was a business which would gravely interfere with his
+freedom of motion in the near future, would create complications which
+might cripple his own purposes in indirect ways.  That was why he had
+declared to Jowett that even Felix Marchand had his price, and that he
+would try negotiations first.
+
+But what troubled him now, as he lay with eyes bandaged and a knowledge
+that to-morrow was the day fixed for the destruction of the bridge, was
+his own incapacity.  It was unlikely that his head or his eyes would be
+right by to-morrow, or that Rockwell would allow him to get up.  He felt
+in his own mind that the injury he had received was a serious one, and
+that the lucky horseshoe had done Maxchand's work for him all too well.
+This thought shook him.  Rockwell could see his chest heave with an
+excitement gravely injurious to his condition; yet he must be told the
+worst, or the shock of discovery by himself that he was blind might give
+him brain fever.  Rockwell felt that he must hasten the crisis.
+
+"Rockwell," Ingolby suddenly asked, "is there any chance of my discarding
+this and getting out to-morrow?"  He touched the handkerchief round his
+eyes.  "It doesn't matter about the head bandages, but the eyes--can't I
+slough the wraps to-morrow?  I feel scarcely any pain now."
+
+"Yes, you can get rid of the bandages to-morrow--you can get rid of them
+to-day, if you really wish," Rockwell answered, closing in on the last
+defence.
+
+"But I don't mind being in the dark to-day if it'll make me fitter for
+to-morrow and get me right sooner.  I'm not a fool.  There's too much
+carelessness about such things.  People often don't give themselves a
+chance to get right by being in too big a hurry.  So, keep me in darkness
+to-day, if you want to, old man.  For a hustler I'm not in too big a
+hurry, you see.  I'm for holding back to get a bigger jump."
+
+"You can't be in a big hurry, even if you want to, Ingolby," rejoined
+Rockwell, gripping the wrist of the sick man, and leaning over him.
+
+Ingolby grew suddenly very still.  It was as though vague fear had seized
+him and held him in a vice.  "What is it?  What do you want to say to
+me?" he asked in a low, nerveless tone.
+
+"You've been hit hard, Chief.  The ricochet has done you up for some
+time.  The head will soon get well, but I'm far from sure about your
+eyes.  You've got to have a specialist about them.  You're in the dark,
+and as for making you see, so am I.  Your eyes and you are out of
+commission for some time, anyhow."
+
+He leaned over hastily, but softly and deftly undid the bandages over the
+eyes and took them off.  "It's seven in the morning, and the sun's up,
+Chief, but it doesn't do you much good, you see."
+
+The last two words were the purest accident, but it was a strange,
+mournful irony, and Rockwell flushed at the thought of it.  He saw
+Ingolby's face turn grey, and then become white as death itself.
+
+"I see," came from the bluish-white lips, as the stricken man made call
+on all the will and vital strength in him.
+
+For a long minute Rockwell held the cold hand in the grasp of one who
+loves and grieves, but even so the physician and surgeon in him were
+uppermost, as they should be, in the hour when his friend was standing on
+the brink of despair, maybe of catastrophe irremediable.  He did not say
+a word yet, however.  In such moments the vocal are dumb and the blind
+see.
+
+Ingolby heaved himself in the bed and threw up his arms, wresting them
+from Rockwell's grasp.
+
+"My God--oh, my God-blind!" he cried in agony.  Rockwell drew the head
+with the sightless eyes to his shoulder.
+
+For a moment he laid one hand on the heart, that, suddenly still, now
+went leaping under his fingers.  "Steady," he said firmly.  "Steady.  It
+may be only temporary.  Keep your head up to the storm.  We'll have a
+specialist, and you must not get mired till then.  Steady, Chief."
+
+"Chief!  Chief!" murmured Ingolby.  "Dear God, what a chief!  I risked
+everything, and I've lost everything by my own vanity.  Barbazon's--the
+horseshoe--among the wolves, just to show I could do things better than
+any one else--as if I had the patent for setting the world right.  And
+now--now--"
+
+The thought of the bridge, of Marchand's devilish design, shot into his
+mind, and once more he was shaken.  "The bridge!  Blind!  Mother!" he
+called in a voice twisted in an agony which only those can feel to whom
+life's purposes are even more than life itself.  Then, with a moan, he
+became unconscious, and his head rolled over against Rockwell's cheek.
+The damp of his brow was as the damp of death as Rockwell's lips touched
+it.
+
+"Old boy, old boy!" Rockwell said tenderly, "I wish it had been me
+instead.  Life means so much to you--and so little to me.  I've seen too
+much, and you've only just begun to see."
+
+Laying him gently down, Rockwell summoned the nurse and Jim Beadle and
+spoke to them in low tones.  "He knows now, and it has hit him hard, but
+not so hard that he won't stiffen to it.  It might have been worse."
+
+He gave instructions as to the care that should be taken, and replaced
+the bandages on the eyes.  It was, however, long before Ingolby was
+restored to consciousness, and when it came, Rockwell put to his lips a
+cooling drink containing a powerful opiate.  Ingolby drank it without
+protest and in silence.  He was like one whose sense of life was
+automatic and of an inner rather than an outer understanding.  But when
+he lay back on the pillow again, he said slowly:
+
+"I want the Chief Constable to come here to-night at eight o'clock.  It
+will be dark then.  He must come.  It is important.  Will you see to it,
+Rockwell?"
+
+He thrust out a hand as though to find Rockwell's, and there was a
+gratitude and an appeal in the pressure of his fingers which went to
+Rockwell's heart.
+
+"All right, Chief.  I'll have him here," Rockwell answered briskly, but
+with tears standing in his eyes.  Ingolby had, as it were, been stricken
+out of the active, sentient, companionable world into a world where he
+was alone, detached, solitary.  His being seemed suspended in an
+atmosphere of misery and helplessness.
+
+"Blind!  I am blind!"  That was the phrase which kept beating with the
+pulses in Ingolby's veins, that throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed like
+engines in a creaking ship which the storm was shaking and pounding in
+the vast seas between the worlds.  Here was the one incomprehensible,
+stupefying fact: nothing else mattered.  Every plan he had ever had,
+every design which he had made his own by an originality that even his
+foes acknowledged, were passing before his brain in swift procession,
+shining, magnified, and magnificent, and in that sudden clear-seeing of
+his soul he beheld their full value, their exact concrete force and
+ultimate effect.  Yet he knew himself detached from them, inactive,
+incapable, because he could not see with the eyes of the body.  The great
+essential thing to him was that one thing he had lost.  A man might be a
+cripple and still direct the great concerns of life and the business of
+life.  He might be shorn of limb and scarred of body, but with eye sight
+still direct the courses of great schemes, in whatever sphere of life his
+purposes were at work.  He might be deaf to every sound and forever dumb,
+but seeing enabled him still to carry forward every enterprise.  In
+darkness, however, those things were naught, because judgment must depend
+on the eyes and senses of others.  The report might be true or false, the
+deputy might deceive, and his blind chief might never know the truth
+unless some other spectator of his schemes should report it; and the
+truth could not surely be checked, save by some one, perhaps, whose life
+was joined to his, by one that truly loved him, whose fate was his.
+
+His brain was afire.  By one that truly loved him!  Who was there that
+loved him?  Who was there at one with him in all his deep designs, in all
+he had done and meant to do?  Neither brother, nor sister, nor friend,
+nor any other.  None of his blood was there who could share with him the
+constructive work he had set out to do.  There was no friend whose fate
+was part of his own.  There was the Boss Doctor: but Rockwell was tied to
+his own responsibilities, and he could not give up, of course, would not
+give up his life to the schemes of another.  There were a dozen men whom
+he had helped to forge ahead by his own schemes, but their destinies were
+not linked with his.  Only one whose life was linked with his could be
+trusted to be his eyes, to be the true reporter of all he did, had done,
+or planned to do.  Only one who loved him.
+
+But even one who loved him could not carry through his incompleted work
+against the assaults of his enemies, who were powerful, watchful, astute,
+and merciless; who had a greed which set money higher than all else in
+the world.  They were of the new order of things in the New World.  The
+business of life was to them not a system of barter and exchange, a
+giving something of value to get something of value, with a margin of
+profit for each, and a sense of human equity behind; it was a cockpit
+where one man sought to get what another man had--and get it almost
+anyhow.
+
+It was the work of the faro-bank man, whose sleight of hand deceived the
+man that carried the gun.
+
+All the old humanity and good-fellowship of the trader, the man who
+exchanged, as it was in the olden days of the world and continued in
+greater or less degree till the present generation--all that was gone.
+It was held in contempt.  It had prevailed when men were open robbers and
+filibusters and warriors, giving their lives, if need be, to get what
+they wanted, making force their god.  It had triumphed over the violence
+and robbery of the open road until the dying years of one century and the
+young years of a new century.  Then the day of the trickster came--and
+men laughed at the idea of fair exchange and strove to give an illusive
+value for a thing of real value--the remorseless sleight of hand which
+the law could not reach.  The desire to get profit by honest toiling was
+dying down to ashes.
+
+Against such men had Ingolby worked--the tricksters, the manipulators.
+At the basis of his schemes was organization and the economy which
+concentrated and conserved energy begets, together with its profit.
+He had been the enemy of waste, the apostle of frugality and thrift;
+and it was that which had enabled him, in his short career, to win the
+confidence of the big men behind him in Montreal, to make good every
+step of the way.  He had worked for profit out of legitimate product
+and industry and enterprise, out of the elimination of waste.  It was his
+theory (and his practice) that no bit of old iron, no bolt or screw, no
+scrap of paper should be thrown away; that the cinders of the engines
+could and should be utilized for that which they would make; and that was
+why there was a paper-mill and foundry on the Sagalac at Manitou.  That
+was why and how, so far, he had beaten the tricksters.
+
+But while his schemes flashed before his mind, as the opiate suspended
+him in the middle heaven between sleep and waking, the tricksters and
+manipulators came hurrying after him like marauders that waited for the
+moment when they could rush the camp in the watches of the night.  His
+disordered imagination saw the ruin and wreck of his work, the seizure of
+what was his own--the place of control on his railways, the place of the
+Master Man who cared infinitely more to see his designs accomplished than
+for the profit they would bring to himself.  Yesterday he had been just
+at the top of the hill.  The key in his fingers was turning in the lock
+which would make safe the securities of his life and career, when it
+snapped, and the world grew dark as the black curtain fell and shut out
+the lighted room from the wayfarer in the gloom.  Then, it was, came the
+opaque blackness which could be felt, and his voice calling in despair:
+"Blind!  I am blind!"
+
+He did not know that he had taken an opiate, that his friend had
+mercifully atrophied his rebellious nerves.  These visions he was seeing
+were terribly true, but they somehow gave him no physical torture.  It
+was as though one saw an operation performed upon one's body with the
+nerves stilled and deadened by ether.  Yet he was cruelly conscious of
+the disaster which had come to him.  For a time at least.  Then his mind
+seemed less acute, the visions came, then without seeing them go, they
+went.  And others came in broken patches, shreds, and dreams,
+phantasmagoria of the brain, and at last all were mingled and confused;
+but as they passed they seemed to burn his sight.  How he longed for a
+cool bandage over his eyes, for a soft linen which would shut out the
+cumuli of broken hopes and designs, life's goals obliterated!  He had had
+enough of the black procession of futile things.
+
+His longing was not denied, for even as he roused himself from the
+oblivion coming on him, as though by a last effort to remember his dire
+misfortune, maybe his everlasting tragedy, something soothing and soft
+like linen dipped in dew was laid upon his forehead.  A cool, delicious
+hand covered his eyes caressingly; a voice from spheres so far away that
+worlds were the echoing points of the sound, came whispering to him like
+a stir of wings in a singing grove.  With a last effort to remain in the
+waking world, he raised his head so very little, but fell gently back
+again with one sighing word on his lips:
+
+"Fleda!"
+
+It was no illusion.  Fleda had come from her own night of trouble to his
+motherless, wifeless home, and would not be denied admittance by the
+nurse.  It was Jim Beadle who admitted her.
+
+"He'd be mad if he knew we wouldn't let her come," Jim had said to the
+nurse.
+
+It was Fleda who had warned Ingolby of the dangers that surrounded him
+--the physical as well as business dangers.  She came now to serve the
+blind victim of that Fate which she had seen hovering over him.
+
+The renegade daughter of the Romanys, as Jethro Fawe had called her, was,
+for the first time, in the house of her master Gorgio.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE CHAIN OF THE PAST
+
+For once in its career, Lebanon was absolutely united.  The blow that had
+brought down the Master Man had also struck the town between the eyes,
+and there was no one--friend or foe of Ingolby--who did not regard it as
+an insult and a challenge.  It was now known that the roughs of Manitou,
+led by the big river-driver, were about to start on a raid upon Lebanon
+and upon Ingolby at the very moment the horseshoe did its work.  All
+night there were groups of men waiting outside Ingolby's house.  They
+were of all classes-carters, railway workers, bartenders, lawyers,
+engineers, bankers, accountants, merchants, ranchmen, carpenters,
+insurance agents, manufacturers, millers, horse-dealers, and so on.
+
+Some prayed for Ingolby's life, others swore viciously; and those who
+swore had no contempt for those who prayed, while those who prayed were
+tolerant of those who swore.  It was a union of incongruous elements.
+Men who had nothing in common were one in the spirit of faction; and all
+were determined that the Orangeman, whose funeral was fixed for this
+memorable Saturday, should be carried safely to his grave.  Civic pride
+had almost become civic fanaticism in Lebanon.  One of the men beaten by
+Ingolby in the recent struggle for control of the railways said to the
+others shivering in the grey dawn: "They were bound to get him in the
+back.  They're dagos, the lot of 'em.  Skunks are skunks, even when you
+skin 'em."
+
+When, just before dawn, old Gabriel Druse issued from the house into
+which he had carried Ingolby the night before, they questioned him
+eagerly.  He had been a figure apart from both Lebanon and Manitou, and
+they did not regard him as a dago, particularly as it was more than
+whispered that Ingolby "had a lien" on his daughter.  In the grey light,
+with his long grizzled beard and iron-grey, shaggy hair, Druse looked
+like a mystic figure of the days when the gods moved among men like
+mortals.  His great height, vast proportions, and silent ways gave him a
+place apart, and added to the superstitious feeling by which he was
+surrounded.
+
+"How is he?" they asked whisperingly, as they crowded round him.
+
+"The danger is over," was the slow, heavy reply.  He will live, but he
+has bad days to face."
+
+"What was the danger?" they asked.  "Fever--maybe brain fever," he
+replied.  "We'll see him through," someone said.
+
+"Well, he cannot see himself through," rejoined the old man solemnly.
+The enigmatical words made them feel there was something behind.
+
+"Why can't he see himself through?" asked Osterhaut the universal, who
+had just arrived from the City Hall.
+
+"He can't see himself through because he is blind," was the heavy answer.
+
+There was a moment of shock, of hushed surprise, and then a voice burst
+forth: "Blind--they've blinded him, boys!  The dagos have killed his
+sight.  He's blind, boys!"
+
+A profane and angry muttering ran through the crowd, who were thirsty,
+hungry, and weary with watching.
+
+Osterhaut held up the horseshoe which had brought Ingolby down.  "Here it
+is, the thing that done it.  It's tied with a blue ribbon-for luck," he
+added ironically.  "It's got his blood on it.  I'm keeping it till
+Manitou's paid the price of it.  Then I'll give it to Lebanon for keeps."
+
+"That's the thing that did it, but where's the man behind the thing?"
+snarled a voice.
+
+Again there was a moment's silence, and then Billy Kyle, the veteran
+stage-driver, said: "He's in the jug, but a gaol has doors, and doors'll
+open with or without keys.  I'm for opening the door, boys."
+
+"What for?" asked a man who knew the answer, but who wanted the thing
+said.
+
+"I spent four years in Arizona, same as Jowett," Billy Kyle answered,
+"and I got in the way of thinking as they do there, and acting just as
+quick as you think.  I drove stage down in the Verde Valley.  Sometimes
+there wasn't time to bring a prisoner all the way to a judge and jury,
+and people was busy, and hadn't time to wait for the wagon; so they done
+what was right, and there was always a tree that would carry that kind o'
+fruit for the sake of humanity.  It's the best way, boys."
+
+"This isn't Arizona or any other lyncher's country," said Halliday, the
+lawyer, making his way to the front.  "It isn't the law, and in this
+country it's the law that counts.  It's the Gover'ment's right to attend
+to that drunken dago that threw the horseshoe, and we've got to let the
+Gover'ment do it.  No lynching on my plate, thank you.  If Ingolby could
+speak to us, you can bet your boots it's what he'd say."
+
+"What's your opinion, boss?" asked Billy Kyle of Gabriel Druse, who had
+stood listening, his chin on his breast, his sombre eyes fixed on them
+abstractedly.
+
+At Kyle's question his eyes lighted up with a fire that was struck from a
+flint in other spheres, and he answered: "It is for the ruler to take
+life, not the subject.  If it is a man that rules, it is for him; if it
+is the law that rules, it is for the law.  Here, it is the law.  Then it
+is not for the subject, and it is not for you."
+
+"If he was your son?" asked Billy Kyle.
+
+"If he was my son, I should be the ruler, not the law," was the grim,
+enigmatic reply, and the old man stalked away from them towards the
+bridge.
+
+"I'd bet he'd settle the dago's hash that done to his son what the
+Manitou dagos done to Ingolby--and settle it quick," remarked Lick
+Farrelly, the tinsmith.
+
+"I bet he's been a ruler or something somewhere," remarked Billy Kyle.
+
+"I bet I'm going home to breakfast," interposed Halliday, the lawyer.
+"There's a straight day's work before us, gentlemen," he added, "and we
+can't do anything here.  Orangemen, let's hoof it."
+
+Twenty Orangemen stepped out from the crowd.  Halliday was a past master
+of their lodge, and they all meant what he meant.  They marched away in
+procession--to breakfast and to a meeting of the lodge.  Others straggled
+after, but a few waited for the appearance of the doctor.  When the sun
+came up and Rockwell, pale and downcast, issued forth, they gathered
+round him, and walked with him through the town, questioning, listening
+and threatening.
+
+A few still remained behind at Ingolby's house.  They were of the devoted
+slaves of Ingolby who would follow him to the gates of Hades and back
+again, or not back if need be.
+
+The nigger barber, Berry, was one; another was the Jack-of-all-trades,
+Osterhaut, a kind of municipal odd-man, with the well-known red hair, the
+face that constantly needed shaving, the blue serge shirt with a scarf
+for a collar, the suit of canvas in the summer and of Irish frieze in the
+winter; the pair of hands which were always in his own pocket, never in
+any one else's; the grey eye, doglike in its mildness, and the long nose
+which gave him the name of Snorty.  Of the same devoted class also was
+Jowett who, on a higher plane, was as wise and discerning a scout as any
+leader ever had.
+
+While old Berry and Osterhaut and all the others were waiting at
+Ingolby's house, Jowett was scouting among the Manitou roughs for the
+Chief Constable of Lebanon, to find out what was forward.  What he had
+found was not reassuring, because Manitou, conscious of being in the
+wrong, realized that Lebanon would try to make her understand her wrong-
+doing; and that was intolerable.  It was clear to Jowett that, in spite
+of all, there would be trouble at the Orange funeral, and that the
+threatened strike would take place at the same time in spite of Ingolby's
+catastrophe.  Already in the early morning revengeful spirits from
+Lebanon had invaded the outer portions of Manitou and had taken
+satisfaction out of an equal number of "Dogans," as they called the Roman
+Catholic labourers, one of whom was carried to the hospital with an elbow
+out of joint and a badly injured back.
+
+With as much information as he needed, Jowett made his way back to
+Lebanon, when, at the approach to the bridge, he met Fleda hurrying with
+bent head and pale, distressed face in his own direction.  Of all Western
+men none had a better appreciation of the sex that takes its toll of
+every traveller after his kind than Aaron Jowett.  He had been a real
+buck in his day among those of his own class, and though the storm of his
+romances had become but a faint stirring of leaves which had tinges of
+days that are sear, he still had an eye unmatched for female beauty.  The
+sun which makes that northern land a paradise in summer caught the gold-
+brown hair of Gabriel Druse's daughter, and made it glint and shine.  It
+coquetted with the umber of her eyes and they grew luminous as a jewel;
+it struck lightly across the pale russet of her cheek and made it like an
+apple that one's lips touch lovingly, when one calls it "too good to
+eat."  It made an atmosphere of half-silver and half-gold with a touch of
+sunrise crimson for her to walk in, translating her form into melting
+lines of grace.
+
+Jowett knew that Druse's daughter was on her way to the man who had
+looked once, looked twice, looked thrice into her eyes and had seen there
+his own image; and that she had done the same; and that the man, it might
+be, would never look into their dark depths again.  He might speak once,
+he might speak twice, he might speak thrice, but would it ever be the
+same as the look that needed no words?
+
+When he crossed Fleda Druse's pathway she stopped short.  She knew that
+Jowett was Ingolby's true friend.  She had seen him often, and he was
+intimately associated with that day when she had run the Carillon Rapids
+and had lain (for how long she never dared to think) in Ingolby's arms in
+the sight of all the world.  First among those who crowded round her at
+Carillon that day were Jowett and Osterhaut, who had tried to warn her.
+
+"You are going to him?" she said now with confidence in her eyes, and by
+the intimacy of the phrase (as though she could speak of Ingolby only as
+him) their own understanding was complete.
+
+"To see how he is and then to do other things," Jowett answered.
+
+There was silence for a moment in which they moved slowly forward, and
+then she said: "You were at Barbazon's last night?"
+
+"When that Gipsy son of a dog gave him away!" he assented.  "I never
+heard anything like the speech Ingolby made.  He had them in the throat.
+The Gipsy would have had nothing out of it, if it hadn't been for the
+horseshoe.  But in spite of the giveaway, Ingolby was getting them where
+they were soft-fairly drugging them with good news.  You never heard such
+dope.  My, he was smooth!  The golden, velvet truth it was, too.  That's
+the only kind he has in stock; and they were sort of stupefied and locoed
+as they chewed his word-plant.  Cicero must have been a saucy singer of
+the dictionary, and Paul the Apostle had a dope of his own you couldn't
+buy, but the gay gamut that Ingolby run gives them all the cold good-
+bye."
+
+She held herself very still as he spoke.  There was, however, a strange,
+lonely look in her eyes.  The man lying asleep in the darkness of body
+and mind yonder was not really her lover, for he had said no word direct
+of love to her, and she knew him so little, how could she love him?  Yet
+there was something between them which had its authority over their
+lives, overcoming even that maiden modesty which was in contrast to the
+bold, physical thing she had done in running the Carillon Rapids those
+centuries ago when she was young and glad-wistfully glad.  So much had
+come since that day, she had travelled so far on the highway of Fate,
+that she looked back from peak to peak of happening to an almost
+invisible horizon.  So much had occurred and she felt so old this
+morning; and yet there was in her heart the undefined feeling that she
+must keep her radiant Spring of life for the blind Gorgio if he needed
+it-if he needed it.  Would he need it, robbed of sight and with his life-
+work murdered?
+
+She shuddered as she thought of what it meant to him.  If a man is to
+work, he must have eyes to see.  Yet what had she to do with it, after
+all?  She had no right to go to him even as she was going.  Yet had she
+not the right of common humanity?  This Gorgio was her friend.  Did not
+the world know that he had saved her life?
+
+As they came to the Lebanon end of the bridge, Fleda turned to Jowett
+and, commenting on his description of the scene at Barbazon, said:
+"He is a great man, but he trusts too much and risks too much.  That was
+no place for him."
+
+"Big men like him think they can do anything," Jowett replied, a little
+ironically, subtly trying to force a confession of her preference for
+Ingolby.
+
+He succeeded.  Her eye lighted with indignation.  She herself might
+challenge him, but she would not allow another to do so.
+
+"It is not the truth," she rejoined sharply.  "He does not measure
+himself against the world so.  He is like--like a child," she added.
+
+"It seems to me all big men are like that," Jowett rejoined; "and he's
+the biggest man the West has seen.  He knows about every man's business
+as though it was his own.  I can get a margin off most any man in the
+West on a horse-trade, but I'd look shy about doing a trade with him.
+You can't dope a horse so he won't know.  He's on to it, sees it-sees it
+like as if it was in glass.  Sees anything and everything, and--" He
+stopped short.  The Master Gorgio could no longer see, and his henchman
+flushed like a girl at his "break"; though, as a horse-dealer, he had in
+his time listened without shame to wilder, angrier reproaches than most
+men living.
+
+She glanced at him, saw his confusion, forgave and understood him.
+
+"It was not the horseshoe, it was not the Gipsy," she returned.  "They
+did not set it going.  It would not have happened but for one man."
+
+"Yes, it's Marchand, right enough," answered Jowett, "but we'll get him
+yet.  We'll get him with the branding-iron hot."
+
+"That will not put things right if--" she paused, then with a great
+effort she added: "Does the doctor think he will get it back and that--"
+
+She stopped suddenly in an agitation he did not care to see and he turned
+away his head.
+
+"Doctor doesn't know," he answered.  "There's got to be an expert.  It'll
+take time before he gets here, but--" he could not help but say it,
+seeing how great her distress was--"but it's going to come back.  I've
+seen cases--I saw one down on the Border"--how easily he lied!--"just
+like his.  It was blasting that done it--the shock.  But the sight come
+back all right, and quick too--like as I've seen a paralizite get up all
+at once and walk as though he'd never been locoed.  Why, God Almighty
+don't let men like Ingolby be done like that by reptiles same's
+Marchand."
+
+"You believe in God Almighty?" she said half-wonderingly, yet with
+gratitude in her tone.  "You understand about God?"
+
+"I've seen too many things not to try and deal fair with Him and not try
+to cheat Him," he answered.  "I see things lots of times that wasn't ever
+born on the prairie or in any house.  I've seen--I've seen enough," he
+said abruptly, and stopped.
+
+"What have you seen?" she asked eagerly.  "Was it good or bad?"
+
+"Both," he answered quickly.  "I was stalked once--stalked I was by night
+and often in the open day, by some sickly, loathsome thing, that even
+made me fight it with my hands--a thing I couldn't see.  I used to fire
+buckshot at it, enough to kill an army, till I near went mad.  I was
+really and truly getting loony.  Then I took to prayin' to the best woman
+I ever knowed.  I never had a mother, but she looked after me--my sister,
+Sara, it was.  She brought me up, and then died and left me without
+anything to hang on to.  I didn't know all I'd lost till she was gone.
+But I guess she knew what I thought of her; for she come back--after I'd
+prayed till I couldn't see.  She come back into my room one night when
+the cursed 'haunt' was prowling round me, and as plain as I see you, I
+saw her.  'Be at peace,' she said, and I spoke to her, and said, 'Sara-
+why, Sara' and she smiled, and went away into nothing--like a bit o'
+cloud in the sun."
+
+He stopped, and was looking straight before him as though he saw a
+vision.
+
+"It went?" she asked breathlessly.
+
+"It went like that--" He made a swift, outward gesture.  "It went and it
+never came back; and she didn't either--not ever.  My idee is," he added,
+"that there's evil things that mebbe are the ghost-shapes of living men
+that want to do us harm; though, mebbe, too, they're the ghost-shapes of
+men that's dead, but that can't get on Over There.  So they try to get
+back to us here; and they can make life Hell while they're stalking us."
+
+"I am sure you are right," she said.
+
+She was thinking of the loathsome thing which haunted her room last
+night.  Was it the embodied second self of Jethro Fawe, doing the evil
+that Jethro Fawe, the visible corporeal man, wished to do?  She
+shuddered, then bent her head and fixed her mind on Ingolby, whose house
+was not far away.  She felt strangely, miserably alone this morning.  She
+was in that fluttering state which follows a girl's discovery that she is
+a woman, and the feeling dawns that she must complete herself by joining
+her own life with the life of another.
+
+She showed no agitation, but her repression gave an almost statuesque
+character to her face and figure.  The adventurous nature of her early
+life had given her a power to meet shock and danger with coolness, and
+though the news of Ingolby's tragedy had seemed to freeze the vital
+forces in her, and all the world became blank for a moment, she had
+controlled herself and had set forth to go to him, come what might.
+
+As she entered the street where Ingolby lived, she suddenly realized the
+difficulty before her.  She might go to him, but by only one right could
+she stay and nurse him, and that right she did not possess.  He would,
+she knew, understand her, no matter how the world babbled.  Why should
+the world babble?  What woman could have designs upon a blind man?  Was
+not humanity alone sufficient warrant for staying by his side?  Yet would
+he wish it?  Suddenly her heart sank; but again she remembered their last
+parting, and once more she was sure he would be glad to have her with
+him.
+
+It flashed upon her how different it would have been, if he and she had
+been Romanys, and this thing had happened over there in the far lands she
+knew so well.  Who would have hinted at shame, if she had taken him to
+her father's tan or gone to his tan and tended him as a man might tend a
+man?  Humanity would have been the only convention; there would have been
+no sex, no false modesty, no babble, no reproach.  If it had been a man
+as old as the oldest or as young as Jethro Fawe it would have made no
+difference.
+
+As young as Jethro Fawe!  Why was it that now she could never think of
+the lost and abandoned Romany life without thinking also of Jethro Fawe?
+Why should she hate him, despise him, revolt against him, and yet feel
+that, as it were by invisible cords, he drew her back to that which she
+had forsworn, to the Past which dragged at her feet?  The Romany was not
+dead in her; her real struggle was yet to come; and in a vague but
+prophetic way she realized it.  She was not yet one with the settled
+western world.
+
+As they came close to Ingolby's house she heard marching footsteps, and
+in the near distance she saw fourscore or more men tramping in military
+order.  "Who are they?" she asked of Jowett.
+
+"Men that are going to see law and order kept in Lebanon," he answered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+SUCH THINGS MAY NOT BE
+
+A few hours later Fleda slowly made her way homeward through the woods on
+the Manitou side of the Sagalac.  Leaving Ingolby's house, she had seen
+men from the ranches and farms and mines beyond Lebanon driving or riding
+into the town, as though to a fair or fete-day.  Word of anticipated
+troubles had sped through the countryside, and the innate curiosity of
+a race who greatly love a row brought in sensation-lovers.  Some were
+skimming along in one-horse gigs, a small bag of oats dangling beneath
+like the pendulum of a great clock.  Others were in double or triple-
+seated light wagons--"democrats" they were called.  Women had a bit of
+colour in their hats or at their throats, and the men had on clean white
+collars and suits of "store-clothes"--a sign of being on pleasure bent.
+Young men and girls on rough but serviceable mounts cantered past,
+laughing and joking, and their loud talking grated on the ear of the girl
+who had seen a Napoleon in the streets of his Moscow.
+
+Presently there crossed her path a gruesomely ugly hearse, with glass
+sides and cheap imitation ostrich plumes drawn by gorged ravens of horses
+with egregiously long tails, and driven by an undertaker's assistant,
+who, with a natural gaiety of soul, displayed an idiotic solemnity by
+dragging down the corners of the mouth.  She turned away in loathing.
+
+Her mind fled to a scene far away in the land of the Volga when she was a
+child, where she had seen buried two men, who had fought for their
+insulted honour till both had died of their wounds.  She remembered the
+white and red sashes and the gay scarfs worn by the women at the burial,
+the jackets with great silver buttons worn by the men, and the silver-
+mounted pistols and bright steel knives in the garish belts.  She saw
+again the bodies of the two gladiators, covered with crimson robes,
+carried shoulder-high on a soft bed of interlaced branches to the graves
+beneath the trees.  There, covered with flowers and sprigs and
+evergreens, ribbons and favours, the kindly earth hid them, cloaked for
+their long sleep, while women wept, and men praised the dead, and went
+back to the open road again cheerily, as the dead would have them do.
+
+If he had died--the man she had just left behind in that torpid sleep
+which opiates bring--his body would have been carried to his last home in
+just such a hideous equipage as this hearse.  A shiver of revolt went
+through her frame, and her mind went to him as she had seen him lying
+between the white sheets of his bed, his hands, as they had lain upon the
+coverlet, compact of power and grace, knit and muscular and vital--not
+the hand for a violin but the hand for a sword.
+
+As she had laid her hand upon his hot forehead and over his eyes, he had
+unconsciously spoken her name.  That had told her more of what really was
+between them than she had ever known.  In the presence of the catastrophe
+that must endanger, if not destroy the work he had done, the career he
+had made, he thought of her, spoke her name.
+
+What could she do to prevent his ruin?  She must do something, else she
+had no right to think of him.  As though her thoughts had summoned him,
+she came suddenly upon Felix Marchand at a point where her path resolved
+itself into two, one leading to Manitou, the other to her own home.
+
+There was a malicious glint in the greenish eyes of the dissolute
+demagogue as he saw her.  His hat made a half-circle before it found his
+head again.
+
+"You pay early visits, mademoiselle," he said, his teeth showing rat-
+like.
+
+"And you late ones?" she asked meaningly.
+
+"Not so late that I can't get up early to see what's going on," he
+rejoined in a sour voice.
+
+"Is it that those who beat you have to get up early?" she asked
+ironically.
+
+"No one has got up earlier than me lately," he sneered.
+
+"All the days are not begun," she remarked calmly.
+
+"You have picked up quite an education since you left the road and the
+tan," he said with the look of one who delivers a smashing blow.
+
+"I am not yet educated enough to know how you get other people to commit
+your crimes for you," she retorted.
+
+"Who commits my crimes for me?"  His voice was sharp and even anxious.
+
+"The man who told you I was once a Gipsy--Jethro Fawe."
+
+Her instinct had told her this was so.  But had Jethro told all?  She
+thought not.  It would need some catastrophe which threw him off his
+balance to make him speak to a Gorgio of the inner things of Romany life;
+and child--marriage was one of them.
+
+He scoffed.  "Once a Gipsy always a Gipsy.  Race is race, and you can't
+put it off and on like--your stocking."
+
+He was going to say chemise, but race was race, and vestiges of native
+French chivalry stayed the gross simile on the lips of the degenerate.
+Fleda's eyes, however, took on a dark and brooding look which, more
+than anything else, showed the Romany in her.  With a murky flood of
+resentment rising in her veins, she strove to fight back the half-savage
+instincts of a bygone life.  She felt as though she could willingly
+sentence this man to death as her father had done Jethro Fawe that very
+morning.  Another thought, however, was working and fighting in her--that
+Marchand was better as a friend than an enemy; and that while Ingolby's
+fate was in the balance, while yet the Orange funeral had not taken place
+and the strikes had not yet come, it might be that he could be won over
+to Ingolby.  Her mind was thus involuntarily reproducing Ingolby's
+policy, as he had declared it to Jowett and Rockwell.  It was to find
+Felix Marchand's price, and to buy off his enmity--not by money, for
+Marchand did not need that, but by those other coins of value which are
+individual to each man's desires, passions and needs.
+
+"Once a Frenchman isn't always a Frenchman," she replied coolly,
+disregarding the coarse insolence of his last utterance.  "You yourself
+do not now swear faith to the tricolour or the fleur-de-lis."
+
+He flushed.  She had touched a tender nerve.
+
+"I am a Frenchman always," he rejoined angrily.  "I hate the English.
+I spit on the English flag."
+
+"Yes, I've heard you are an anarchist," she rejoined.  "A man with no
+country and with a flag that belongs to no country--quelle affaire et
+quelle drolerie!"
+
+She laughed.  Taken aback in spite of his anger, he stared at her.  How
+good her French accent was!  If she would only speak altogether in that
+beloved language, he could smother much malice.  She was beautiful and--
+well, who could tell?  Ingolby was wounded and blind, maybe for ever, and
+women are always with the top dog--that was his theory.  Perhaps her
+apparent dislike of him was only a mood.  Many women that he had
+conquered had been just like that.  They had begun by disliking him--from
+Lil Sarnia down--and had ended by being his.  This girl would never be
+his in the way that the others had been, but--who could tell?--perhaps he
+would think enough of her to marry her?  Anyway, it was worth while
+making such a beauty care for him.  The other kind of women were easy
+enough to get, and it would be a piquant thing to have one irreproachable
+affaire.  He had never had one; he was not sure that any girl or woman he
+had ever known had ever loved him, and he was certain that he had never
+loved any girl or woman.  To be in love would be a new and piquant
+experience for him.  He did not know love, but he knew what passion was.
+He had ever been the hunter.  This trail might be dangerous, too, but he
+would take his chances.  He had seen her dislike of him whenever they had
+met in the past, and he had never tried to soften her attitude towards
+him.  He had certainly whistled, but she had not come.  Well, he would
+whistle again--a different tune.
+
+"You speak French much?" he asked almost eagerly, the insolence gone from
+his tone.  "Why didn't I know that?"
+
+"I speak French in Manitou," she replied, "but nearly all the French
+speak English there, and so I speak more English than French."
+
+"Yes, that's it," he rejoined almost angrily again.  "The English will
+not learn French, will not speak French.  They make us learn English,
+and--"
+
+"If you don't like the flag and the country, why don't you leave it?" she
+interrupted, hardening, though she had meant to try and win him over to
+Ingolby's side.
+
+His eyes blazed.  There was something almost real in the man after all.
+
+"The English can kill us, they can grind us to the dust," he rejoined in
+French, "but we will not leave the land which has always been ours.  We
+settled it; our fathers gave their lives for it in a thousand places.
+The Indians killed them, the rivers and the storms, the plague and the
+fire, the sickness and the cold wiped them out.  They were burned alive
+at the stake, they were flayed; their bones were broken to pieces by
+stones--but they blazed trails with their blood in the wilderness from
+New Orleans to Hudson's Bay.  They paid for the land with their lives.
+Then the English came and took it, and since that time--one hundred and
+fifty years--we have been slaves."
+
+"You do not look like a slave," she answered, "and you have not acted
+like a slave.  If you were to do the things in France that you've done
+here, you wouldn't be free as you are to-day."
+
+"What have I done?" he asked darkly.
+
+"You were the cause of what happened at Barbazon's last night,"--he
+smiled evilly--"you are egging on the roughs to break up the Orange
+funeral to-day; and there is all the rest you know so well."
+
+"What is the rest I know so well?"  He looked closely at her, his long,
+mongrel eyes half-closing with covert scrutiny.
+
+"Whatever it is, it is all bad and it is all yours."
+
+"Not all," he retorted coolly.  "You forget your Gipsy friend.  He did
+his part last night, and he's still free."
+
+They had entered the last little stretch of wood in which her home lay,
+and she slackened her footsteps slightly.  She felt that she had been
+unwise in challenging him; that she ought to try persistently to win him
+over.  It was repugnant to her, still it must be done even yet.  She
+mastered herself for Ingolby's sake and changed her tactics.
+
+"As you glory in what you have done, you won't mind being responsible
+for all that's happened," she replied in a more friendly tone.
+
+She made an impulsive gesture towards him.
+
+"You have shown what power you have--isn't that enough?" she asked.
+"You have made the crowd shout, 'Vive Marchand !' You can make everything
+as peaceful as it is now upset.  If you don't do so, there will be much
+misery.  If peace must be got by force, then the force of government will
+get it in the end.  You have the gift of getting hold of the worst men
+here, and you have done it; but won't you now master them again in the
+other way?  You have money and brains; why not use them to become a
+leader of those who will win at last, no matter what the game may be?"
+
+He came close to her.  She shrank inwardly, but she did not move.  His
+greenish eyes were wide open in the fulness of eloquence and desire.
+
+"You have a tongue like none I ever heard," he said impulsively.  "You've
+got a mind that thinks, you've got dash and can take risks.  You took
+risks that day on the Carillon Rapids.  It was only the day before that
+I'd met you by the old ford of the Sagalac, and made up to you.  You
+choked me off as though I was a wolf or a devil on the loose.  The next
+day when I saw Ingolby hand you out to the crowd from his arms, I got
+nasty--I have fits like that sometimes, when I've had a little too much
+liquor.  I felt it more because you're the only kind of woman that could
+ever get a real hold on me.  It was you made me get the boys rampaging
+and set the toughs moving.  As you say, I can get hold of a crowd.  It's
+not hard--with money and drink.  You can buy human nature cheap.  Every
+man has his price they say--and every woman too--bien sur!  The thing is
+to find out what is the price, and then how to buy.  You can't buy
+everyone in the same way, even if you use a different price.  You've got
+to find out how they want the price--whether it's to be handed over the
+counter, so to speak, or to be kept on the window-sill, or left in a
+pocket, or dropped in a path, or dug up like a potato, with a funny make-
+believe that fools nobody, but just plays to the hypocrite in everyone
+everywhere.  I'm saying this to you because you've seen more of the
+world, I bet, than one in a million, even though you're so young.  I
+don't see why we can't come together.  I'm to be bought.  I don't say
+that my price isn't high.  You've got your price, too.  You wouldn't fuss
+yourself about things here in Manitou and Lebanon, if there wasn't
+something you wanted to get.  Tout ca!  Well, isn't it worth while making
+the bargain?  You've got such gift of speech that I'm just as if I'd been
+drugged, and all round, face, figure, eyes, hair, foot, and girdle,
+you're worth giving up a lot for.  I've seen plenty of your sex, and I've
+heard crowds of them talk, but they never had anything for me beyond the
+minute.  You've got the real thing.  You're my fancy.  You've been
+thinking and dreaming of Ingolby.  He's done.  He's a back number.
+There's nothing he's done that isn't on the tumble since last night.
+The financial gang that he downed are out already against him.  They'll
+have his economic blood.  He made a splash while he was at it, but the
+alligator's got him.  It's 'Exit Ingolby,' now."
+
+She made a passionate gesture, and seemed about to speak, but he went on:
+"No, don't say anything.  I know how you feel.  You've had your face
+turned his way, and you can't look elsewhere all at once.  But Time cures
+quick, if you're a good healthy human being.  Ingolby was the kind likely
+to draw a girl.  He's a six-footer and over; he spangled a lot, and he
+smiled pretty--comme le printemps, and was sharp enough to keep clear of
+women that could hurt him.  That was his strongest point after all, for a
+little, sly sprat of a woman that's made eyes at you and led you on, till
+you sent her a note in a hurry some time with some loose hot words in it,
+and she got what she'd wanted, will make you pay a hundred times for the
+goods you get.  Ingolby was sharp enough to walk shy, until you came his
+way, and then he lost his underpinning.  But last night got him in the
+vitals--hit him between the eyes; and his stock's not worth ten cents in
+the dollar to-day.  But though the pumas are out, and he's done, and'll
+never see his way out of the hole he's in"--he laughed at his grisly
+joke"--it's natural to let him down easy.  You've looked his way; he did
+you a good turn at the Carillon Rapids, and you'd do one for him if you
+could.  I'm the only one can stop the worst from happening.  You want to
+pay your debt to him.  Good.  I can help you do it.  I can stop the
+strikes on the railways and in the mills.  I can stop the row at the
+Orange funeral.  I can stop the run on his bank and the drop in his
+stock.  I can fight the gang that's against him--I know how.  I'm the
+man that can bring things to pass."
+
+He paused with a sly, mean smile of self-approval and conceit, and his
+tongue licked the corners of his mouth in a way that drunkards have in
+the early morning when the effect of last night's drinking has worn off.
+He spread out his hands with the air of a man who had unpacked his soul,
+but the chief characteristic of his manner was egregious belief in
+himself.
+
+At first, in her desire to find a way to meet the needs of Ingolby, Fleda
+had listened to him with fortitude and even without revolt.  But as he
+began to speak of women, and to refer to herself with a look of gloating
+which men of his breed cannot hide, her angry pulses beat hard.  She did
+not quite know where he was leading, but she was sure he meant to say
+something which would vex her beyond bearing.  At one moment she meant to
+cut short his narrative, but he prevented her, and when at last he ended,
+she was almost choking with agitation.  It had been borne in upon her as
+his monologue proceeded, that she would rather die than accept anything
+from this man--anything of any kind.  To fight him was the only thing.
+Nothing else could prevail in the end.  His was the service of the
+unpenitent thief.
+
+"And what is it you want to buy from me?" she asked evenly.
+
+He did not notice, and he could not realize that ominous thing in her
+voice and face.  "I want to be friends with you.  I want to see you here
+in the woods, to meet you as you met Ingolby.  I want to talk with you,
+to hear you talk; to learn things from you I never learned before; to--"
+
+She interrupted him with a swift gesture.  "And then--after that?  What
+do you want at the end of it all?  One cannot spend one's time talking
+and wandering in the woods and teaching and learning.  After that, what?"
+
+"I have a house in Montreal," he said evasively.  "I don't want to live
+there alone."  He laughed.  "It's big enough for two, and at the end it
+might be us two, if--"
+
+With sharp anger, yet with coolness and dignity, she broke in on his
+words.  "Might be us two!" she exclaimed.  "I have never thought of
+making my home in a sewer.  Do you think--but, no, it isn't any use
+talking!  You don't know how to deal with man or woman.  You are
+perverted."
+
+"I did not mean what you mean; I meant that I should want to marry you,"
+he protested.  "You think the worst of me.  Someone has poisoned your
+mind against me."
+
+"Everyone has poisoned my mind against you," she returned, "and yourself
+most of all.  I know you will try to injure Mr. Ingolby; and I know that
+you will try to injure me; but you will not succeed."
+
+She turned and moved away from him quickly, taking the path towards her
+own front door.  He called something after her, but she did not or would
+not hear.
+
+As she entered the open space in front of the house, she heard footsteps
+behind her and turned quickly, not without apprehension.  A woman came
+hurrying towards her.  She was pale, agitated, haggard with fatigue.
+
+"May I speak with you?" she asked in French.  "Surely," replied Fleda.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE WOMAN FROM WIND RIVER
+
+"What is it?" asked Fleda, opening the door of the house.
+
+"I want to speak to you about m'sieu'," replied the sad-faced woman.
+She made a motion of her head backwards towards the wood.  "About M'sieu'
+Marchand."
+
+Fleda's face hardened; she had had more than enough of "M'sieu'
+Marchand."  She was bitterly ashamed that she had, even for a moment,
+thought of using diplomacy with him.  But this woman's face was so
+forlorn, apart, and lonely, that the old spirit of the Open Road worked
+its will.  In far-off days she had never seen a human being turned away
+from a Romany tent, or driven from a Romany camp.  She opened the door
+and stood aside to admit the wayfarer.
+
+A few moments later, the woman, tidied and freshened, sat at the ample
+breakfast which was characteristic of Romany home-life.  The woman's
+plate was bountifully supplied by Fleda, and her cup filled more than
+once by Madame Bulteel, while old Gabriel Druse bulked friendly over all.
+His face now showed none of the passion and sternness which had been
+present when he passed the Sentence of the Patrin upon Jethro Fawe;
+nothing of the gloom filling his eyes as he left Ingolby's house.  The
+gracious, bountiful look of the patriarch, of the head of the clan, was
+upon him.
+
+The husband of one wife, the father of one child, yet the Ry of Rys had
+still the overlooking, protective sense of one who had the care of great
+numbers of people.  His keen eyes foresaw more of the story the woman was
+to tell presently than either of the women of his household.  He had seen
+many such women as this, and had inflexibly judged between them and those
+who had wronged them.
+
+"Where have you come from?" he asked, as the meal drew to a close.
+
+"From Wind River and under Elk Mountain," the woman answered with a look
+of relief.  Her face was of those who no longer can bear the soul's
+secrets.
+
+There was silence while the breakfast things were cleared away, and the
+window was thrown wide to the full morning sun.  It broke through the
+branches of pine and cedar and juniper; it made translucent the leaves of
+the maples; it shimmered on Fleda's brown hair as she pulled a rose from
+the bush at the window, and gave it to the forlorn creature in the grey
+"linsey-woolsey" dress and the loose blue flannel jacket, whose skin was
+coarsened by outdoor life, but who had something of real beauty in the
+intense blue of her eyes.  She had been a very comely figure in her best
+days, for her waist was small, her bosom gently and firmly rounded, and
+her hands were finer than those of most who live and work much in the
+open air.
+
+"You said there was something you wished to tell me," said Fleda, at
+last.
+
+The woman gazed slowly round at the three, as though with puzzled appeal.
+There was the look of the Outlander in her face; of one who had been
+exiled from familiar things and places.  In manner she was like a child.
+Her glance wandered over the faces of the two women, then her eyes met
+those of the Ry, and stayed there.
+
+"I am old and I have seen many sorrows," said Gabriel Druse, divining
+what was in her mind.  "I will try to understand."
+
+"I have known all the bitterness of life," interposed the low, soft voice
+of Madame Bulteel.
+
+"All ears are the same here," Fleda added, looking the woman in the eyes.
+
+"I will tell everything," was the instant reply.  Her fingers twined and
+untwined in her lap with a nervousness shown by neither face nor body.
+Her face was almost apathetic in its despair, but her body had an upright
+courage.
+
+She sighed heavily and began.
+
+"My name is Arabella Stone.  I was married from my home over against Wind
+River by the Jumping Sandhills.
+
+"My father was a lumberman.  He was always captain of the gang in the
+woods, and captain of the river in the summer.  My mother was deaf and
+dumb.  It was very lonely at times when my father was away.  I loved a
+boy--a good boy, and he was killed breaking horses.  When I was twenty-
+one years old my mother died.  It was not good for me to be alone, my
+father said, so he must either give up the woods and the river, or he or
+I must marry.  Well, I saw he would not marry, for my mother's face was
+one a man could not forget."
+
+The old man stirred in his seat.  "I have seen such," he said in his deep
+voice.
+
+"So it was I said to myself I would marry," she continued, "though I had
+loved the Boy that died under the hoofs of the black stallion.  There
+weren't many girls at the Jumping Sandhills, and so there were men, now
+one, now another, to say things to me which did not touch my heart; but I
+did not laugh, because I understood that they were lonely.  Yet I liked
+one of them more than all the others.
+
+"So, for my father's sake, I came nearer to Dennis, and at last it seemed
+I could bear to look at him any time of the day or night he came to me.
+He was built like a pine-tree, and had a playful tongue, and also he was
+a ranchman like the Boy that was gone.  It all came about on the day he
+rode in from the range the wild wicked black stallion which all range-
+riders had tried for years to capture.  It was like a brother of the
+horse which had killed my Boy, only bigger.  When Dennis mastered him and
+rode him to my door I made up my mind, and when he whispered to me over
+the dipper of buttermilk I gave him, I said, 'Yes.' I was proud of him.
+He did things that a woman likes, and said the things a woman loves to
+hear, though they be the same thing said over and over again."
+
+Madame Bulteel nodded her head as though in a dream, and the Ry of Rys
+sat with his two great hands on the chair-arm and his chin dropped on his
+chest.  Fleda's hands were clasped in her lap, and her big eyes never
+left the woman's face.
+
+"Before a month was gone I had married him," the, low, tired voice went
+on.  "It was a gay wedding; and my father was very happy, for he thought
+I had got the desire of a woman's life--a home of her own.  For a time
+all went well.  Dennis was gay and careless and wilful, but he was easy
+to live with, too, except when he came back from the town where he sold
+his horses.  Then he was different, because of the drink, and he was
+quarrelsome with me--and cruel, too.
+
+"At last when he came home with the drink upon him, he would sleep on the
+floor and not beside me.  This wore upon my heart.  I thought that if I
+could only put my hand on his shoulder and whisper in his ear, he would
+get better of his bad feeling; but he was sulky, and he would not bear
+with me.  Though I never loved him as I loved my Boy, still I tried to be
+a good wife to him, and never turned my eyes to any other man."
+
+Suddenly she stopped as though the pain of speaking was too great.
+Madame Bulteel murmured something, but the only word that reached the
+ears of the others was the Arabic word 'mafish'.  Her pale face was
+suffused as she said it.
+
+Two or three times the woman essayed to speak again, but could not.  At
+last, however, she overcame her emotion and said: "So it was when M'sieu'
+Felix Marchand came up from the Sagalac."
+
+The old man started and muttered harshly, but Fleda had foreseen the
+entrance of the dissolute Frenchman into the tale, and gave no sign of
+surprise.
+
+"M'sieu' Marchand bought horses," the sad voice trailed on.  "One day he
+bought the mining-claims Dennis had been holding till he could develop
+them or sell them for good money.  When Dennis went to town again he
+brought me back a present of a belt with silver clasps; but yet again
+that night he slept upon the floor alone.  So it went on.  M. Marchand,
+he goes on to the mountains and comes back; and he buys more horses, and
+Dennis takes them to Yargo, and M. Marchand goes with him, but comes back
+before Dennis does.  It was then M'sieu' begun to talk to me; to say
+things that soothe a woman when she is hurt.  I knew now Dennis did not
+want me as when he first married me.  He was that kind of man--quick to
+care and quicker to forget.  He was weak, he could not fasten where he
+stood.  It pleased him to be gay and friendly with me when he was sober,
+but there was nothing behind it--nothing, nothing at all.  At last I
+began to cry when I thought of it, for it went on and on, and I was too
+much alone.  I looked at myself in the glass, and I saw I was not old or
+lean.  I sang in the trees beside the brook, and my voice was even a
+little better than in the days when Dennis first came to my father's
+house.  I looked to my cooking, and I knew that it was as good as ever.
+I thought of my clothes, and how I did my hair, and asked myself if I
+was as fresh to see as when Dennis first came to me.  I could see no
+difference.  There was a clear pool not far away under the little hills
+where the springs came together.  I used to bathe in it every morning and
+dry myself in the sun; and my body was like a child's.  That being so,
+should my own man turn his head away from me day or night?  What had I
+done to be used so, less than two years after I had married!"
+
+She paused and hung her head, weeping gently.  "Shame stings a woman like
+nothing else," Madame Bulteel said with a sigh.
+
+"It was so with me," continued Dennis's wife.  "Then at last the thought
+came that there was another woman.  And all the time M. Marchand kept
+coming and going, at first when Dennis was there, and always with some
+good reason for coming--horses, cattle, shooting, or furs bought of the
+Indians.  When Dennis was not there, he came at first for an hour or two,
+as if by chance, then for a whole day, because he said he knew I was
+lonely.  One day, I was sitting by the pool--it was in the evening.
+I was crying because of the thought that followed me of another woman
+somewhere, who made Dennis turn from me.  Then it was M'sieu' came and
+put a hand on my shoulder--he came so quietly that I did not hear him
+till he touched me.  He said he knew why I cried, and it saddened his
+soul."
+
+"His soul--the jackal!" growled the old man in his beard.
+
+The woman nodded wearily and went on.  "For all of ten days I had been
+alone, except for the cattlemen camping a mile away and an old Indian
+helper who slept in his tepee within call.  Loneliness makes you weak
+when there's something tearing at the heart.  So I let M'sieu' Marchand
+talk to me.  At last he told me that there was a woman at Yargo--that
+Dennis did not go there for business, but to her.  Everyone knew it
+except me, he said.  He told me to ask old Throw Hard, the Indian helper,
+if he had spoken the truth.  I was shamed, and angry and crazy, too, I
+think, so I went to old Throw Hard and asked him.  He said he could not
+tell the truth, and that he would not lie to me.  So I knew it was all
+true.
+
+"How do I know what was in my mind?  Is a woman not mad at such a time!
+There I was, tossed aside for a flyaway, who was for any man that would
+come her way.  Yes, I think I was mad.  The pride in me was hurt--as only
+a woman can understand."  She paused and looked at the two women who
+listened to her.  Fleda's eyes were on the world beyond the window
+of the room.
+
+"Surely we understand," whispered Madame Bulteel.
+
+The woman's courage returned, and she continued: "I could not go to my
+father, for he was riding the river scores of miles away.  I was terribly
+alone.  It was then that M'sieu' Marchand, who had bribed the woman to
+draw Dennis away, begged me to go away with him.  He swore I should marry
+him as soon as I could be free of Dennis.  I scarcely knew what I said or
+thought; but the place I had loved was hateful to me, so I went away with
+him."
+
+A sharp, pained exclamation broke from the lips of Madame Bulteel, but
+presently she reached out and laid a hand upon the woman's arm.  "Of
+course you went with him," she said.  "You could not stay where you were
+and face the return of Dennis.  There was no child to keep you, and the
+man that tempted you said he adored you?"
+
+The woman looked gratefully at her.  "That was what he said," she
+answered.  "He said he was tired of wandering, and that he wanted a home-
+and there was a big house in Montreal."
+
+She stopped suddenly upon an angry, smothered word from Fleda's lips.  A
+big house in Montreal!  Fleda's first impulse was to break in upon the
+woman's story and tell her father what had happened just now outside
+their own house; but she waited.
+
+"Yes, there was a big house in Montreal?" said Fleda, her eyes now
+resting sadly upon the woman.
+
+"He said it should be mine.  But that did not count.  To be far away from
+all that had been was more than all else.  I was not thinking of the man,
+or caring for him, I was flying from my shame.  I did not see then the
+shame to which I was going.  I was a fool, and I was mad and bad also.
+When I waked--and it was soon--there was quick understanding between us.
+The big house in Montreal--that was never meant for me.  He was already
+married."
+
+The old man stretched heavily to his feet, leaned both hands on the
+table, and looked at the woman with glowering eyes, while Fleda's heart
+seemed to stop beating.
+
+"Married!" growled Gabriel Druse, with a blur of passion in his voice.
+He knew that Felix Marchand had followed his daughter as though he were a
+single man.
+
+Fleda saw what was working in his mind.  Since her father suspected, he
+should know all.
+
+"He almost offered me the big house in Montreal this morning," she said
+evenly and coldly.
+
+A malediction broke from the old man's lips.
+
+"He almost thought he wanted me to marry him," Fleda added scornfully.
+
+"And what did you say?" Druse asked.
+
+"There could only be one thing to say.  I told him I had never thought of
+making my home in a sewer."  A grim smile broke over the old man's face,
+and he sat down again.
+
+"Because I saw him with you I wanted to warn you," the woman continued.
+"Yesterday, I came to warn him of his danger, and he laughed at me.  From
+Madame Thibadeau I heard he had said he would make you sing his song.
+When I came to tell you, there he was with you.  But when he left you I
+was sure there was no need to speak.  Still I felt I must tell you--
+perhaps because you are rich and strong, and will stop him from doing
+more harm."
+
+"How do you know we are rich?" asked Druse in a rough tone.
+
+"It is what the world says," was the reply.  "Is there harm in that?  In
+any case it was right to tell you all; so that one who had herded with a
+woman like me should not be friends with you."
+
+"I have seen worse women than you," murmured the old man.
+
+"What danger did you come to warn M. Marchand about?" asked Fleda.
+
+"To his life," answered the woman.
+
+"Do you want to save his life?" asked the old man.
+
+"Ah, is it not always so?" intervened Madame Bulteel in a low, sad
+voice.  "To be wronged like that does not make a woman just."
+
+"I am just," answered the woman.  "He deserves to die, but I want to save
+the man that will kill him when they meet."
+
+"Who will kill him?" asked Fleda.  "Dennis--he will kill Marchand if he
+can."
+
+The old man leaned forward with puzzled, gloomy interest.  "Why?  Dennis
+left you for another.  You say he had grown cold.  Was that not what he
+wanted--that you should leave him?"
+
+The woman looked at him with tearful eyes.  "If I had known Dennis
+better, I should have waited.  What he did is of the moment only.  A man
+may fall and rise again, but it is not so with a woman.  She thinks and
+thinks upon the scar that shows where she wounded herself; and she never
+forgets, and so her life becomes nothing--nothing."
+
+No one saw that Madame Bulteel held herself rigidly, and was so white
+that even the sunlight was gold beside her look.  Yet the strangest,
+saddest smile played about her lips; and presently, as the eyes of the
+others fastened on the woman and did not leave her, she regained her
+usual composure.
+
+The woman kept looking at Gabriel Druse.  "When Dennis found that I had
+gone, and knew why--for I left word on a sheet of paper--he went mad like
+me.  Trailing to the south, to find M'sieu' Marchand, he had an accident,
+and was laid up in a shack for weeks on the Tanguishene River, and they
+could not move him.  But at last a ranchman wrote to me, and the letter
+found me on the very day I left M'sieu'.  When I got that letter begging
+me to go to the Tanguishene River, to nurse Dennis who loved me still, my
+heart sank.  I said to myself I could not go; and Dennis and I must be
+apart always to the end of time.  But then I thought again.  He was ill,
+and his body was as broken as his mind.  Well, since I could do his mind
+no good, I would try to help his body.  I could do that much for him.  So
+I went.  But the letter to me had been long on the way, and when I got to
+the Tanguishene River he was almost well."
+
+She paused and rocked her body to and fro for a moment as though in pain.
+
+"He wanted me to go back to him then.  He said he had never cared for the
+woman at Yargo, and that what he felt for me now was different from what
+it had ever been.  When he had settled accounts we could go back to the
+ranch and be at peace.  I knew what he meant by settling accounts, and it
+frightened me.  That is why I am here.  I came to warn the man, Marchand,
+for if Dennis kills him, then they will hang Dennis.  Do you not see?
+This is a country of law.  I saw that Dennis had the madness in his
+brain, and so I left him again in the evening of the day I found him, and
+came here--it is a long way.  Yesterday, M'sieu' Marchand laughed at me
+when I warned him.  He said he could take care of himself.  But such men
+as Dennis stop at nothing; there will be killing, if M'sieu' stays here."
+
+"You will go back to Dennis?" asked Fleda gently.  "Some other woman
+will make him happy when he forgets me," was the cheerless, grey reply.
+
+The old man got up and, coming over, laid a hand upon her shoulder.
+
+"Where did you think of going from here?" he asked.
+
+"Anywhere--I don't know," was the reply.
+
+"Is there no work here for her?" he asked, turning to Madame Bulteel.
+
+"Yes, plenty," was the reply.  "And room also?" he asked again.
+
+"Was ever a tent too full, when the lost traveller stumbled into camp in
+the old days?" rejoined Fleda.  The woman trembled to her feet, a glad
+look in her eyes.  "I ought to go, but I am tired and I will gladly
+stay," she said and swayed against the table.
+
+Madame Bulteel and Fleda put their arms round her, steadying her.
+
+"This is not the way to act," said Fleda with a touch of sharp reproof.
+Had she not her own trouble to face?
+
+The stricken woman drew herself up and looked Fleda in the eyes.  "I will
+find the right way, if I can," she said with courage.
+
+A half-hour later, as the old man sat alone in the room where he had
+breakfasted, a rifle-shot rang out in the distance.
+
+"The trouble begins," he said, as he rose and hastened into the hallway.
+
+Another shot rang out.  He caught up his wide felt hat, reached for a
+great walking-stick in the corner, and left the house hurriedly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE MAYOR FILLS AN OFFICE
+
+It was a false alarm which had startled Gabriel Druse, but it had
+significance.  The Orange funeral was not to take place until eleven
+o'clock, and it was only eight o'clock when the Ry left his home.  A
+rifle-shot had, however, been fired across the Sagalac from the Manitou
+side, and it had been promptly acknowledged from Lebanon.  There was a
+short pause, and then came another from the Lebanon side.  It was merely
+a warning and a challenge.  The only man who could have controlled the
+position was blind and helpless.
+
+As Druse walked rapidly towards the bridge, he met Jowett.  Jowett was
+one of the few men in either town for whom the Ry had regard, and the
+friendliness had had its origin in Jowett's knowledge of horseflesh.
+This was a field in which the Ry was himself a master.  He had ever been
+too high-placed among his own people to trade and barter horses except
+when, sending a score of Romanys on a hunt for wild ponies on the hills
+of Eastern Europe, he had afterwards sold the tamed herd to the highest
+bidders in some Balkan town; but he had an infallible eye for a horse.
+
+It was a curious anomaly also that the one man in Lebanon who would not
+have been expected to love and pursue horse-flesh was the Reverend Reuben
+Tripple to whom Ingolby had given his conge, but who loved a horse as he
+loved himself.
+
+He was indeed a greater expert in horses than in souls.  One of the
+sights of Lebanon had been the appearance in the field of the "Reverend
+Tripple," who owned a great, raw-boned bay mare of lank proportions, the
+winner of a certain great trotting-race which had delighted the mockers.
+
+For two years Jowett had eyed Mr. Tripple's rawbone with a piratical eye.
+
+Though it had won only a single great race, that, in Jowett's view, was
+its master's fault.  As the Arabs say, however, Allah is with the
+patient; and so it was that on the evening of the day in which Ingolby
+met disaster, Mr. Tripple informed Jowett that he was willing to sell his
+rawbone.
+
+He was mounted on the gawky roadster when he met Gabriel Druse making for
+the bridge.  Their greeting was as cordial as hasty.  Anxious as was the
+Ry to learn what was going on in the towns, Jowett's mount caught his
+eye.  It was but a little time since they had met at Ingolby's house, and
+they were both full of the grave events afoot, but here was a horse-deal
+of consequence, and the bridle-rein was looseflung.
+
+"Yes, I got it," said Jowett, with a chuckle, interpreting the old man's
+look.  "I got it for good--a wonder from Wonderville.  Damned queer-
+looking critter, but there, I guess we know what I've got.  Outside like
+a crinoline, inside like a pair of ankles of the Lady Jane Plantagenet.
+Yes, I got it, Mr. Druse, got it dead-on!"
+
+"How?" asked the Ry, feeling the clean fetlocks with affectionate
+approval.
+
+"He's off East, so he says," was the joyous reply; "sudden but sure, and
+I dunno why.  Anyway, he's got the door-handle offered, and he's off
+without his camel."  He stroked the neck of the bay lovingly.  "How
+much?"
+
+Jowett held up his fingers.  The old man lifted his eyebrows quizzically.
+"That-h'm!  Does he preach as well as that?" he asked.
+
+Jowett chuckled.  "He knows the horse-country better than the New
+Jerusalem, I guess; and I wasn't off my feed, nor hadn't lost my head
+neither.  I wanted that dust-hawk, and he knew it; but I got in on him
+with the harness and the sulky.  The bridle he got from a Mexican that
+come up here a year ago, and went broke and then went dead; and there
+being no padre, Tripple did the burying, and he took the bridle as his
+fee, I s'pose.  It had twenty dollars' worth of silver on it--look at
+these conchs."
+
+He trifled with the big beautiful buttons on the head-stall.  "The
+sulky's as good as new, and so's the harness almost; and there's the
+nose-bag and the blankets, and a saddle and a monkey-wrench and two
+bottles of horse-liniment, and odds and ends.  I only paid that"--and he
+held up his fingers again as though it was a sacred rite--"for the lot.
+Not bad, I want to say.  Isn't he good for all day, this one?"
+
+The old man nodded, then turned towards the bridge.  "The gun-shots--
+what?" he asked, setting forward at a walk which taxed the rawbone's
+stride.
+
+"An invite--come to the wedding; that's all.  Only it's a funeral this
+time, and, if something good doesn't happen, there'll be more than one
+funeral on the Sagalac to-morrow.  I've had my try, but I dunno how it'll
+come out.  He's not a man of much dictionary is the Monseenoor."
+
+"The Monseigneur Lourde?  What does he say?"
+
+"He says what we all say, that he is sorry.  'But why have the Orange
+funeral while things are as they are?' he says, and he asks for the red
+flag not to be shook in the face of the bull."
+
+"That is not the talk of a fool, as most priests are," growled the other.
+
+"Sure.  But it wants a real wind-warbler to make them see it in Lebanon.
+They've got the needle.  They'll pray to-day with the taste of blood in
+their mouths.  It's gone too far.  Only a miracle can keep things right.
+The Mayor has wired for the mounted police--our own battalion of militia
+wouldn't serve, and there'd be no use ordering them out--but the Riders
+can't get here in time.  The train's due the very time the funeral's to
+start, but that train's always late, though they say the ingine-driver is
+an Orangeman!  And the funeral will start at the time fixed, or I don't
+know the boys that belong to the lodge.  So it's up to We, Us & Co.  to
+see the thing through, or go bust.  It don't suit me.  It wouldn't have
+been like this, if it hadn't been for what happened to the Chief last
+night.  There's no holding the boys in.  One thing's sure, the Gipsy that
+give Ingolby away has got to lie low if he hasn't got away, or there'll
+be one less of his tribe to eat the juicy hedgehog.  Yes, sir-ee!"
+
+To the last words of Jowett the Ry seemed to pay no attention, though his
+lips shut tight and a menacing look came into his eyes.  They were now
+upon the bridge, and could see what was forward on both sides of the
+Sagalac.  There was unusual bustle and activity in the streets and on the
+river-bank of both towns.  It was noticeable also that though the mills
+were running in Manitou, there were fewer chimneys smoking, and far more
+men in the streets than usual.  Tied up to the Manitou shore were a half-
+dozen cribs or rafts of timber which should be floating eastward down the
+Sagalac.
+
+"If the Monseenoor can't, or don't, step in, we're bound for a shindy
+over a corpse," continued Jowett after a moment.
+
+"Can the Monseigneur cast a spell over them all?" remarked the Ry
+ironically, for he had little faith in priests, though he had for this
+particular one great respect.
+
+"He's a big man, that preelate," answered Jowett quickly and forcibly.
+"He kept the Crees quiet when they was going to rise.  If they'd got up,
+there'd have been hundreds of settlers massacreed.  He risked his life to
+do that--went right into the camp in face of levelled rifles, and sat
+down and begun to talk.  A minute afterwards all the chiefs was
+squatting, too.  Then the tussle begun between a man with a soul and a
+heathen gang that eat dog, kill their old folks, their cripples and their
+deformed children, and run sticks of wood through their bleeding chests,
+just to show that they're heathens.  But he won out, this Jesueete friend
+o' man.  That's why I'm putting my horses and my land and my pants and my
+shirt and the buff that's underneath on the little preelate."
+
+Gabriel Druse's face did not indicate the same confidence.  "It is not an
+age of miracles; the priest is not enough," he said sceptically.
+
+By twos, by threes, by tens, men from Manitou came sauntering across the
+bridge into Lebanon, until a goodly number were scattered at different
+points through the town.  They seemed to distribute themselves by a
+preconceived plan, and they were all habitants.  There were no Russians,
+Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, or Germans among them.  They were low-browed,
+sturdy men, dressed in red or blue serge shirts, some with sashes around
+their waists, some with ear-rings in their ears, some in knee-boots, and
+some with the heavy spiked boots of the river-driver.  None appeared to
+carry any weapon that would shoot, yet in their belts was the sheath-
+knife, the invariable equipment of their class.  It would have seemed
+more suspicious if they had not carried them.  The railwaymen, miners,
+carters, mill-hands, however, appeared to carry nothing save their strong
+arms and hairy hands, and some were as hairy as animals.  These
+backwoodsmen also could, without weapons, turn a town into a general
+hospital.  In battle they fought not only with hands but also with teeth
+and hoofs like wild stallions.  Teeth tore off an ear or sliced away a
+nose, hands smote like hammers or gouged out eyes, and their nailed boots
+were weapons of as savage a kind as could be invented.  They could spring
+and strike an opponent with one foot in the chest or in the face, and
+spoil the face for many a day, or for ever.  It was a gift of the
+backwoods and the lumber-camps, practised in hours of stark monotony when
+the devils which haunt places of isolation devoid of family life, where
+men herd together like dogs in a kennel, break loose.  There the man that
+dips his fingers "friendly-like" in the dish of his neighbour one minute
+wants the eye of that neighbour the next not so much in innate or
+momentary hatred, as in innate savagery and the primeval sense of combat,
+the war which was in the blood of the first man.
+
+The unarmed appearance of these men did not deceive the pioneer folk
+of Lebanon.  To them the time had come when the reactionary forces of
+Manitou must receive a check.  Even those who thought the funeral
+fanatical and provocative were ready to defend it.
+
+The person who liked the whole business least was Rockwell.  He was
+subject to the same weariness of the flesh and fatigue of the spirit as
+all men; yet it was expected of him that at any hour he should be at the
+disposal of suffering humanity--of criminal or idiotic humanity--patient,
+devoted, calm, nervestrung, complete.  He was the one person in the
+community who was the universal necessity, and yet for whom the community
+had no mercy in its troubles or out of them.  There were three doctors in
+Lebanon, but none was an institution, none had prestige save Rockwell,
+and he often wished that he had less prestige, since he cared nothing for
+popularity.
+
+He had made his preparations for possible "accidents" in no happy mood.
+Fresh from the bedside of Ingolby, having had no sleep, and with many
+sick people on his list, he inwardly damned the foolishness of both
+towns.  He even sharply rebuked the Mayor, who urged surgical
+preparations upon him, for not sending sooner to the Government for a
+force which could preserve order or prevent the procession.
+
+It was while he was doing so that Jowett appeared with Gabriel Druse to
+interview the Mayor.
+
+"It's like this," said Jowett.  "In another hour the funeral will start.
+There's a lot of Manitou huskies in Lebanon now, and their feet is
+loaded, if their guns ain't.  They're comin' by driblets, and by-and-bye,
+when they've all distributed themselves, there'll be a marching column of
+them from Manitou.  It's all arranged to make trouble and break the law.
+It's the first real organized set-to we've had between the towns, and
+it'll be nasty.  If the preelate doesn't dope them, there'll be pertikler
+hell to pay."
+
+He then gave the story of his visit to Monseigneur Lourde, and the
+details of what was going forward in Manitou so far as he had learned.
+Also the ubiquitous Osterhaut had not been idle, and his bulletin had
+just been handed to Jowett.
+
+"There's one thing ought to be done and has got to be done," Jowett
+added, "if the Monseenoor don't pull if off.  The leaders have to be
+arrested, and it had better be done by one that, in a way, don't belong
+to either Lebanon or Manitou."
+
+The Mayor shook his head.  "I don't see how I can authorize Marchand's
+arrest--not till he breaks the law, in any case."
+
+"It's against the law to conspire to break the law," replied Jowett.
+"You've been making a lot of special constables.  Make Mr. Gabriel Druse
+here a special constable, then if the law's broke, he can have a right to
+take a hand in."
+
+The giant Ry had stood apart, watchful and ruminant, but he now stepped
+forward, as the Mayor turned to him and stretched out a hand.
+
+"I am for peace," the old man said.  "To keep the peace the law must be
+strong."
+
+In spite of the gravity of the situation the Mayor smiled.  "You wouldn't
+need much disguise to stand for the law, Mr. Druse," he remarked.  "When
+the law is seven feet high, it stands well up."
+
+The Ry did not smile.  "Make me the head of the constables, and I will
+keep the peace," he said.  There was a sudden silence.  The proposal had
+come so quietly, and it was so startling, that even the calm Rockwell was
+taken aback.  But his eye and the eye of the Mayor met, and the look in
+both their faces was the same.
+
+"That's bold play," the Mayor said, "but I guess it goes.  Yesterday it
+couldn't be done.  To-day it can.  The Chief Constable's down with
+smallpox.  Got it from an Injun prisoner days ago.  He's been bad for
+three days, but hung on.  Now he's down, and there's no Chief.  I was
+going to act myself, but the trouble was, if anything happened to me,
+there'd be no head of anything.  It's better to have two strings to your
+bow.  It's a go-it's a straight go, Mr. Druse.  Seven foot of Chief
+Constable ought to have its weight with the roughnecks."
+
+A look of hopefulness came into his face.  This sage, huge, commanding
+figure would have a good moral effect on the rude elements of disorder.
+
+"I'll have you read the Riot Act instead of doing it myself," added the
+Mayor.  "It'll be a good introduction for you, and as you live in
+Manitou, it'll be a knock-out blow to the toughs.  Sometimes one man is
+as good as a hundred.  Come on to the Courthouse with me," he continued
+cheerfully.  "We'll fix the whole thing.  All the special constables are
+waiting there with the regular police.  An extra foot on a captain's
+shoulders is as good as a battery of guns."
+
+"You're sure it's according to Hoyle?" asked Jowett quizzically.
+
+He was so delighted that he felt he must "make the Mayor show off self,"
+as he put it afterwards.  He did not miscalculate; the Mayor rose to his
+challenge.
+
+"I'm boss of this show," he said, "and I can go it alone if necessary
+when the town's in danger and the law's being hustled.  I've had a
+meeting of the Council and I've got the sailing-orders I want.  I'm boss
+of the place, and Mr. Druse is my--" he stopped, because there was a look
+in the eyes of the Ry which demanded consideration--"And Mr. Druse is
+lawboss," he added.
+
+The old ineradicable look of command shone in the eyes of Gabriel Druse.
+Leadership was written all over him.  Power spoke in every motion.  The
+square, unbowed shoulders, the heavily lined face, with the patriarchal
+beard, the gnarled hands, the rough-hewn limbs, the eye of bright,
+brooding force proclaimed authority.
+
+Indeed in that moment there came into the face of the old Nomad the look
+it had not worn for many a day.  The self-exiled ruler had paid a heavy
+price for his daughter's vow, though he had never acknowledged it to
+himself.  His self-ordained impotency, in a camp that was never moved,
+within walls which never rose with the sunset and fell with the morning;
+where his feet trod the same roadway day after day; where no man asked
+for justice or sought his counsel or fell back on his protection; where
+he drank from the same spring and tethered his horse in the same paddock
+from morn to morn: all these things had eaten at his heart and bowed his
+spirit in spite of himself.
+
+He was not now of the Romany world, and he was not of the Gorgio world;
+but here at last was the old thing come back to him in a new way, and his
+bones rejoiced.  He would entitle his daughter to her place among the
+Gorgios.  Perhaps also it would be given him, in the name of the law, to
+deal with a man he hated.
+
+"We've got Mister Marchand now," said Jowett softly to the old chieftain.
+
+The Ry's eyes lighted and his jaw set.  He did not speak, but his hands
+clenched, opened and clenched again.  Jowett saw and grinned.
+
+"The Mayor and the law-boss'll win out, I guess," he said to himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE MONSEIGNEUR AND THE NOMAD
+
+Even more than Dr. Rockwell, Berry, the barber, was the most troubled man
+in Lebanon on the day of the Orange funeral.  Berry was a good example of
+an unreasoning infatuation.  The accident which had come to his idol,
+with the certain fall of his fortunes, hit him so hard, that, for the
+first time since he became a barber, his razor nipped the flesh of more
+than one who sat in his red-upholstered chair.
+
+In his position, Berry was likely to hear whatever gossip was going.  Who
+shall have perfect self-control with a giant bib under the chin, tipped
+back on a chair that cannot be regulated, with a face covered by lather,
+and two plantation fingers holding the nose?  In these circumstances,
+with much diplomacy, Berry corkscrewed his way into confidence, and when
+he dipped a white cloth in bay-rum and eau-de-cologne, and laid it over
+the face of the victim, with the finality of a satisfied inquisitor, it
+was like giving the last smother to human individuality.  An artist after
+his kind, he no sooner got what he wanted than he carefully coaxed his
+victim away from thoughts of the disclosures into the vague distance of
+casual gossip once more.
+
+Gradually and slowly he shepherded his patient back to the realms of
+self-respect and individual personality.  The border-line was at the
+point where the fingers of his customer fluttered at a collar-button; for
+Berry, who realized the power that lies in making a man look ridiculous,
+never allowed a customer to be shaved or have his hair cut with a collar
+on.  When his customers had corns, off came the boots also, and then
+Berry's triumph over the white man was complete.  To call attention to an
+exaggerated bunion when the odorous towel lay upon the hidden features of
+what once was a "human," was the last act in the drama of the Unmaking of
+Man.
+
+Only when the client had felt in his pocket for the price of the flaying,
+and laid it, with a ten-cent fee, on the ledge beneath the mirror, where
+all the implements of the inquisition and the restoration were assembled,
+did he feel manhood restored.  If, however, he tried to keep a vow of
+silence in the chair of execution, he paid a heavy price; for Berry had
+his own methods of punishment.  A little tighter grasp of the nose; a
+little rougher scrape of the razor, and some sharp, stinging liquid
+suddenly slapped with a cold palm on the excoriated spot, with the
+devilish hypocrisy of healing it; a longer smothering-period under the
+towel, when the corners of it were tucked behind the ears and a crease of
+it in the mouth-all these soon induced vocal expression again, and Berry
+started on his inquisition with gentle certainty.  When at last he dusted
+the face with a little fine flour of oatmeal, "to heal the cuticle and
+'manoor' the roots," and smelled with content the hands which had
+embalmed the hair in verbena-scented oil, a man left his presence
+feeling that he was ready for the wrath to come.
+
+Such was Berry when he had under his razor one of Ingolby's business foes
+of Manitou, who had of late been in touch with Felix Marchand.  Both were
+working for the same end, but with different intentions.  Marchand worked
+with that inherent devilishness which sometimes takes possession of low
+minds; but the other worked as he would have done against his own
+brother, for his own business success; and it was his view that one man
+could only succeed by taking the place of another, as though the Age of
+Expansion had ceased and the Age of Smother had begun.
+
+From this client while in a state of abject subjection, Berry, whose
+heart was hard that day, but whose diplomacy was impeccable, discovered
+a thing of moment.  There was to be a procession of strikers from two
+factories in Manitou, who would throw down their tools or leave their
+machines at a certain moment.  Falling into line these strikers would
+march across the bridge between the towns at such time as would bring
+them into touch with the line of the Orange funeral--two processions
+meeting at right angles.  If neither procession gave way, the Orange
+funeral could be broken up, ostensibly not from religious fanaticism,
+but from the "unhappy accident" of two straight lines colliding.  It was
+a juicy plot; and in a few minutes the Mayor and Gabriel Druse knew of
+it from the faithful Berry.
+
+The bell of the meeting-house began to toll as the Orangeman whose death
+had caused such commotion was carried to the waiting carriage where he
+would ride alone.  Almost simultaneously with the starting of the gaudy
+yet sombre Orange cortege, with its yellow scarfs, glaring banners,
+charcoal plumes and black clothes, the labour procession approached the
+Manitou end of the Sagalac bridge.  The strikers carried only three or
+four banners, but they had a band of seven pieces, with a drum and a pair
+of cymbals.  With frequent discord, but with much spirit, the Bleaters,
+as these musicians were called in Lebanon, inspired the steps of the
+Manitou fanatics and toughs.  As they came upon the bridge they were
+playing a gross paraphrase of The Marseillaise.
+
+At the head of the Orange procession was a silver-cornet band which the
+enterprise of Lebanon had made possible.  Its leader was a ne'er-do-well
+young Welshman, who had been dismissed from leadership after leadership
+of bands in the East till at last he had drifted into Lebanon.  Here,
+strange to say, he had never been drunk but once; and that was the night
+before he married the widow of a local publican, who had a nice little
+block of stock in one of Ingolby's railways, which yielded her seven per
+cent., and who knew how to handle the citizens of the City of Booze.
+When she married Tom Straker, her first husband, he drank on an average
+twenty whiskies a day.  She got him down to one; and then he died and had
+as fine a funeral as a judge.  There were those who said that if Tom's
+whiskies hadn't been cut down so--but there it was: Tom was in the bosom
+of Abraham, and William Jones, who was never called anything else than
+Willy Welsh, had been cut down from his unrecorded bibulations to none at
+all; but he smoked twenty-cent cigars at the ex-widow's expense.
+
+To-day Willy Welsh played with heart and courage, "I'm Going Home to
+Glory," at the head of the Orange procession; for who that has faced such
+a widow as was his for one whole year could fear the onset of faction
+fighters!  Besides, as the natives of the South Seas will never eat a
+Chinaman, so a Western man will never kill a musician.  Senators,
+magistrates, sheriffs, police, gamblers, horse-stealers, bankers, and
+broncho-riders all die unnatural deaths at times, but a musician in the
+West is immune from all except the hand of Fate.  Not one can be spared.
+Even a tough convicted of cheating at cards, or breaking a boom on a
+river, has escaped punishment because he played the concertina.
+
+The discord and jangle between the two bands was the first collision of
+this fateful day.  While yet there was a space between the two
+processions, the bands broke into furious contest.  It was then that,
+through the long funeral line, men with hard-set faces came closer up
+together, and forty, detaching themselves from the well-kept run of
+marching lodgemen, closed up around the horses and the hearse, making a
+solid flanking force.  At stated intervals also, outside the lodgemen in
+the lines, were special constables, many of whom had been the stage-
+drivers, hunters, cattlemen, prospectors, and pioneers of the early days.
+Most of them had come of good religious stock-Presbyterians, Baptists,
+Methodists, Unitarians; and though they had little piety, and had never
+been able to regain the religious customs and habits of their childhood,
+they "Stood for the Thing the Old Folks stand for."  They were in a mood
+which would tear cotton, as the saying was.  There was not one of them
+but expected that broken heads and bloodshed would be the order of the
+day, and they were stonily, fearlessly prepared for the worst.
+
+Since the appearance of Gabriel Druse on the scene, the feeling had grown
+that the luck would be with them.  When he started at the head of the
+cortege, they could scarce forbear to cheer.  Such a champion in
+appearance had never been seen in the West, and, the night before,
+he had proved his right to the title by shaking a knot of toughs into
+spots of disconcerted humanity.
+
+As they approached the crossroads of the bridge, his voice, clear and
+sonorous, could be heard commanding the Orange band to cease playing.
+
+When the head of the funeral procession was opposite the bridge--the
+band, the hearse, the bodyguard of the hearse--Gabriel Druse stood aside,
+and took his place at the point where the lines of the two processions
+would intersect.
+
+It was at this moment that the collision came.  There were only about
+sixty feet of space between the two processions, when a voice rang out in
+a challenge so offensive, that the men of Manitou got their cue for
+attack without creating it themselves.  Every Orangeman of the Lodge of
+Lebanon afterwards denied that he had raised the cry; and the chances are
+that every one spoke the truth.  It was like Felix Marchand to arrange
+for just such an episode, and so throw the burden of responsibility on
+the Orangemen.
+
+"To hell with the Pope!  To hell with the Pope!" the voice rang out, and
+it had hardly ceased before the Manitou procession made a rush forward.
+The apparent leader of the Manitou roughs was a blackbearded man of
+middle height, who spoke raucously to the crowd behind him.
+
+Suddenly a powerful voice rang out.
+
+"Halt, in the name of the Queen!" it called.  Surprise is the very
+essence of successful war.  The roughs of Manitou had not looked for
+this.  They had foreseen the appearance of the official Chief Constable
+of Lebanon; they had expected his challenge and warning in the
+vernacular; but here was something which struck them with consternation
+--first, the giant of Manitou in the post of command, looking like some
+berserker; and then the formal reading of that stately document in the
+name of the Queen.
+
+Far back in the minds of every French habitant present was the old
+monarchical sense.  He makes, at worst, a poor anarchist, though he is a
+good revolutionist; and the French colonials had never been divorced from
+monarchical France.
+
+In the eyes of the most forward of those on the Sagalac bridge, there
+was a sudden wonderment and confusion.  To the dramatic French mind,
+ceremonial is ever welcome; and for a moment it had them in its grip,
+as old Gabriel Druse read out in his ringing voice, the trenchant royal
+summons.
+
+It was a strange and dramatic scene--the Orange funeral standing still,
+garish yet solemn, with hundreds of men, rough and coarse, quiet and
+refined, dissolute and careless, sober and puritanic, broad and tolerant,
+sharp and fanatical; the labour procession, polyglot in appearance, but
+with Gallic features and looseness of dress predominating; excitable,
+brutish, generous, cruel; without intellect, but with an intelligence
+which in the lowest was acute, and with temperaments responsive to drama.
+
+As Druse read, his eyes now and then flashed, at first he knew not why,
+to the slim, bearded figure of the apparent leader.  At length he caught
+the feverish eye of the man, and held it for a moment.  It was familiar,
+but it eluded him; he could not place it.
+
+He heard, however, Jowett's voice say to him, scarce above a whisper:
+
+"It's Felix Marchand, boss!"
+
+Jowett also had been puzzled at first by the bearded figure, but it
+suddenly flashed upon him that the beard and wig were a disguise, that
+Marchand had resorted to Ingolby's device.  It might prove as dangerous
+a stratagem with him as it had to Ingolby.
+
+There was a moment's hesitation after Druse had finished reading--as
+though the men of Manitou had not quite recovered from their surprise--
+then the man with the black beard said something to those nearest him.
+There was a start forward, and someone cried, "Down with the Orangemen
+--et bas l'Orange!"
+
+Like a well-disciplined battalion the Orangemen rolled up quickly into a
+compact mass, showing that they had planned their defence well, and the
+moment was black with danger, when, suddenly, Druse strode forward.
+Flinging right and left two or three river-drivers, he caught the man
+with the black beard, snatched him out from among the oncoming crowd,
+and tore off the black beard and wig.  Felix Marchand stood exposed.
+
+A cry of fury rang out from the Orangemen behind, and a dozen men rushed
+forward, but Gabriel Druse acted with the instant decision of a real
+commander.  Seeing that it would be a mistake to arrest Marchand at that
+moment, he raised the struggling figure of the wrecker above his head
+and, with Herculean effort, threw him up over the heads of the Frenchmen
+in front of him.
+
+So extraordinary was the sight that, as if fascinated, the crowd before
+and behind followed the action with staring eyes and tense bodies.  The
+faces of all the contending forces were as concentrated for the instant,
+as though the sun were falling out of the sky.  It was so great a feat,
+one so much in consonance with the spirit of the frontier world, that
+gasps of praise broke from both crowds.  As though it were a thunderbolt,
+the Manitou roughs standing where Marchand was like to fall, instead of
+trying to catch him, broke away from beneath the bundle of falling
+humanity, and Marchand fell on the dusty cement of the bridge with a dull
+thud, like a bag of bones.
+
+For a moment there was no motion on the part of either procession.
+Banners drooped and swayed as the men holding them were lost in the
+excitement.
+
+Time had only been gained, however.  There was no reason to think that
+the trouble was over, or that the special constables who had gathered
+close behind Gabriel Druse would not have to strike heavy blows for the
+cause of peace.
+
+The sudden appearance of a new figure in the narrow, open space between
+the factions in that momentary paralysis was not a coincidence.  It was
+what Jowett had planned for, the factor for peace in which he most
+believed.
+
+A small, spare man in a scarlet cassock, white chasuble, and black
+biretta, suddenly stole out from the crowd on the Lebanon side of the
+bridge, carrying the elements of the Mass.  His face was shining white,
+and in the eyes was an almost unearthly fire.  It was the beloved
+Monseigneur Lourde.
+
+Raising the elements before him toward his own people on the bridge, he
+cried in a high, searching voice:
+
+"I prayed with you, I begged you to preserve the peace.  Last night I
+asked you in God's name to give up your disorderly purposes.  I thought
+then I had done my whole duty; but the voice of God has spoken to me.
+An hour ago I carried the elements to a dying woman here in Lebanon, and
+gave her peace.  As I did so the funeral bell rang out, and it came to
+me, as though the One above had spoken, that peace would be slain and His
+name insulted by all of you--by all of you, Catholic and Protestant.
+God's voice bade me come to you from the bed of one who has gone hence
+from peace to Peace.  In the name of Christ, peace, I say!  Peace, in the
+name of Christ!"
+
+He raised the sacred vessel high above his head, so that his eyes looked
+through the walls of his uplifted arms.  "Kneel!" he called in a clear,
+ringing voice which yet quavered with age.
+
+There was an instant's hush, and then great numbers of the crowd in front
+of him, toughs and wreckers, blasphemers, turbulent ones and evil-livers,
+yet Catholics all, with the ancient root of the Great Thing in them, sank
+down; and the banners of the labour societies drooped before the symbol
+of peace won by sacrifice.
+
+Even the Orangemen bared their heads in the presence of that Popery which
+was anathema to them, which they existed to combat, and had been taught
+to hate.  Some, no doubt, would rather have fought than have had peace at
+the price; but they could not free their minds from the sacred force
+which had brought most of the crowd of faction-fighters to their knees.
+
+With a wave of the hand, Gabriel Druse ordered the cortege forward, and
+silently the procession with its yellow banners and its sable, drooping
+plumes moved on.
+
+Once on its way again, Willy Welsh and his silver-cornet band struck up
+the hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light."  It was the one real coincidence of the
+day that this moving hymn was written by a cardinal of the Catholic
+Church.  It was also an irony that, as the crowd of sullen Frenchmen
+turned back to Manitou, the train bearing the Mounted Police, for whom
+the Mayor had sent to the capital, steamed noisily in, and redcoats
+showed at its windows and on the steps of the cars.
+
+The only casualty that the day saw was the broken arm and badly bruised
+body of Felix Marchand, who was gloomily helped back to his home across
+the Sagalac.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE BEACONS
+
+There were few lights showing in Lebanon or Manitou; but here and
+there along the Sagalac was the fading glimmer of a camp-fire, and in
+Tekewani's reservation one light glowed softly like a star.  It came
+from a finely-made and chased safety-lantern given to Tekewani by the
+Government, as a symbol of honour for having kept the braves quiet when
+an Indian and half-breed rising was threatened; and to the powerless
+chief it had become a token of his authority, the sign of the Great White
+Mother's approval.  By day a spray of eagle's feathers waved over his
+tepee, but the gleam of the brass lantern every night was like a sentry
+at the doorway of a monarch.
+
+It was a solace to his wounded spirit; it allayed the smart of
+subjection; made him feel himself a ruler in retirement, even as Gabriel
+Druse was a self-ordained exile.
+
+These two men, representing the primitive nomad life, had been drawn
+together in friendship.  So much so, that to Tekewani alone of all the
+West, Druse gave his confidence and told his story.  It came in the
+springtime, when the blood of the young bucks was simmering and, the
+ancient spell was working.  There had preceded them generations of
+hunters who had slain their thousands and their tens of thousands of wild
+animals and the fowls of the air; had killed their enemies in battle; had
+seized the comely women of their foes and made them their own.  No thrill
+of the hunter's trail now drew off the overflow of desire.  In the days
+of rising sap, there were only the young maidens or wives of their own
+tribe to pursue, and it lacked in glory.  Also in the springtime,
+Tekewani himself had his own trials, for in his blood the old medicine
+stirred.  His face turned towards the prairie North and the mountain West
+where yet remained the hunter's quarry; and he longed to be away with
+rifle and gun, with his squaw and the papooses trailing after like camp-
+followers, to eat the fruits of victory.  But that could not be; he must
+remain in the place the Great White Mother had reserved for him; he and
+his braves must assemble, and draw their rations at the appointed times
+and seasons, and grunt thanks to those who ruled over them.
+
+It was on one of these virginal days, when there was a restless stirring
+among the young bucks, who smelled the wide waters, the pines and the
+wild shrubs; who heard the cry of the loon on the lonely lake and the
+whir of the wild duck's wings, who answered to the phantom cry of ancient
+war; it was on such a day that the two chiefs opened their hearts to each
+other.
+
+Near to the boscage on a little hill overlooking the great river, Gabriel
+Druse had come upon Tekewani seated in the pine-dust, rocking to and fro,
+and chanting a low, sorrowful refrain, with eyes fixed on the setting
+sun.  And the Ry of Rys understood, with the understanding which only
+those have who live close to the earth, and also near to the heavens of
+their own gods.  He sat down beside the forlorn chief, and in the silence
+their souls spoke to each other.  There swept into the veins of the
+Romany ruler something of the immitigable sadness of the Indian chief;
+and, with a sudden premonition that he also was come to the sunset of his
+life, his big nomad eyes sought the westering rim of the heavens, and his
+breast heaved.
+
+In that hour the two men declared themselves to each other, and Gabriel
+Druse told Tekewani all that he had hidden from the people of the
+Sagalac, and was answered in kind.  It seemed to them that they were as
+brothers who were one and who had parted in ages long gone; and having
+met were to part and disappear once more, beginning still another trail
+in an endless reincarnation.
+
+"Brother," said Tekewani, "it was while there was a bridge of land
+between the continents at the North that we met.  Again I see it.  I
+forgot it, but again I see.  There was war, and you went upon one path
+and I upon another, and we met no more under all the moons till now."
+
+"'Dordi', so it was and at such a time," answered the Ry of Rys.  "And
+once more we will follow after the fire-flies which give no light to the
+safe places but only lead farther into the night."
+
+Tekewani rocked to and fro again, muttering to himself, but presently he
+said:
+
+"We eat from the hands of those who have driven away the buffalo, the
+deer, and the beaver; and the young bucks do naught to earn the joy of
+women.  They are but as lusting sheep, not as the wild-goat that chases
+its mate over the places of death, till it comes upon her at last, and
+calls in triumph over her as she kneels at his feet.  So it is.  Like
+tame beasts we eat from the hand of the white man, and the white man
+leaves his own camp where his own women are, and prowls in our camps,
+so that not even our own women are left to us."
+
+It was then that Gabriel Druse learned of the hatred of Tekewani for
+Felix Marchand, because of what he had done in the reservation, prowling
+at night like a fox or a coyote in the folds.
+
+They parted that hour, believing that the epoch of life in which they
+were and the fortunes of time which had been or were to come, were but
+turns of a wheel that still went on turning; and that whatever chanced
+of good or bad fortune in the one span of being, might be repaired in
+the next span, or the next, or the next; so, through their creed of
+reincarnation, taking courage to face the failure of the life they now
+lived.  Not by logic or the teaching of any school had they reached this
+revelation, but through an inner sense.  They were not hopeful and
+wondering and timid; they were only sure.  Their philosophy, their
+religion, whether heathen or human, was inborn.  They had comfort in it
+and in each other.
+
+After that day Gabriel Druse always set a light in his window which
+burned all night, answering to the lantern-light at the door of
+Tekewani's home--the lights of exile and of an alliance which had
+behind it the secret influences of past ages and vanished peoples.
+
+There came a night, however, when the light at the door of Tekewani's
+tepee did not burn.  At sunset it was lighted, but long before midnight
+it was extinguished.  Looking out from the doorway of his home (it was
+the night after the Orange funeral), Gabriel Druse, returned from his new
+duties at Lebanon, saw no light in the Indian reservation.  With anxiety,
+he set forth in the shine of the moon to visit it.
+
+Arrived at the chief's tepee, he saw that the lantern of honour was gone,
+and waking Tekewani, he brought him out to see.  When the old Indian knew
+his loss, he gave a harsh cry and stooped, and, gathering a handful of
+dust from the ground, sprinkled it on his head.  Then with arms
+outstretched he cursed the thief who had robbed him of what had been
+to him like a never-fading mirage, an illusion blinding his eyes to the
+bitter facts of his condition.
+
+To his mind all the troubles come to Lebanon and Manitou had had one
+source; and now the malign spirit had stretched its hand to spoil those
+already dispossessed of all but the right to live.  One name was upon the
+lips of both men, as they stood in the moonlight by Tekewani's tepee.
+
+"There shall be an end of this," growled the Romany.
+
+"I will have my own," said Tekewani, with malediction on the thief who
+had so shamed him.
+
+Black anger was in the heart of Gabriel Druse as he turned again towards
+his own home, and he was glad of what he had done to Felix Marchand at
+the Orange funeral.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE KEEPER OF THE BRIDGE
+
+     "Like the darkness of the grave, which is darkness itself--"
+
+Most of those who break out of the zareba of life, who lay violent hands
+upon themselves, do so with a complete reasoning, which in itself is
+proof of their insanity.  It may be domestic tragedy, or ill-health,
+or crime, or broken faith, or shame, or insomnia, or betrayed trust--
+whatever it is, many a one who suffers from such things, tries to end it
+all with that deliberation, that strategy, and that cunning which belong
+only to the abnormal.
+
+A mind which has known a score or more of sleepless nights acquires an
+invincible clearness of its own, seeing an end which is without
+peradventure.  It finds a hundred perfect reasons for not going on, every
+one of which is in itself sufficient; every one of which knits into the
+other ninety and nine with inevitable affinity.
+
+To the mind of Ingolby came a hundred such reasons for breaking out of
+life's enclosure, as the effect of the opiate Rockwell had given him wore
+off, and he regained consciousness.  As he did so, someone in the room
+was telling of that intervention of Gabriel Druse and the Monseigneur at
+the Orange funeral, which had saved the situation.  At first he listened
+to what was said--it was the nurse talking to Jim Beadle with no sharp
+perception of the significance of the story; though it slowly pierced the
+lethargy of his senses, and he turned over in the bed to face the
+watchers.
+
+"What time is it, Jim?" he asked heavily.  They told him it was sunset.
+
+"Is it quiet in both towns?" he asked after a pause.  They told him that
+it was.
+
+"Any telegrams for me?" he asked.
+
+There was an instant's hesitation.  They had had no instructions on this
+point, and they hardly knew what to say; but Jim's mind had its own
+logic, and the truth seemed best to him now.  He answered that there were
+several wires, but that they "didn't amount to nothin'."
+
+"Have they been opened?" Ingolby asked with a frown, half-raising
+himself.  It was hard to resign the old masterfulness and self-will.
+
+"I'd like to see anybody open 'em 'thout my pe'mision," answered Jim
+imperiously.  "When you's asleep, Chief, I'm awake; and I take care of
+you' things, same as ever I done.  There ain't no wires been opened, and
+there ain't goin' to be whiles I'm runnin' the show for you."
+
+"Open and read them to me," commanded Ingolby.  Again Ingolby was
+conscious of hesitation on Jim's part.  Already the acuteness of the
+blind was possessing him, sharpening the senses left unimpaired.
+Although Jim moved, presumably, towards the place where the telegrams
+lay, Ingolby realized that his own authority was being crossed by that
+of the doctor and the nurse.
+
+"You will leave the room for a moment, nurse," he said with a brassy
+vibration in the voice--a sign of nervous strain.  With a smothered
+protest the nurse left, and Jim stood beside the bed with the telegrams.
+
+"Read them to me, Jim," Ingolby repeated irritably.  "Be quick."
+
+They were not wires which Ingolby should have heard at the time, when his
+wound was still inflamed, when he was still on the outer circle of that
+artificial sleep which the opiates had secured.  They were from Montreal
+and New York, and, resolved from their half-hidden suggestion into bare
+elements, they meant that henceforth others would do the work he had
+done.  They meant, in effect, that save for the few scores of thousand
+dollars he had made, he was now where he was when he came West.
+
+When Jim had finished reading them, Ingolby sank back on the pillows and
+said quietly:
+
+"All right, Jim.  Put them in the drawer of the table and I'll answer
+them to-morrow.  I want to get a little more sleep, so give me a drink,
+and then leave me alone--both nurse and you--till I ring the bell.
+There's a bell on the table, isn't there?"
+
+He stretched out a hand towards the table beside the bed, and Jim softly
+pushed the bell under his fingers.
+
+"That's right," he added.  "Now, I'm not to be disturbed unless the
+doctor comes.  I'm all right, and I want to be alone and quiet.  No one
+at all in the room is what I want.  You understand, Jim?"
+
+"My head's just as good to get at what you want as ever it was, and you
+goin' have what you want, I guess, while I'm on deck," was Jim's reply.
+
+Jim put a glass of water into his hand.  He drank very slowly, was indeed
+only mechanically conscious that he was drinking, for his mind was far
+away.
+
+After he had put the glass down, Jim still stood beside the bed, looking
+at him.
+
+"Why don't you go, as I tell you, Jim?" Ingolby asked wearily.
+
+"I'm goin'"--Jim tucked the bedclothes in carefully--"I'm goin', but,
+boss, I jes' want to say dat dis thing goin' to come out all right bime-
+by.  There ain't no doubt 'bout dat.  You goin' see everything, come jes'
+like what you want--suh!"
+
+Ingolby did not reply.  He held out his hand, and black fingers shot over
+and took it.  A moment later the blind man was alone in the room.
+
+The light of day vanished, and the stars came out.  There was no moon,
+but it was one of those nights of the West when millions of stars glimmer
+in the blue vault above, and every planet and every star and cluster of
+stars are so near that it might almost seem they could be caught by an
+expert human hand.  The air was very still, and a mantle of peace was
+spread over the tender scene.  The window and the glass doors that gave
+from Ingolby's room upon the veranda on the south side of the house, were
+open, and the air was warm as in Midsummer.  Now and then the note of a
+night-bird broke the stillness, but nothing more.
+
+It was such a night as Ingolby loved; it was such a night as often found
+him out in the restful gloom of the trees, thinking and brooding,
+planning, revelling in memories of books he had read, and in dreaming of
+books he might write-if there were time.  Such a night insulated the dark
+moods which possessed him occasionally almost as effectively as fishing
+did; and that was saying much.
+
+But the darkest mood of all his days was upon him now.  When Rockwell
+came, soon after Jim and the nurse left him, he simulated sleep, for he
+had no mind to talk; and the doctor, deceived by his even breathing, had
+left, contented.  At last he was wholly alone with his own thoughts, as
+he desired.  From the moment Jim had read him the wires, which were the
+real revelation of the situation to which he had come, he had been
+travelling hard on the road leading to a cul-de-sac, from which there
+was no egress save by breaking through the wall.  Never, it might have
+seemed, had his mind been clearer, but it was a clearness belonging to
+the abnormal.  It was a straight line of thought which, in its intensity,
+gathered all other thoughts into its wake, reduced them to the control of
+an obsession.  It was borne in on his mind that his day was done, that
+nothing could right the disorder which had strewn his path with broken
+hopes and shattered ambitions.  No life-work left, no schemes to
+accomplish, no construction to achieve, no wealth to gain, no public
+good to be won, no home to be his, no woman, his very own, to be his
+counsellor and guide in the natural way!
+
+As myriad thoughts drove through his brain on this Indian-summer night,
+they all merged into the one obsession that he could no longer stay.  The
+irresistible logic of the brain stretched to an abnormal tenuity, and an
+intolerable brightness was with him.  He was in the throes of that
+intense visualization which comes with insomnia, when one is awake yet
+apart from the waking world, where nothing is really real and nothing
+normal.  He had a call to go hence, and he must go.  Minute after minute
+passed, hours passed, and the fight of the soul to maintain itself
+against the disordered mind went on.  All his past seemed but part
+of a desert, lonely and barren and strange.
+
+In the previous year he had made a journey to Arizona with Jowett, to see
+some railway construction there, and at a ranch he had visited he came
+upon some verses which had haunted his mind ever since.  They fastened
+upon his senses now.  They were like a lonesome monotone which at length
+gave calm to his torturing reflections.  In his darkness the verses kept
+repeating themselves:
+
+         "I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still
+          There was Winter in my world and in my heart:
+          A breath came from the mesa and a message stirred my will,
+          And my soul and I arose up to depart.
+
+          I heard the desert calling; and I knew that over there,
+          In an olive-sheltered garden where the mesquite grows,
+          Was a woman of the sunrise, with the starshine in her hair,
+          And a beauty that the almond-blossom blows.
+
+          In the night-time when the ghost-trees glimmered in the moon,
+          Where the mesa by the watercourse was spanned,
+          Her loveliness enwrapped me like the blessedness of June,
+          And all my life was thrilling in her hand.
+
+          I hear the desert calling, and my heart stands still;
+          There is Summer in my world and in my heart;
+          A breath comes from the mesa, and a will beyond my will
+          Binds my footsteps as I rise up to depart."
+
+This strange, half-mystic song of the mesa and the olive-groves, of the
+ghost-trees and the moon, kept playing upon his own heated senses like
+the spray from a cooling stream, and at last it quieted him.  The dark
+spirit of self-destruction loosened its hold.
+
+His brain had been strained beyond the normal, almost unconsciously his
+fingers had fastened on the pistol in the drawer of the table by his bed.
+It had been there since the day when he had travelled down from Alaska--
+loaded as it had been when he had carried it down the southern trail.
+But as his fingers tightened on the little engine of death, from the
+words which had been ringing in his brain came the flash of a revelation:
+
+              ".  .  .  And a will beyond my will
+               Binds my footsteps as I rise up to depart."
+
+A will beyond his will!  It was as though Fleda's fingers were laid upon
+his own; as though she whispered in his ear and her breath swept his
+cheek; as though she was there in the room beside him, making the
+darkness light, tempering the wind of chastisement to his naked soul.
+In the overstrain of his nervous system the illusion was powerful.  He
+thought he heard her voice.  The pistol slipped from his fingers, and he
+fell back on the pillow with a sigh.  The will beyond his will bound his
+footsteps.
+
+Who can tell?  The grim, malign experience of Fleda in her bedroom with
+the Thing she thought was from beyond the bounds of her own life; the
+voice that spoke to Ingolby, and the breath that swept over his cheek
+were, perhaps, as real in a sense as would have been the corporeal
+presence of Jethro Fawe in one case and of Fleda Druse in the other.
+It may be that in very truth Fleda Druse's spirit with its poignant
+solicitude controlled his will as he "rose up to depart."  But if it was
+only an illusion, it was not less a miracle.  Some power of suggestion
+bound his fleeing footsteps, drew him back from the Brink.
+
+He slept.  Once the nurse came and looked at him and returned to the
+other room; and twice Jim stole in silently for a moment and retired
+again to his own chamber.  The stars shone in at the doors that opened
+out from the quiet room into the night, the watch beside the bed ticked
+on, the fox-terrier which always slept on a mat at the foot of the bed
+sighed in content, while his master breathed heavily in a sleep full of
+dreams that hurried past like phantasmagoria--of a hundred things that
+had been in his life, and that had never been; of people he had known,
+distorted, ridiculous and tremendous.  There were dreams of fiddlers and
+barbers, of crowds writhing in passion in a room where there was a
+billiard-table and a lucky horseshoe on the wall.  There were dreams that
+tossed and mingled in one whirlpool vision; and then at last came a dream
+which was so cruel and clear that it froze his senses.
+
+It was the dream of a great bridge over a swiftflowing river; of his own
+bridge over the Sagalacof that bridge being destroyed by men who crept
+through the night with dynamite in their hands.
+
+With a hoarse, smothered cry he awoke.  His eyes opened wide.  His heart
+was beating like a hammer against his side.  Only the terrier at his feet
+heard the muttered agony.  With an instinct all its own, it slipped to
+the floor.
+
+It watched its master get out of bed, cross the room and feel for a coat
+along the wall--an overcoat which he used as a dressing-gown at times.
+Putting it on hastily, with outstretched hands Ingolby felt his way to
+the glass doors opening on the veranda.  The dog, as though to let him
+know he was there, rubbed against his legs.  Ingolby murmured a soft,
+unintelligible word, and, in his bare feet, passed out on to the veranda,
+and from there to the garden and towards the gate at the front of the
+house.
+
+The nurse heard the gate click lightly, but she was only half-awake, and
+as all was quiet in the next room, she composed herself in her chair
+again with the vain idea that she was not sleeping.  And Jim the faithful
+one, as though under a narcotic of fate, was snoring softly beside the
+vacant room.  The streets were still.  No lights burned anywhere so far
+as eye could see.  But now and then, in the stillness through which the
+river flowed on, murmuring and rhythmic, there rose the distant sounds of
+disorderly voices.  Ingolby was in a state which was neither sleep nor
+waking, which was in part delirium, in part oblivion to all things in the
+world save one--an obsession so complete, that he moved automatically
+through the street in which he lived towards that which led to the
+bridge.
+
+His terrier, as though realizing exactly what he wished, seemed to guide
+him by rubbing against his legs, and even pressing hard against them when
+he was in any danger of losing the middle of the road, or swerving
+towards a ditch or some obstruction.  Only once did they pass any human
+being, and that was when they came upon a camp of road-builders, where a
+red light burned, and two men slept in the open by a dying fire.  One of
+them raised his head when Ingolby passed, but being more than half-
+asleep, and seeing only a man and a dog, thought nothing of it, and
+dropped back again upon his rough pillow.  He was a stranger to Lebanon,
+and there was little chance of his recognizing Ingolby in the semi-
+darkness.
+
+As they neared the river, Ingolby became deeply agitated.  He moved with
+his hands outstretched.  Had it not been for his dog he would probably
+have walked into the Sagalac; for though he seemed to have an instinct
+that was extra-natural, he swayed and staggered in the delirium driving
+him on.  There was one dreadful moment when, having swerved from the road
+leading on to the bridge, he was within a foot of the river-bank.  One
+step farther, and he would have plunged down thirty feet into the stream,
+to be swept to the Rapids below.
+
+But for the first time the terrier made a sound.  He gave a whining bark
+almost human in its meaning, and threw himself at the legs of his master,
+pushing him backwards and over towards the road leading upon the bridge,
+as a collie guides sheep.  Presently Ingolby felt the floor of the bridge
+under his feet; and now he hastened on, with outstretched arms and head
+bent forward, listening intently, the dog trotting beside, with what
+knowledge working in him Heaven alone knew.
+
+The roar of the Rapids below was a sonorous accompaniment to Ingolby's
+wild thoughts.  One thing only he felt, one thing only heard--the men in
+Barbazon's Tavern saying that the bridge should be blown up on the
+Saturday night; and this was Saturday night--the night of the day
+following that of the Orange funeral.  He had heard the criminal hireling
+of Felix Marchand say that it should be done at midnight, and that the
+explosive should be laid under that part of the bridge which joined the
+Manitou bank of the Sagalac.  As though in very truth he saw with his
+eyes, he stopped short not far from the point where the bridge joined the
+land, and stood still, listening.
+
+For several minutes he was motionless, intent, as an animal waiting for
+its foe.  At last his newly-sensitive ears heard footsteps approaching
+and low voices. The footsteps came nearer, the voices, though so low,
+became more distinct.  They were now not fifty feet away, but to the
+delirious Ingolby they were as near as death had been when his fingers
+closed on the pistol in his room.
+
+He took a step forward, and with passionate voice and arms outstretched,
+he cried:
+
+    "You shall not do it-by God, you shall not touch my bridge!
+     I built it.  You shall not touch it.  Back, you devils-back!"
+
+
+The terrier barked loudly.
+
+The two men in the semi-darkness in front of him cowered at the sight of
+this weird figure holding the bridge they had come to destroy.  His
+words, uttered in so strange and unnatural a voice, shook their nerves.
+They shrank away from the ghostly form with the outstretched arms.
+
+In the minute's pause following on his words, a giant figure suddenly
+appeared behind the dynamiters.  It was the temporary Chief Constable of
+Lebanon, returning from his visit to Tekewani.  He had heard Ingolby's
+wild words, and he realized the situation.
+
+"Ingolby--steady  there,  Ingolby !" he  called.  "Steady!  Steady!
+Gabriel Druse is here.  It's all right."
+
+At the first sound of Druse's voice the two wreckers turned and ran.
+
+As they did so, Ingolby's hands fell to his side, and he staggered
+forward.
+
+"Druse--Fleda," he murmured, then swayed, trembled and fell.
+
+With words that stuck in his throat Gabriel Druse stooped and lifted him
+up in his arms.  At first he turned towards the bridge, as though to
+cross over to Lebanon, but the last word Ingolby had uttered rang
+in his ears, and he carried him away into the trees towards his own
+house, the faithful terrier following.  "Druse--Fleda !"  They were the
+words of one who had suddenly emerged from the obsession of delirium into
+sanity, and then had fallen into as sudden unconsciousness.
+
+"Fleda!  Fleda!" called Gabriel Druse outside the door of his house a
+quarter of an hour later, and her voice in reply was that of one who knew
+that the feet of Fate were at her threshold.
+
+
+
+
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