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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Desert and The Sown, by Mary Hallock Foote
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Desert and The Sown
+
+Author: Mary Hallock Foote
+
+
+Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8219]
+This file was first posted on July 3, 2003
+Last Updated: May 19, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DESERT AND THE SOWN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Clay Massei and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DESERT AND THE SOWN
+
+
+By Mary Hallock Foote
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I. A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS
+
+II. INTRODUCING A SON-IN-LAW
+
+III. THE INITIAL LOVE
+
+IV. "A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT"
+
+V. DISINHERITED
+
+VI. AN APPEAL TO NATURE
+
+VII. MARKING TIME
+
+VIII. A HUNTER'S DIARY
+
+IX. THE POWER OF WEAKNESS
+
+X. THE WHITE PERIL
+
+XI. A SEARCHING OF HEARTS
+
+XII. THE BLOOD-WITE
+
+XIII. CURTAIN
+
+XIV. KIND INQUIRIES
+
+XV. A BRIDEGROOM OF SNOW
+
+XVI. THE NATURE OF AN OATH
+
+XVII. THE HIDDEN TRAIL
+
+XVIII.THE STAR IN THE EAST
+
+XIX. PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS
+
+XX. A STATION IN THE DESERT
+
+XXI. INJURIOUS REPORTS CONCERNING AN OLD HOUSE
+
+XXII. THE CASE STRIKES IN
+
+XXIII.RESTIVENESS
+
+XXIV. INDIAN SUMMER
+
+XXV. THE FELL FROST
+
+XXVI. PEACE TO THIS HOUSE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+A COUNCIL OF THE ELDERS
+
+It was an evening of sudden mildness following a dry October gale.
+The colonel had miscalculated the temperature by one log--only one, he
+declared, but that had proved a pitchy one, and the chimney bellowed
+with flame. From end to end the room was alight with it, as if the
+stored-up energies of a whole pine-tree had been sacrificed in the
+consumption of that four-foot stick.
+
+The young persons of the house had escaped, laughing, into the fresh
+night air, but the colonel was hemmed in on every side; deserted by
+his daughter, mocked by the work of his own hands, and torn between the
+duties of a host and the host's helpless craving for his after-dinner
+cigar.
+
+Across the hearth, filling with her silks all the visible room in his
+own favorite settle corner, sat the one woman on earth it most behooved
+him to be civil to,--the future mother-in-law of his only child. That
+Moya was a willing, nay, a reckless hostage, did not lessen her father's
+awe of the situation.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus, according to her wont at this hour, was composedly doing
+nothing. The colonel could not make his retreat under cover of her real
+or feigned absorption in any of the small scattering pursuits which
+distract the female mind. When she read she read--she never "looked at
+books." When she sewed she sewed--presumably, but no one ever saw her
+do it. Her mind was economic and practical, and she saved it whole, like
+many men of force, for whatever she deemed her best paying sphere of
+action.
+
+It was a silence that crackled with heat! The colonel, wrathfully
+perspiring in the glow of that impenitent stick, frowned at it like
+an inquisitor. Presently Mrs. Bogardus looked up, and her expression
+softened as she saw the energetic despair upon his face.
+
+"Colonel, don't you always smoke after dinner?"
+
+"That is my bad habit, madam. I belong to the generation that
+smokes--after dinner and most other times--more than is good for us."
+Colonel Middleton belonged also to the generation that can carry a
+sentence through to the finish in handsome style, and he did it with a
+suave Virginian accent as easy as his seat in the saddle. Mrs. Bogardus
+always gave him her respectful attention during his best performances,
+though she was a woman of short sentences herself.
+
+"Don't you smoke in this room sometimes?" she asked, with a barely
+perceptible sniff the merest contraction of her housewifely nostrils.
+
+"Ah--h! Those rascally curtains and cushions! You ladies--women,
+I should say--Moya won't let me say ladies--you bolster us up with
+comforts on purpose to betray us!"
+
+"You can say 'ladies' to me," smiled the very handsome one before him.
+"That's the generation _I_ belong to."
+
+The colonel bowed playfully. "Well, you know, I don't detect myself, but
+there's no doubt I have infected the premises."
+
+"Open fires are good ventilators. I wish you would smoke now. If you
+don't, I shall have to go away, and I'm exceedingly comfortable."
+
+"You are exceedingly charming to say so--on top of that last stick,
+too!" The colonel had Irish as well as Virginian progenitors. "Well," he
+sighed, proceeding to make himself conditionally happy, "Moya will never
+forgive me! We spoil each other shamefully when we're alone, but of
+course we try to jack each other up when company comes. It's a great
+comfort to have some one to spoil, isn't it, now? I needn't ask which it
+is in your family!"
+
+"The spoiled one?" Mrs. Bogardus smiled rather coldly. "A woman we had
+for governess, when Christine was a little thing, used to say: 'That
+child is the stuff that tyrants are made of!' Tyrants are made by the
+will of their subjects, don't you think, generally speaking?"
+
+"Well, you couldn't have made a tyrant of your son, Mrs. Bogardus. He's
+the Universal Spoiler! He'll ruin my striker, Jephson. I shall have to
+send the fellow back to the ranks. I don't know how you keep a servant
+good for anything with Paul around."
+
+"Paul thinks he doesn't like to be waited on," Paul's mother observed
+shrewdly. "He says that only invalids, old people, and children have any
+claim on the personal service of others."
+
+"By George! I found him blacking his own boots!"
+
+Mrs. Bogardus laughed.
+
+"But I'm paying a man to do it for him. It upsets my contract with that
+other fellow for Paul to do his work. We have a claim on what we pay for
+in this world."
+
+"I suppose we have. But Paul thinks that nothing can pay the price of
+those artificial relations between man and man. I think that's the way
+he puts it."
+
+"Good Heavens! Has the boy read history? It's a relation that began when
+the world was made, and will last while men are in it."
+
+"I am not defending Paul's ideas, Colonel. I have a great sympathy with
+tyrants myself. You must talk to him. He will amuse you."
+
+"My word! It's a ticklish kind of amusement when _we_ get talking. Why,
+the boy wants to turn the poor old world upside down--make us all stand
+on our heads to give our feet a rest. Now, I respect my feet,"--the
+colonel drew them in a little as the lady's eyes involuntarily took the
+direction of his allusion,--"I take the best care I can of them; but
+I propose to keep my head, such as it is, on top, till I go under
+altogether. These young philanthropists! They assume that the Hands and
+the Feet of the world, the class that serves in that capacity, have got
+the same nerves as the Brain."
+
+"There's a sort of connection," said Mrs. Bogardus carelessly. "Some
+of our Heads have come from the class that you call the Hands and Feet,
+haven't they?"
+
+The colonel admitted the fact, but the fact was the exception. "Why,
+that's just the matter with us now! We've got no class of legislators.
+I don't wish to plume myself, but, upon my word, the two services are
+about all we have left to show what selection and training can do. And
+we're only just getting the army into shape, after the raw material that
+was dumped into it by the civil war."
+
+"Weren't you in the civil war yourself?"
+
+"I was--a West Pointer, madam; and I was true to my salt and false to my
+blood. But, the flag over all!--at the cost of everything I held dear
+on earth." After this speech the colonel looked hotter than ever and a
+trifle ashamed of himself.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus's face wore its most unobservant expression. "I don't
+agree with Paul," she said. "I wish in some ways he were more like other
+young men--exercise, for instance. It's a pity for young men not to love
+activity and leadership. Besides, it's the fashion. A young man might
+as well be out of the world as out of the fashion. Blood is a strange
+thing," she mused.
+
+The colonel looked at her curiously. In a woman so unfrank, her
+occasional bursts of frankness were surprising and, as he thought, not
+altogether complimentary. It was as if she felt herself so far removed
+from his conception of her that she might say anything she pleased, sure
+of his miscomprehension.
+
+"He is not lazy intellectually," said the colonel, aiming to comfort
+her.
+
+"I did not say he was lazy--only he won't do things except to what he
+calls some 'purpose.' At his age amusement ought to be purpose enough.
+He ought to take his pleasures seriously--this hunting-trip, for
+instance. I believe, on the very least encouragement, he would give it
+all up!"
+
+"You mustn't let him do that," said the colonel, warming. "All that
+country above Yankee Fork, for a hundred miles, after you've gone fifty
+north from Bonanza, is practically virgin forest. Wonderful flora
+and fauna! It's late for the weeds and things, but if Paul wants game
+trophies for your country-house, he can load a pack-train."
+
+Mrs. Bogardus continued to be amused, in a quiet way. "He calls them
+relics of barbarism! He would as soon festoon his walls with scalps, as
+decorate them with the heads of beautiful animals,--nearer the Creator's
+design than most men, he would say."
+
+"He's right there! But that doesn't change the distinction between men
+and animals. He is your son, madam--and he's going to be mine. But, fine
+boy as he is, I call him a crank of the first water."
+
+"You'll find him quite good to Moya," Mrs. Bogardus remarked
+dispassionately. "And he's not quite twenty-four."
+
+"Very true. Well, _I_ should send him into the woods for the sake of
+getting a little sense into him, of an every-day sort. He 'll take in
+sanity with every breath."
+
+"And you don't think it's too late in the season for them to go out?"
+
+There was no change in Mrs. Bogardus's voice, unconcerned as it was; yet
+the colonel felt at once that this simple question lay at the root of
+all her previous skirmishing.
+
+"The guide will decide as to that," he said definitely. "If it is, he
+won't go out with them. They have got a good man, you say?"
+
+"They are waiting for a good man; they have waited too long, I think.
+He is expected in with another party on Monday, perhaps, Paul is to meet
+the Bowens at Challis, where they buy their outfit. I do believe"--she
+laughed constrainedly--"that he is going up there more to head them off
+than for any other reason."
+
+"How do you mean?"
+
+"Oh, it's very stupid of them! They seem to think an army post is part
+of the public domain. They have been threatening, if Paul gives up the
+trip, to come down here on a gratuitous visit."
+
+"Why, let them come by all means! The more the merrier! We will quarter
+them on the garrison at large."
+
+"Wherever they were quartered, they would be here all the time. They are
+not intimate friends of Paul's. _Mrs._ Bowen is--a very great friend.
+He is her right-hand in all that Hartley House work. The boys are just
+fashionable young men."
+
+"Can't they go hunting without Paul?"
+
+"Wheels within wheels!" Mrs. Bogardus sighed impatiently. "Hunting trips
+are expensive, and--when young men are living on their fathers, it
+is convenient sometimes to have a third. However, Paul goes, I half
+believe, to prevent their making a descent upon us here."
+
+"Well; I should ask them to come, or make it plain they were not
+expected."
+
+"Oh, would you?--if their mother was one of the nicest women, and your
+friend? Besides, the reservation does not cover the whole valley. Banks
+Bowen talks of a mine he wants to look at--I don't think it will make
+much difference to the mine! This is simply to say that I wish Paul
+cared more about the trip for its own sake."
+
+"Well, frankly, I think he's better out of the way for the next
+fortnight. The girls ought to go to bed early, and keep the roses in
+their cheeks for the wedding. Moya's head is full of her frocks and
+fripperies. She is trying to run a brace of sewing women; and all those
+boxes are coming from the East to be 'inspected, and condemned' mostly.
+The child seems to make a great many mistakes, doesn't she? About every
+other day I see a box as big as a coffin in the hall, addressed to some
+dry-goods house, 'returned by ----'"
+
+"Moya should have sent to me for her things," said Mrs. Bogardus. "I am
+the one who makes her return them. She can do much better when she is
+in town herself. It doesn't matter, for the few weeks they will be
+away, what she wears. I shall take her measures home with me and set the
+people to work. She has never been _fitted_ in her life."
+
+The colonel looked rather aghast. He had seldom heard Mrs. Bogardus
+speak with so much animation. He wondered if really his household was so
+very far behind the times.
+
+"It's very kind of you, I'm sure, if Moya will let you. Most girls think
+they can manage these matters for themselves."
+
+"It's impossible to shop by mail," Mrs. Bogardus said decidedly. "They
+always keep a certain style of things for the Western and Southern
+trade."
+
+The colonel was crushed. Mrs. Bogardus rose, and he picked up her
+handkerchief, breathing a little hard after the exertion. She passed
+out, thanking him with a smile as he opened the door. In the hall she
+stopped to choose a wrap from a collection of unconventional garments
+hanging on a rack of moose horns.
+
+"I think I shall go out," she said. "The air is quite soft to-night. Do
+you know which way the children went?" By the "children," as the colonel
+had noted, Mrs. Bogardus usually meant her daughter, the budding tyrant,
+Christine.
+
+"Fine woman!" he mused, alone with himself in his study. "Splendid
+character head. Regular Dutch beauty. But hard--eh?--a trifle hard in
+the grain. Eyes that tell you nothing. Mouth set like a stone. Never
+rambles in her talk. Never speculates or exaggerates for fun. Never runs
+into hyperbole--the more fool some other folks! Speaks to the point or
+keeps still."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+INTRODUCING A SON-IN-LAW
+
+The colonel's papers failed to hold him somehow. He rose and paced the
+room with his short, stiff-kneed tread. He stopped and stared into the
+fire; his face began to get red.
+
+"So! Moya's clothes are not good enough. Going to set the people to
+work, is she? Wants an outfit worthy of her son. And who's to pay for
+it, by gad? Post-nuptial bills for wedding finery are going to hurt poor
+little Moya like the deuce. Confound the woman! Dressing my daughter
+for me, right in my own house. Takes it in her hands as if it were
+her right, by----!" The colonel let slip another expletive. "Well,"
+he sighed, half amused at his own violence, "I'll write to Annie. I
+promised Moya, and it's high time I did."
+
+Annie was the colonel's sister, the wife of an infantry captain,
+stationed at Fort Sherman. She was a very understanding woman; at least
+she understood her brother. But she was not solely dependent upon his
+laggard letters for information concerning his private affairs. The
+approaching wedding at Bisuka Barracks was the topic of most of the
+military families in the Department of the Columbia. Moya herself had
+written some time before, in the self-conscious manner of the newly
+engaged. Her aunt knew of course that Moya and Christine Bogardus had
+been room-mates at Miss Howard's, that the girls had fallen in love with
+each other first, and with visits at holidays and vacations, when the
+army girl could not go to her father, it was easily seen how the
+rest had followed. And well for Moya that it had, was Mrs. Creve's
+indorsement. As a family they were quite sufficiently represented in
+the army; and if one should ever get an Eastern detail it would be very
+pleasant to have a young niece charmingly settled in New York.
+
+The colonel drew a match across the top bar of the grate and set it
+to his pipe. His big nostrils whitened as he took a deep in-breath. He
+reseated himself and began his duty letter in the tone of a judicious
+parent; but, warming as he wrote, under the influence of Annie's
+imagined sympathy, he presently broke forth with his usual arrogant
+colloquialism.
+
+"She might have had her pick of the junior officers in both branches.
+And there was a captain of engineers at the Presidio, a widower, but an
+awfully good fellow. And she has chosen a boy, full of transcendental
+moonshine, who climbs upon a horse as if it were a stone fence, and has
+mixed ideas which side of himself to hang a pistol on.
+
+"I have no particular quarrel with the lad, barring his great burly
+mouthful of a name, Bo--gardus! To call a child Moya and have her fetch
+up with her soft, Irish vowels against such a name as that! She had a
+fond idea that it was from Beauregard. But she has had to give that up.
+It's Dutch--Hudson River Dutch--for something horticultural--a tree,
+or an orchard, or a brush-pile; and she says it's a good name where it
+belongs. Pity it couldn't have stayed where it belongs.
+
+"However, you won't find him quite so scrubby as he sounds. He's very
+proper and clean-shaven, with a good pair of dark, Dutch eyes, which he
+gets from his mother; and I wish he had got her business ability with
+them, and her horse sense, if the lady will excuse me. She runs the
+property and he spends it, as far as she'll let him, on the newest
+reforms. And there's another hitch!--To belong to the Truly Good
+at twenty-four! But beggars can't be choosers. He's going to settle
+something handsome on Moya out of the portion Madame gives him on his
+marriage. My poor little girl, as you know, will get nothing from me but
+a few old bits and trinkets and a father's blessing,--the same
+doesn't go for much in these days. I have been a better dispenser than
+accumulator, like others of our name.
+
+"I do assure you, Annie, it bores me down to the ground, this
+humanitarian racket from children with ugly names who have just chipped
+the shell. This one owns his surprise that we _work_ in the army! That
+our junior officers teach, and study a bit perforce themselves. His own
+idea is that every West Pointer, before he gets his commission, should
+serve a year or two in the ranks, to raise the type of the enlisted man,
+and chiefly, mark you, to get his point of view, the which he is to
+bear in mind when he comes to his command. Oh, we've had some pretty
+arguments! But I suspect the rascal of drawing it mild, at this stage,
+for the old dragon who guards his Golden Apple. He doesn't want to poke
+me up. How far he'd go if he were not hampered in his principles by the
+fact that he is in love, I cannot say. And I'd rather not imagine."
+
+The commandant's house at Bisuka Barracks is the nearest one to the
+flag-pole as you go up a flight of wooden steps from the parade ground.
+These steps, and their landings, flanked by the dry grass terrace of the
+line, are a favorite gathering place for young persons of leisure at
+the Post. They face the valley and the mountains; they lead past the
+adjutant's office to the main road to town; they command the daily
+pageant of garrison duty as performed at such distant, unvisited posts,
+with only the ladies and the mountains looking on.
+
+Retreat had sounded at half after five, for the autumn days grew short.
+The colonel's orderly had been dismissed to his quarters. There was no
+excuse, at this hour, for two young persons lingering in sentimental
+corners of the steps, beyond a flagrant satisfaction in the shadow
+thereof which covered them since the lighting of lamps on Officers' Row.
+
+The colonel stood at his study window keeping his pipe alive with slow
+and dreamy puffs. The moon was just clearing the roof of the men's
+quarters. His eye caught a shape, or a commingling of shapes, ensconced
+in an angle of the steps; the which he made out to be his daughter,
+in her light evening frock with one of his own old army capes over her
+shoulders, seated in close formation beside the only man at the Post who
+wore civilian black.
+
+The colonel had the feelings of a man as well as a father. He went back
+to his letter with a softened look in his face. He had said too much; he
+always did--to Annie; and now he must hedge a little or she would think
+there was trouble brewing, and that he was going to be nasty about
+Moya's choice.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+THE INITIAL LOVE
+
+"Let us be simple! Not every one can be, but we can. We can afford to
+be, and we know how!"
+
+Moya was speaking rapidly, in her singularly articulate tones. A reader
+of voices would have pronounced hers the physical record of unbroken
+health and constant, joyous poise.
+
+"Hear the word of your prophet Emerson!" she brought a little fist down
+upon her knee for emphasis, a hand several sizes larger closed upon it
+and held it fast. "Hear the word--are you listening? 'Only _two_ in the
+Garden walked and with Snake and Seraph talked.'"
+
+The young man's answer was an instant's impassioned silence. Too close
+it touched him, that vital image of the Garden. Then, with an effect of
+sternness, he said,--
+
+"Have we the right to do as we please? Have we the courage that comes of
+right to cut ourselves off from all those calls and cries for help?"
+
+"_I_ have," said the girl; "I have just that right--of one who knows
+exactly what she wants, and is going to get it if she can!"
+
+He laughed at her happy insolence, with which all the youth and nature
+in him made common cause.
+
+"I shouldn't mind thinking about your Poor Man," she tripped along, "if
+he liked being poor, or if it seemed to improve him any; or if it were
+only now and then. But there is so dreadfully much of him! Once we
+begin, how should we ever think about anything else? He'd rise up and
+sit down with us, and eat and drink with us, and tell us what to wear.
+Every pleasure of our lives would be spoiled with his eternal 'Where do
+_I_ come in?' It was simple enough in _that_ garden, with only those
+two and nobody outside to feel injured. But we are those two, aren't
+we? Isn't everybody--once in a life, and once only?" She turned her face
+aside, slighting by her manner the excessive meaning of her words. "I
+ask for myself only what I think I have a right to give you--my absolute
+undivided attention for those first few years. They say it never lasts!"
+she hastened to add with playful cynicism.
+
+Young Bogardus seemed incapable under the circumstances of any adequate
+reply. Free as they were in words, there was an extreme personal shyness
+between these proud young persons, undeveloped on the side of passion
+and better versed in theories of life than in life itself. They had
+separated the day after their sudden engagement, and their nearest
+approaches to intimacy had been through letters. Naturally the girl was
+the bolder, having less in herself to fear.
+
+"That is what _I_ call being simple," she went on briskly. "If you
+think we can be that in New York, let us live there. _I_ could be simple
+there, but not with you, sir! That terrible East Side would be shaking
+its gory locks at us. We should feel that we did it--or you would! Then
+good-by to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!"
+
+"You are my life, liberty, and happiness, and I will be your almoner,"
+said Paul, "and dispense you"--
+
+"Dispense _with_ me!" laughed the girl. "And what shall I be doing while
+you are dispensing me on the East Side? New York has other sides. While
+you go slumming with the Seraph, I shall be talking to the Snake! Now,
+_do_ laugh!" she entreated childishly, turning her sparkling face to
+his.
+
+"Am I expected to laugh at that?"
+
+"Well, what shall we do? Don't make me harden my heart before it has had
+time to soften naturally. Give my poor pagan sympathies a little time to
+ripen."
+
+"But you have lived in New York. Did you find it such a strain on your
+sympathies?"
+
+"I was a visitor; and a girl is not expected to have sympathies. But to
+begin our home there: we should have to strike a note of some sort.
+How if my note should jar with yours? Paul, dear, it isn't nice to
+have convictions when one is young and going to be married. You know it
+isn't. It's not poetic, and it's not polite, and it's a dreadful bore!"
+
+The altruist and lover winced at this. Allowing for exaggeration, which
+was the life of speech with her, he knew that Moya was giving him a bit
+of her true self, that changeful, changeless self which goes behind all
+law and "follows joy and only joy." Her voice dropped into its sweetest
+tones of intimacy.
+
+"Why need we live in a crowd? Why must we be pressed upon with all this
+fuss and doing? Doing, doing! We are not ready to do anything yet. Every
+day must have its dawn;--and I don't see my way yet; I'm hardly awake!"
+
+"Darling, hush! You must not say such things to me. For you only to look
+at me like that is the most terrible temptation of my life. You make
+me forget everything a man is bound--that I of all men am bound to
+remember."
+
+"Then I will keep on looking! Behold, I am Happiness, Selfishness, if
+you like! I have come to stay. No, really, it's not nice of you to act
+as if you were under higher orders. You are under my orders. What right
+have we to choose each other if we are not to be better to each other
+than to any one else?--if our lives belong to any one who needs us, or
+our time and money, more than we need it ourselves? Why did you choose
+me? Why not somebody pathetic--one of your Poor Things; or else save
+yourself whole for all the Poor Things?"
+
+"Now you are 'talking for victory,'" he smiled. "You don't believe we
+must be as consistent as all that. Hearts don't have to be coddled
+like pears picked for market. But I'm not preaching to you. The heavens
+forbid! I'm trying to explain. You don't think this whole thing with me
+is a pose? I know I'm a bore with my convictions; but how do we come by
+such things?"
+
+"Ah! How do I come not to have any, or to want any?" she rejoined.
+
+"Once for all, let me tell you how I came by mine. Then you will know
+just where and how those cries for help take hold on me."
+
+"I don't wish to know. Preserve me from knowing! Why didn't you choose
+somebody different?"
+
+He looked at her with all his passion in his eyes. "I did not choose.
+Did you?"
+
+"It isn't too late," she whispered. Her face grew hot in the darkness.
+
+"Yes; it is too late--for anything but the truth. Will you listen,
+sweet? Will you let the nonsense wait?"
+
+"Deeper and deeper! Haven't we reached the bottom yet?"
+
+"Go on! It's the dearest nonsense," she heard him say; but she detected
+pain in his voice and a new constraint.
+
+"What is it? What is the 'truth'?"
+
+"Oh, it's not so dreadful. Only, you always put me in quite a different
+class from where I belong, and I haven't had the courage to set you
+right."
+
+"Children, children!" a young voice called, from the lighted walk above.
+Two figures were going down the line, one in uniform keeping step beside
+a girl in white who reefed back her skirts with one hand, the other was
+raised to her hair which was blowing across her forehead in bewitching
+disorder. Every gesture and turn of her shape announced that she was
+pretty and gay in the knowledge of her power. It was Chrissy, walking
+with Lieutenant Lane.
+
+"Where are you--ridiculous ones? Don't you want to come with us?"
+
+"'Now who were they?'" Paul quoted derisively out of the dark.
+
+"We are going to Captain Dawson's to play Hearts. Come! Don't be
+stupid!"
+
+"We are not stupid, we are busy!" Moya called back.
+
+"Busy! Doing what?"
+
+"Oh, deciding things. We are talking about the Poor Man."
+
+"The poor men, she means." Christine's high laugh followed the
+lieutenant's speech, as the pair went on.
+
+"He _is_ a bore!" Moya declared. "We can't even use him for a joke."
+
+"Speaking of Lane, dear?"
+
+"The Poor Man. Are you sure that you've got a sense of humor, Paul?
+Can't we have charity for jokes among the other poor things?"
+
+Paul had raised himself to the step beside her. "You are shivering," he
+said, "I must let you go in."
+
+"I'm not shivering--I'm chattering," she mocked. "Why should I go in
+when we are going to be really serious?"
+
+Paul waited a moment; his breath came short, as if he were facing a
+postponed dread. "Moya, dear," he began in a forced tone, "I can't help
+my constraints and convictions that bore you so, any more than you can
+help your light heart--God bless it--and your theory of class which to
+me seems mediaeval. I have cringed to it, like the coward a man is when
+he is in love. But now I want you to know me."
+
+He took her hand and kissed it repeatedly, as if impressing upon her
+the one important fact back of all hypothesis and perilous efforts at
+statement.
+
+"Well, are you bidding me good-by?"
+
+"You must give me time," he said. "It takes courage in these days for
+a good American to tell the girl he loves that his father was a hired
+man."
+
+He smiled, but there was little mirth and less color in his face.
+
+"What absurdity!" cried Moya. Then glancing at him she added quickly,
+"_My_ father is a hired man. Most fathers who are worth anything are!"
+
+"My father was because he came of that class. His father was one before
+him. His mother took in tailoring in the village where he was born. He
+had only the commonest common-school education and not much of that.
+At eleven he worked for his board and clothes at my Grandfather Van
+Elten's, and from that time he earned his bread with his hands. Don't
+imagine that I'm apologizing," Paul went on rapidly. "The apology
+belongs on the other side. In New York, for instance, the Bogardus blood
+is quite as good as the Bevier or the Broderick or the Van Elten; but
+up the Hudson, owing to those chances or mischances that selected our
+farming aristocracy for us, my father's people had slipped out of
+their holdings and sunk to the poor artisan class which the old Dutch
+landowners held in contempt."
+
+"We are not landowners," said Moya. "What does it matter? What does any
+of it matter?"
+
+"It matters to be honest and not sail under false colors. I thought
+you would not speak of the Poor Man as you do if you knew that I am his
+son."
+
+"Money has nothing to do with position in the army. I am a poor man's
+daughter."
+
+"Ah, child! Your father gives orders--mine took them, all his life."
+
+"My father has to take what he gives. There is no escaping 'orders.'
+Even I know that!" said Moya. A slight shiver passed over her as she
+spoke, laughing off as usual the touch of seriousness in her words.
+
+"Why did you do that?" Paul touched her shoulder. "Is it the wind? There
+is a wind creeping down these steps." He improved the formation slightly
+in respect to the wind.
+
+"Listen!" said Moya. "Isn't that your mother walking on the porch?
+Father, I know, is writing. She will be lonely."
+
+"She is never lonely, more or less. It is always the same loneliness--of
+a woman widowed for years."
+
+"How very much she must have cared for him!" Moya sighed incredulously.
+What a pity, she thought, that among the humbler vocations Paul's father
+should have been just a plain "hired man." Cowboy, miner, man-o'-war's
+man, even enlisted man, though that were bad enough--any of these he
+might have been in an accidental way, that at least would have been
+picturesque; but it is only the possession of land, by whatsoever means
+or title, that can dignify an habitual personal contact with it in the
+form of soil. That is one of the accepted prejudices which one does not
+meddle with at nineteen. "Youth is conservative because it is afraid."
+Moya, for all her fighting blood, was traditionally and in social ways
+much more in bonds than Paul, who had inherited his father's dreamy
+speculative habit of thought, with something of the farm-hand's distrust
+of society and its forms and shibboleth.
+
+Paul's voice took a narrative tone, and Moya gave herself up to
+listening--to him rather more, perhaps, than to his story.
+
+Few young men of twenty-four can go very deeply into questions of
+heredity. Of what follows here much was not known to Paul. Much that he
+did know he would have interpreted differently. The old well at Stone
+Ridge, for instance, had no place in his recital; and yet out of it
+sprang the history of his shorn generation. Had Paul's mother grown up
+in a houseful of brothers and sisters, governed by her mother instead
+of an old ignorant servant, in all likelihood she would have married
+differently--more wisely but not perhaps so well, her son would loyally
+have maintained. The sons of the rich farmers who would have been her
+suitors were men inferior to their fathers. They inherited the vigor and
+coarseness of constitution, the unabashed materialism of that earlier
+generation that spent its energies coping with Nature on its stony
+farms, but the sons were spared the need of that hard labor which their
+blood required. They supplied an element of force, but one of great
+corruption later, in the state politics of their time.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+A MAN THAT HAD A WELL IN HIS OWN COURT
+
+In the kitchen court called the "Airy" at Abraham Van Elten's, there
+was one of those old family wells which our ancestors used to locate so
+artlessly. And when it tapped the kitchen drain, and typhoid took the
+elder children, and the mother followed the children, it was called the
+will of God. A gloomy distinction rested on the house. Abraham felt the
+importance attaching to any supreme experience in a community where life
+runs on in the middle key.
+
+A young doctor who had been called in at the close of the last case
+went prying about the premises, asking foolish questions that angered
+Abraham. It is easier for some natures to suffer than to change. If the
+farmer had ever drunk water himself, except as tea or coffee, or mixed
+with something stronger, he must have been an early victim, to his own
+crass ignorance. He was a vigorous, heavy-set man, a grand field for
+typhoid. But he prospered, and the young doctor was turned down with
+the full weight and breadth of the Van Elten thumb, or the Broderick;
+Abraham's build was that of his maternal grandmother, Hillotje
+Broderick.
+
+On the Ridge, which later developed into a valuable slate quarry,
+there was a spring of water, cold and perpetual, flowing out of the
+trap-formation. Abraham had piped this water down to his barns and
+cattle-sheds; it furnished power for the farm-work. But to bring it to
+the house, in obedience to the doctor's meddlesome advice, would be an
+acknowledgment of fatal mistakes in the past; would raise talk and blame
+among the neighbors, and do away with the honor of a special visitation;
+would cost no trifle of money; would justify the doctor's interference,
+and insult the old well of his father and his father's father, the
+fountain of generations. To seal its mouth and bid its usefulness cease
+in the house where it had ministered for upwards of a hundred years was
+an act of desecration impossible to the man who in his stolid way loved
+the very stones that lined its slimy sides. The few sentiments that had
+taken hold on Abraham's arid nature went as deep as his obstinacy and
+clung as fast as his distrust of new opinions and new men. The question
+of water supply was closed in his house; but the well remained open and
+kept up its illicit connection with the drain.
+
+Old Becky, keeper of the widower's keys, had followed closely the
+history of those unhappy "cases;" she had listened to discussions,
+violent or suppressed, she had heard much talk that went on behind her
+master's back.
+
+Employers of that day and generation were masters; and masters are meant
+to be outwitted. Emily, the youngest and last of the flock, was now a
+child of four, dark like her mother, sturdy and strong like her father.
+On an August day soon after the mother's funeral, Becky took her little
+charge to the well and showed her a tumbler filled, with water not
+freshly drawn.
+
+"See them little specks and squirmy things?" Emmy saw them. She followed
+their wavering motion in the glass as the stern forefinger pointed.
+"Those are little baby snakes," said Becky mysteriously. "The well is
+full of 'em. Sometimes you can see 'em, sometimes you can't, but they're
+always there. They never grow big down the well; it's too dark 'n' cold.
+But you drink that water and the snakes will grow and wriggle and
+work all through ye, and eat your insides out, and you'll die. Your
+mother"--in a whisper--"she drunk that water, and she died. Your sister
+Ruth, and Dirck, and Jimmy, they drunk it, and they died. Now if Emmy
+wants to die"--Large eyes of horror fastened on the speaker's face.
+"No--o, she don't want to die, the Loveums! She don't want Becky to have
+no little girl left at all! No; we mustn't ever drink any of that bad
+water--all full of snakes, ugh! But if Emmy's thirsty, see here! Here's
+good nice water. It's going to be always here in this pail--same water
+the little lambs drink up in the fields. Becky 'll take Emmy up on the
+hill sometime and show where the little lambs drink."
+
+Grief had not clouded the farmer's oversight in petty things. He noticed
+the innocent pail on the area bench, never empty, always specklessly
+clean.
+
+"What is this water?" he asked.
+
+Becky was surly. "Drinking water. Want some?"
+
+"What's it doing here all the time?"
+
+"I set it there for Emmy. She can't reach up to the bucket."
+
+Abraham tasted the water suspiciously. The well-water was hard, with
+a tang of iron. The spring soft, and less cold for its journey to the
+barn.
+
+"Where did you get this water?"
+
+"Help yourself. There's plenty more."
+
+"Becky, where did this water come from? Out o' the well?"
+
+Becky gave a snort of exasperation. "Sam Lewis brought it from the barn!
+I'm too lame to be histin' buckets. I've got the rheumatiz' awful in my
+back and shoulders, if ye want to know!"
+
+"Becky, you're lying to me. You've been listening to what don't concern
+you. Now, see here. You are not going to ask the men to carry water for
+you. They've got something else to do. _There's_ your water, as handy as
+ever a woman had it; use that or go without."
+
+Abraham caught up the pail and flung its contents out upon the grass,
+scattering the hens that came sidling back with squawks of inquiring
+temerity.
+
+When next Emmy came for water, the old woman took her by the hand in
+silence and led her into the dim meat-cellar, a half-basement with one
+low window level with the grass. There was the pail, safe hidden behind
+the soft-soap barrel.
+
+"I had to hide it from your pa," Becky whispered. "Don't you never let
+him know you're afraid o' the well-water. He drunk it when he was a
+little boy. He don't believe in the snakes. But _there wa'n't none
+then_. It's when water gets old and rotten. You can believe what Becky
+says. _She_ knows! But you mustn't ever tell. Your father 'd be as mad
+as fire if he knowed I said anything about snakes. He'd send me right
+away, and some strange woman would come, and maybe she'd whip Emmy.
+Emmy want Becky to go?" Sobs, and little arms clinging wildly to Becky's
+aproned skirts. "No, no! Well, she ain't goin'. But Emmy mustn't tell
+tales or she might have to. Tattlers are wicked anyway. 'Telltale tit!
+Your tongue shall be slit, and all the little dogs'--There! run now!
+There's your poppy. Don't you never,--never!"
+
+Emmy let her eyes be wiped, and with one long, solemn, secret look of
+awed intelligence she ran out to meet her father. She did not love him,
+and the smile with which she met him was no new lesson in diplomacy. But
+her first secret from him lay deep in the beautiful eyes, her mother's
+eyes, as she raised them to his.
+
+"Ain't that wonderful!" said Becky, with a satisfied sigh, watching her.
+"Safe as a jug! An' she not five years old!" For vital reasons she had
+taught the child an ugly lesson. Such lessons were common enough in her
+experience of family discipline. She never thought of it again.
+
+That year which took Emmy's mother from her brought to the child her
+first young companion and friend. Adam Bogardus came as chore-boy to
+the farm,--an only child himself, and sensitive through the clashing
+of gentle instincts with rough and inferior surroundings; brought up
+in that depressed God-fearing attitude in which a widow not strong,
+and earning her bread, would do her duty by an only son. Not a natural
+fighter, she took what little combativeness he had out of him, and made
+his school-days miserable--a record of humiliations that sunk deep and
+drove him from his kind. He was a big, clumsy, sagacious boy, grave
+as an old man, always snubbed and condescended to, yet always trusted.
+Little Emmy made him her bondslave at sight. His whole soul blossomed in
+adoration of the beautiful, masterful child who ordered him about as her
+vassal, while slipping a soft little trustful hand in his. She trotted
+at his heels like one of the lambs or chickens that he fed. She brought
+him into perpetual disgrace with Becky, for wasting his time through her
+imperious demands. She was the burden, the delight, the handicap, the
+incentive, and the reward of his humble apprenticeship. And when he was
+promoted to be one of the regular hands she followed him still, and got
+her pleasure out of his day's work. No one had such patience to tell
+her things, to wait for her and help her over places where her tagging
+powers fell short. But though she bullied him, she looked up to him
+as well. His occupations commanded her respect. He was the god of the
+orchards and of the cider-making; he presided at all the functions of
+the farm year. He was a perfect calendar besides of country sports in
+their season. He swept the ice pools in the meadow for winter sliding,
+after his day's work was done. He saved up paper and string for
+kite-making in March. He knew when willow bark would slip for April's
+whistles. In the first heats of June he climbed the tall locust-trees
+to put up a swing in which she could dream away the perfumed hours.
+At harvest she waited in the meadow for him to toss her up on the
+hay-loads, and his great arms received her when she slid off in the
+barn. She knelt at his feet on the bumping boards of the farm-wagon
+while he braced himself like a charioteer, holding the reins above
+her head. He threshed the nut-trees and routed marauding boys from her
+preserves, and carved pumpkin lanterns to light her to her attic chamber
+on cold November nights, where she would lie awake watching strange
+shadows on the sloping roof, half worshiping, half afraid of her idol's
+ugliness in the dark.
+
+These were some of Paul's illustrations of that pastoral beginning, and
+no doubt they were sympathetically close to the truth. He lingered
+over them, dressing up his mother's choice instinctively to the little
+aristocrat beside him.
+
+When Emmy grew big enough to go to the Academy, three miles from the
+farm, it was all in the day's work that Adam should take her and fetch
+her home. He combined her with the mail, the blacksmith, and other
+village errands. Whoever met her father's team on those long stony hills
+of Saugerties would see his little daughter seated beside his hired man,
+her face turned up to his in endless confiding talk. It was a face, as
+we say, to dream of. But there were few dreamers in that little world.
+The farmers would nod gravely to Adam. "Abraham's girl takes after her
+mother; heartier lookin', though. Guess he'll need a set o' new tires
+before spring." The comments went no deeper.
+
+Abraham was now well on in years; he made no visits, and he never drove
+his own team at night. When his daughter began to let down her frocks
+and be asked to evening parties, it was still Adam who escorted her.
+He sat in the kitchen while she was amusing herself in the parlor. She
+discussed her young acquaintances with him on their way home. The
+time for distinctions had come, but she was too innocent to feel
+them herself, and too proud to accept the standards of others. He was
+absolutely honest and unworldly. He thought it no treachery to love her
+for herself, and he believed, as most of us do, that his family was as
+good as hers or any other.
+
+It would be hard to explain the old man's obliviousness. Perhaps he had
+forgotten his own youth; or class prejudice had gone so deep with him as
+to preclude the bare thought of a child of his falling in love with one
+of his "men." His imagination could not so insult his own blood. But
+when the awakening came, his passion of anger and resentment knew no
+bounds. To discharge his faithless employee out of hand would be the
+cripple throwing away his crutch. Though he called Adam _one_ of his
+men, and though his pay was that of a common laborer, his duties had
+long been of a much higher order. Abraham had made a very good bargain
+out of the widow's son. Adam knew well that he could not be spared, and
+pitied the old man's helpless rage. He took his frantic insults as part
+of his senility, and felt it no unmanliness to appease it by giving his
+promise that he would speak no more of love to Emmy while he was taking
+her father's wages. But Emmy did not indorse this promise fully. To her
+it looked like weakness, and implied a sort of patience which did
+not become a lover such as she wished hers to be. The winter wore on
+uncomfortably for all. Towards spring, Becky's last illness and passing
+away brought the younger ones together again, and closer than before.
+Adam kept his promise through days and nights of sickroom intimacy; but
+though no word of love was spoken, each bore silent witness to what was
+loveliest in the other, and the bond between them deepened.
+
+Then spring came, and its restlessness was strong upon them both. But it
+was Emmy to whom it meant action and rebellion.
+
+They stood on the orchard hill one Sunday afternoon at the pause of the
+year. Buds were swelling and the edges of the woods wore a soft blush
+against the vaporous sky. The bare brown slopes were streaked with snow.
+A floe of winter ice, grinding upon itself with the tide, glared yellow
+as an old man's teeth in the setting sun. From across the river came
+the thunder of a train, bound north, two engines dragging forty cars of
+freight piled up by some recent traffic-jam; it plunged into a tunnel,
+and they waited, listening to the monster's smothered roar. Out it
+burst, its breath packed into clouds, the engines whooped, and round
+the curve where a point of cedars cut the sky the huge creature unwound
+itself, the hills echoing to its tread.
+
+Emmy watched it out of sight, and breathed again. "Hundreds, hundreds
+going every day! It seems easy enough for everybody else. Oh, if I were
+a man!"
+
+"What do you want I should do, Emmy?" Adam knew well what man she was
+thinking of.
+
+"_I_ want? Don't you ever want things yourself?"
+
+"When I want a thing bad, I gen'ly think it's worth waiting for."
+
+"People don't get things by waiting. I don't know how you can stand
+it,--to stay here year after year. And now you've tied yourself up with
+a promise, and you know you cannot keep it!"
+
+"I'm trying to keep it."
+
+"You couldn't keep it if you cared--really and truly--as some do!" She
+dropped her voice hurriedly. "To live here and eat your meals day after
+day and pass me like a stick or a stone!"
+
+The slow blood burned in Adam's face and hammered in his pulses. His
+blue eyes were bashful through its heat. "I don't feel like a stick nor
+a stone. You know it, Emmy. You want to be careful," he added gently.
+"Would going away look as if I cared?"
+
+"Why--why don't you ask me to go with you?" The girl tried to meet his
+eyes. She turned off her question with a proud laugh.
+
+"Be--careful, child! You know why I can't take you up on that. Would
+you want we should leave him here alone--without even Becky? You're only
+trying me for fun."
+
+"No; I am not!" Emmy was pale now. Her breast was rising in strong
+excitement. "If we were gone, he would know then what you are worth to
+him. Now, you're only Adam! He thinks he can put you down like a boy. He
+won't believe I care for you. There's only one way to show him--that
+is, if we do care. In one month he would be sending for us back. Then we
+could come, and you would take your right place here, and be somebody.
+You would not eat in the kitchen, then. Haven't you been like a son to
+him? And why shouldn't he own it?"
+
+"But if he won't? Suppose he don't send for us to come back?"
+
+"Then you could strike out for yourself. What was Tom Madden, before
+he went away to Colorado, or somewhere--where was it? And now everybody
+stops to shake hands with him;--he's as much of a man as anybody. If you
+could make a little money. That's the proof he wants. If you were rich,
+you'd be all right with him. You know that!"
+
+"I'd hate to think it. But I'll never be rich. Put that out of your
+mind, Emmy. It don't run in the blood. I don't come of a money-making
+breed."
+
+"What a silly thing to say! Of course, if you don't believe you can, you
+can't. Who has made the money here for the last ten years?"
+
+"It was his capital done it. It ain't hard to make money after you've
+scraped the first few thousands together. But it's the first thousand
+that costs."
+
+"How much have you got ahead?"
+
+Adam answered awkwardly, "Eleven hundred and sixty odd." He did not like
+to talk of money to the girl who was the prayer, the inspiration, of his
+life. It hurt him to be questioned by her in this sordid way.
+
+"You earned it all, didn't you?"
+
+"I've took no risks. Here was my home. He give me the chance and he
+showed me how. And--he's your father. I don't like to talk about his
+money, nor about my own, to you."
+
+"Oh, you are good, good! Nobody knows! But it's all wasted if you
+haven't got any push--anything inside of yourself that makes people know
+what you are. I wish I could put into you some of my _fury_ that I
+feel when things get in my way! You have held yourself in too long. You
+can't--_can't_ love a girl, and be so careful--like a mother. Don't you
+understand?"
+
+"Stop right there, Emmy! You needn't push no harder. I can let go
+whenever you say so. But--do _you_ understand, little girl? Man and wife
+it will have to be."
+
+Emmy did not shrink at the words. Her face grew set, her dark eyes full
+of mystery fixed themselves on the slow-moving ice-floe grinding along
+the shore.
+
+"I know," she assented slowly.
+
+"I can't give you no farm, nor horses and carriages, nor help in the
+kitchen. It's bucklin' right down with our bare hands--me outside and
+you in? And you only eighteen. See what little hands--If I could do it
+all!"
+
+"Your promise is broken," she whispered. "I made you break it. You will
+have to tell him now, or--we must go."
+
+"So be!" said Adam solemnly. "And God do so to me and more also, if I
+have to hurt my little girl,--Emmy--wife!"
+
+He folded her in his great arms clumsily--the man she had said was like
+a mother. He was almost as ignorant as she, and more hopeful than he had
+dared to seem, as to their worldly chances. But the love he had for her
+told him it was not love that made her so bold. The first touch of
+such love as his would have made her fear him as he feared her. And the
+subtle pain of this instinctive knowledge, together with that broken
+promise, shackled the wings of his great joy. It was not as he had hoped
+to win the crown of life.
+
+Paul, it may be supposed, had never liked to think of his mother's
+elopement. It had been the one hard point to get over in his conception
+of his father, but he could never have explained it by such a scene as
+this. It would have hampered him terribly in his tale had he dreamed of
+it. He passed over the unfortunate incident with a romancer's touch, and
+dwelt upon his grandfather's bitter resentment which he resented as
+the son of his mother's choice. The Van Eltens and Brodericks all fared
+hardly at the hands of their legatee.
+
+It was not only in the person of a hireling who had abused his trust
+that Abraham had felt himself outraged. There were old neighborhood
+spites and feuds going back, dividing blood from blood--even brothers of
+the same blood. There was trouble between him and his brother Jacob, of
+New York, dating from the settlement of their father's, Broderick Van
+Elten's, estate; and no one knows what besides that was private and
+personal may have entered into it. It was years since they had met,
+but Jacob kept well abreast of his brother's misfortunes. A bachelor
+himself, with no children to lose or to quarrel with, it was not
+displeasing to him to hear of the breaks in his brother's household.
+
+"What, what, what! The last one left him,--run off with one of his men!
+What a fool the man must be. Can't he look after his women folks better
+than that? Better have lost her with the others. Two boys, and Chrissy,
+and the girl--and now the last girl gone off with his hired man. Poor
+Chrissy! Guess she had about enough of it. Things have come out pretty
+much even, after all! There was more love and lickin's wasted on Abe.
+Father was proudest of him, but he couldn't break him. Hi! but I've
+crawled under the woodshed to hear him yell, and father would tan him
+with a raw-hide, but he couldn't break him; couldn't get a sound out
+of him. Big, and hard, and tough--Chrissy thought she knew a man; she
+thought she took the best one."
+
+With slow, cold spite Jacob had tracked his brother's path in life
+through its failures. Jacob had no failures, and no life.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+DISINHERITED
+
+Proud little Emmy, heiress no longer, had put her spirit into her
+farm-hand and incited him to the first rebellion of his life. They
+crossed the river at night, poling through floating ice, and climbed
+aboard one of those great through trains whose rushing thunder had made
+the girlish heart so often beat. This was long before the West Shore
+Line was built. Neither of them had ever seen the inside of a Pullman
+sleeper. Emmy could count the purchased meals she had eaten in her life;
+she had never slept in a hotel or hired lodging till after her marriage.
+Hardly any one could be so provincial in these days.
+
+Adam Bogardus was a plodder in the West as he had been in the East. He
+was an honest man, and he was wise enough not to try to be a shrewd one.
+He tried none of the short-cuts to a fortune. Hard work suited him best,
+and no work was too hard for his iron strength and patient resolution.
+But it broke the spirit of a man in him to see his young wife's despair.
+Poverty frightened and quelled her. The deep-rooted security of her old
+home was something she missed every day of her makeshift existence. It
+was degradation to live in "rooms," or a room; to move for want of means
+to pay the rent. She pined for the good food she had been used to. Her
+health suffered through anxiety and hard work. She was too proud to
+complain, but the sight of her dumb unacceptance of what had come to
+her through him undoubtedly added the last straw to her husband's mental
+strain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It is hard for me to realize it as I once did," said Paul, as the story
+paused. "You make tragedy a dream. But there is a deep vein of tragedy
+in our blood. And my theory is that it always crops out in families
+where it's the keynote, as it were."
+
+"Never mind, you old care-taker! We Middletons carry sail enough to need
+a ton or two of lead in our keel."
+
+"But, you understand?"--
+
+"I understand the distinction between what I call your good blood, and
+the sort of blood I thought you had. It explains a certain funny way you
+have with arms--weapons. Do you mind?"
+
+"Not at all," said Paul coldly. "I hate a weapon. I am always ashamed of
+myself when I get one in my hand."
+
+"You act that way, dear!"
+
+"God made tools and the Devil made weapons."
+
+"You are civil to my father's profession."
+
+"Your father is what he is aside from his profession."
+
+"You are quite mistaken, Paul. My father and his profession are one.
+His sword is a symbol of healing. The army is the great surgeon of the
+nation when the time comes for a capital operation."
+
+"It grows harder to tell my story," said Paul gloomily;--"the short and
+simple annals of the poor."
+
+"Now come! Have I been a snob about my father's profession?"
+
+"No; but you love it, naturally. You have grown up with its pomp and
+circumstance around you. You are the history makers when history is most
+exciting."
+
+"Go on with your story, you proud little Dutchman! When I despise you
+for your farming relatives, you can taunt me with my history making."
+
+Paul was about two years old when his parents broke up in the Wood
+River country and came south by wagon on the old stage-road to Felton.
+Whenever he saw a "string-bean freighter's" outfit moving into Bisuka,
+if there was a woman on the driver's seat, he wanted to take off his hat
+to her. For so his mother sat beside his father and held him in her arms
+two hundred miles across the Snake River desert. The stages have been
+laid off since the Oregon Short Line went through, but there were
+stations then all along the road.
+
+One night they made camp at a lonely place between Soul's Rest and
+Mountain Home. Oneman Station it was called; afterwards Deadman Station,
+when the keeper's body was found one morning stiff and cold in his bunk.
+He died in the night alone. Emily Bogardus had cause to hate the man
+when he was living, and his dreary end was long a shuddering remembrance
+to her, like the answer to an unforgiving prayer.
+
+The station was in a hollow with bare hills around, rising to the
+highest point of that rolling plain country. The mountains sink below
+the plain, only their white tops showing. It was October. All the wild
+grass had been eaten close for miles on both sides of the road, but over
+a gap in the Western divide was the Bruneau Valley, where the bell-mare
+of the team had been raised. In the night she broke her hopples and
+struck out across the summit with the four mules at her heels. Towards
+morning a light snow fell and covered their tracks. Adam was compelled
+to hunt his stock on foot; the keeper refusing him a horse, saying he
+had got himself into trouble before through being friendly with the
+company's horses. He started out across the hills, expecting that the
+same night would see him back, and his wife was left in the wagon camp
+alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I know this story very well," said Paul, "and yet I never heard it but
+once, when mother decided I was old enough to know all. But every word
+was bitten into me--especially this ugly part I am coming to. I wish
+it need not be told, yet all the rest depends on it; and that such an
+experience could come to a woman like my mother shows what exposure and
+humiliation lie in the straightest path if there is no money to smooth
+the way. You hear it said that in the West the toughest men will be
+chivalrous to a woman if she is the right sort of a woman. I'm afraid
+that is a romantic theory of the Western man.
+
+"That night, before his team stampeded, as he sat by the keeper's fire,
+father had made up his mind that the less they had to do with that man
+the better. He may have warned mother; and she, left alone with the
+brute, did not know the wisdom of hiding her fear and loathing of him.
+He may have meant no more than a low kind of teasing, but her suffering
+was the same.
+
+"Father did not come. She dared not leave the camp. She knew no place to
+go to, and in his haste, believing he would soon be with her again, he
+had taken all their little stock of funds. But he had left her his gun,
+and with this within reach of her hand in the shelter of the wagon hood,
+without fire and without cooked food, she kept a sleepless watch.
+
+"The stages came and went; help was within sound of her voice, but she
+dared make no sign. The passengers were few at that season, always
+men, on the best of terms with the keeper. He had threatened--well, no
+matter--such a threat as a more sophisticated woman would have smiled
+at. She was simple, but she was not weak. It was a moral battle between
+them. There were hours when she held him by the power of her eye alone;
+she conquered, but it nearly killed her.
+
+"One morning a man jumped down from the stage whose face she knew. He
+had recognized my father's outfit and he came to speak to her, amazed
+to find her in that place alone. There was no need to put her worst fear
+into words; he knew the keeper. He made the best he could of father's
+detention, but he assured her, as she knew too well, that she could not
+wait for him there. He was on his way East, and he took us with him as
+far as Mountain Home. To this day she believes that if Bud Granger had
+led the search, my father would have been found; but he went East to
+sell his cattle, the snows set in, and the search party came straggling
+home. The man, Granger, had left a letter of explanation, inclosing one
+from mother to father, with the keeper. He bribed and frightened him,
+but for years she used to agonize over a fear that father had come back
+and the keeper had withheld the letter and belied her to him with some
+devilish story that maddened him and drove him from her. Such a fancy
+might have come out of her mental state at that time. I believe that
+Granger left the letter simply to satisfy her. He must have believed my
+father was dead. He could not have conceived of a man's being lost in
+that broad country at that season; but my father was a man of hills and
+farms, all small, compact. The plains were another planet to him.
+
+"The letter was found in the keeper's clothing after his death; no
+one ever came to claim it of his successor. Somewhere in this great
+wilderness a tired man found rest. What would we not give if we knew
+where!
+
+"And she worked in a hotel in Mountain Home. Can you imagine it! Then
+Christine was born and the multiplied strain overcame her. Strangers
+took care of her children while she lay between life and death. She had
+been silent about herself and her past, but they found a letter from one
+of her old schoolmates asking about teachers' salaries in the West, and
+they wrote to her begging her to make known my mother's condition to
+her relatives if any were living. At length came a letter from
+grandfather--characteristic to the last. The old home was there, for her
+and for her children, but no home for the traitor, as he called father.
+She must give him up even to his name. No Bogardus could inherit of a
+Van Elten.
+
+"She had not then lost all hope of father's return, and she never
+forgave her father for trying to buy her back for the price of what she
+considered her birthright. She settled down miserably to earn bread for
+her children. Then, when hope and pride were crushed in her, and faith
+had nothing left to cling to, there came a letter from Uncle Jacob, the
+bachelor, who had bided his time. Out of the division in his brother's
+house he proposed to build up his own; just as he would step in and buy
+depreciated bonds to hold them for a rise. He offered her a home and
+maintenance during his lifetime, and his estate for herself and her
+children when he was through. There were no conditions referring to our
+father, but it was understood that she should give up her own. This,
+mainly, to spite his brother, yet under all there was an old man's plea.
+She felt she could make the obligation good, though there might not be
+much love on either side. Perhaps it came later; but I remember enough
+of that time to believe that her children's future was dearly paid for.
+Grandfather died alone, in the old rat-ridden house up the Hudson. He
+left no will, to every one's surprise. It might have been his negative
+way of owning his debt to nature at the last.
+
+"That is how we came to be rich; and no one detects in us now the crime
+of those early struggles. But my father was a hired man; and my mother
+has done every menial thing with those soft hands of hers." A softer one
+was folded in his own. Its answering clasp was loyal and strong.
+
+"Is _this_ the story you had not the courage to tell me?"
+
+"This is the story I had the courage to tell you--not any too soon,
+perhaps you think?"
+
+"And do you think it needed courage?"
+
+"The question is what you think. What are we to do with Uncle Jacob's
+money? Go off by ourselves and have a good time with it?"
+
+"We will not decide to-night," said Moya, tenderly subdued. But, though
+the story had interested and touched her, as accounting for her lover's
+saddened, conscience-ridden youth, it was no argument against teaching
+him what youth meant in her philosophy. The differences were explained,
+but not abolished.
+
+"It was spite money, remember, not love money," he continued, reverting
+to his story. "It purchased my mother's compliance to one who hated her
+father, who forced her to listen, year after year, to bitter, unnatural
+words against him. I am not sure but it kept her from him at the last;
+for if Uncle Jacob had not stepped in and made her his, I can't help
+thinking she would have found somehow a way to the soft place in his
+heart. Something good ought to be done with that money to redeem its
+history."
+
+"You must not be morbid, Paul."
+
+"That sounds like mother," said Paul, smiling. "She is always jealous
+for our happiness; because she lost her own, I think, and paid so
+heavily for ours. She prizes pleasure and success, even worldly success,
+for us."
+
+"I don't blame her!" cried Moya.
+
+"No; of course not. But you mustn't both be against me, and Chrissy,
+too. She is so, unconsciously; she does not know the pull there is on
+me, through knowing things she doesn't dream of, and that I can never
+forget."
+
+"No," said Moya. "I am sure she is perfectly unconscious. We exchanged
+biographies at school, and there was nothing at all like this in hers.
+Why was she never told?"
+
+"She has always been too strained, too excitable. Every least incident
+is an emotion with her. When she laughs, her laugh is like a cry.
+Haven't you noticed that? Startle her, and her eyes are the very eyes of
+fear. Mother was wise, I think, not to pour those old sorrows into her
+little fragile cup."
+
+"So she emptied them all into yours!"
+
+"That was my right, of the elder and stronger. I wouldn't have missed
+the knowledge of our beginnings for the world. What a prosperous fool
+and ass I might have made of myself!"
+
+"Morbid again," said Moya. "You belong to your own day and generation.
+You might as well wear country shoes and clothes because your father
+wore them."
+
+"Still, if we have such a thing in this country as class, then you and I
+do not belong to the same class except by virtue of Uncle Jacob's money.
+Confess you are glad I am a Bevier and a Broderick and a Van Elten, as
+well as a Bogardus."
+
+"I shall confess nothing of the kind. Now you do talk like a _nouveau_
+Paul, dear," said Moya, with her caressing eyes on his--they had paused
+under the lamp at the top of the steps--"I think your father must have
+been a very good man."
+
+"All our fathers were," Paul averred, smiling at her earnestness.
+
+"Yes, but yours in particular; because _you_ are an angel; and your
+mother is quite human, is she not?--almost as human as I am? That
+carriage of the head,--if that does not mean the world!"--
+
+"She has needed all her pride."
+
+"I don't object to pride, myself," said the girl, "but you dwell so upon
+her humiliations. I see no such record in her face."
+
+"She has had much to hide, you must remember."
+
+"Well, she can hide things; but one's self must escape sometimes. What
+has become of little Emily Van Elten who ran away with her father's
+hired man? What has become of the freighter's wife?"
+
+"She is all mother now. She brought us back to the world, and for our
+sakes she has learned to take her place in it. Herself she has buried."
+
+"Yes; but which is--was herself?"
+
+"And you cannot see her story in her face?"
+
+"Not that story."
+
+"Not the crushing reserve, the long suspense, the silence of a sorrow
+that even her children could not share?"
+
+"I know her silence. Your mother is a most reticent woman. But is she
+now the woman of that story?"
+
+"I don't understand you quite," said Paul. "How much are we ourselves
+after we have passed through fires of grief, and been recast under the
+pressure of circumstances! She was that woman once."
+
+"The saddest part of the story to me is, that your father, who loved her
+so, and worked so hard for his family, should have served you all the
+better by his death."
+
+"Oh, don't say that, dear! Who knows what is best? But one thing we do
+know. The sorrow that cut my mother's life in two brought you and me
+together. It rent the stratum on which I was born and raised it to the
+level of yours, my lady!"
+
+"I shall not forget," whispered Moya with blissful irony, "that you are
+the Poor Man's son!"
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+AN APPEAL TO NATURE
+
+The autumn days were shortening imperceptibly and the sunsets had
+gained an almost articulate splendor: cloud calling unto cloud, the west
+horizon signaling to the east, and answering again, while the mute dark
+circle of hills sat like a council of chiefs with their blankets drawn
+over their heads. Soon those blankets would be white with snow.
+
+Behind the Post where the hills climb toward the Cottonwood Creek
+divide, there is a little canon which at sunset is especially inviting.
+It hastens twilight by at least an hour during midsummer, and in autumn
+it leads up a stairway of shadow to the great spectacle of the day--the
+day's departure from the hills.
+
+The canon has its companion rivulet always coming down to meet the
+stage-road going up. As this road is the only outlet hillward for all
+the life of the plain, and as the tendency of every valley population is
+to climb, one thinks of it as a way out rather than a way in. Higher up,
+the stage-road becomes a pass cut through a wall of splintered cliffs;
+and here it leads its companion, the brook, a wild dance over boulders,
+and under culverts of fallen rock. At last it emerges on what is
+called The Summit; and between are green, deep valleys where the little
+ranches, fields and fences and houses, seem to have slid down to the
+bottom and lie there at rest.
+
+A party of young riders from the post had gone up this road one evening,
+and two had come down, laughing and talking; but the other two remained
+in the circle of light that rested on the summit. Prom where they sat
+in the dry grass they could hear a hollow sound of moving feet as the
+cattle wandered down through folds of the hills, seeking the willow
+copses by the water. On the breast of her habit Moya wore the blossoms
+of the wild evening primrose, which in this region flowers till the
+coming of frost. They had been gathered for her on the way up, and as
+she had waited for them, sitting her horse in silence, the brown owls
+gurgled and hooted overhead from nest to nest in the crannies of the
+rocks.
+
+"You need not hold the horses," she commanded, in her fresh voice.
+"Throw my bridle over your saddle pommel and yours over mine.--There!"
+she said, watching the horses as they shuffled about interlinked. "That
+is like half the marriages in this world. They don't separate and they
+don't go astray, but they don't _get_ anywhere!"
+
+"I have been thinking of those 'two in the Garden,'" mused Paul, resting
+his dark, abstracted eyes on her. "Whether or no your humble servant has
+a claim to unchallenged bliss in this world, there's no doubt about your
+claim. If my plans interfere, I must take myself out of the way."
+
+"Oh, you funny old croaker!" laughed the girl. "Take yourself out of the
+way, indeed! Haven't you chosen me to show you the way?"
+
+"Moya, Moya!" said Paul in a smothered voice.
+
+"I know what you are thinking. But stop it!" she held one of her crushed
+blossoms to his lips. "What was this made for? Why hasn't it some work
+to do? Isn't it a skulker--blooming here for only a night?"
+
+"'Ripen, fall, and cease!'" Paul murmured.
+
+"How much more am I--are you, then? The sum of us may amount to
+something, if we mind our own business and keep step with each other,
+and finish one thing before we begin the next. I will not be in a hurry
+about being good. Goodness can take care of itself. What you need is to
+be happy! And it's my first duty to make you so."
+
+"God knows what bliss it would be."
+
+"Don't say 'would be.'"
+
+"God knows it is!"
+
+"Then hush and be thankful!" There was a long hush. They heard the far,
+faint notes of a bugle sounding from the Post.
+
+"Lights out," said Moya. "We must go."
+
+"You haven't told me yet where our Garden is to be," he said.
+
+"I will tell you on the way home."
+
+When they had come down into the neighborhood of ranches, and Bisuka's
+lights were twinkling below them, she asked: "Who lives now in the
+grandfather's house on the Hudson?"
+
+"The farmer, Chauncey Dunlop."
+
+"Is there any other house on the place?"
+
+"Yes. Mother built a new one on the Ridge some years ago."
+
+"What sort of a house is it?"
+
+"It was called a good house once; but now it's rather everything it
+shouldn't be. It was one of the few rash things mother ever did; build a
+house for her children while they were children. Now she will not change
+it. She says we shall build for ourselves, how and where we please.
+Stone Ridge is her shop. Of course, if Chrissy liked it--But Chrissy
+considers it a 'hole.' Mother goes up there and indulges in secret
+orgies of economy; one man in the stable, one in the garden--'Economy
+has its pleasures for all healthy minds.'"
+
+"Economy is as delicious as bread and butter after too much candy. I
+should love to go up to Stone Ridge and wear out my old clothes. Did any
+one tell me that place would some day be yours?"
+
+"It will be my wife's on the day we are married."
+
+"That is where your wife, sir, would like to live."
+
+"It is a stony Garden, dear! The summer people have their places nearer
+the river. Our land lies back, with no view but hills. For one who has
+the world before her where to choose, it strikes me she has picked out a
+very humble Paradise."
+
+"Did you think my idea was to travel--a poor army girl who spends
+her life in trunks? Do we ever buy a book or frame a picture without
+thinking of our next move? As for houses, who am I that I should be
+particular? In the Army's House are many mansions, but none that we
+can call our own. Oh, I'm very primitive; I have the savage instinct to
+gather sticks and stones, and get a roof over my head before winter sets
+in."
+
+To such a speech as this there was but one obvious answer, as she rode
+at his side, her appealing slenderness within reach of his arm. It did
+not matter what thousands he proposed to spend upon the roof that should
+cover her; it was the same as if they were planning a hut of tules or a
+burrow in the snow.
+
+"It is a poor man's country," he said; "stony hillsides, stony roads
+lined with stone fences. The chief crop of the country is ice and stone.
+In one of my grandfather's fields there is a great cairn which Adam
+Bogardus, they say, picked up, stone by stone, with his bare hands, and
+carted there when he was fourteen years old. We will build them into the
+walls of our new house for a blessing."
+
+"No," said Moya. "We will let sleeping stones lie!"
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+MARKING TIME
+
+There was impatience at the garrison for news that the hunters had
+started. Every day's delay at Challis meant an abridgment of the
+bridegroom's leave, and the wedding was now but a fortnight away. It
+began to seem preposterous that he should go at all, and the colonel
+was annoyed with himself for his enthusiasm over the plan in the first
+place. Mrs. Bogardus's watchfulness of dates told the story of her
+thoughts, but she said nothing.
+
+"Mamsie is restless," said Christine, putting an arm around her mother's
+solid waist and giving her a tight little hug apropos of nothing. "I
+believe it's another case of 'mail-time fever.' The colonel says it
+comes on with Moya every afternoon about First Sergeant's call. But
+Moya is cunning. She goes off and pretends she isn't listening for the
+bugle."
+
+"'First Sergeant or Second,' it's all one to me," said Mrs. Bogardus. "I
+never know one call from another, except when the gun goes off."
+
+"Mamsie! 'When the gun goes off!' What a civilian way of talking. You
+are not getting on at all with your military training. Now let me give
+you some useful information. In two seconds the bugle will call the
+first sergeant--of each company--to the adjutant's office, and there
+he'll get the mail for his men. The orderly trumpeter will bring it to
+the houses on the line, and the colonel's orderly--beautiful creature!
+There he goes! How I wish we could take him home with us and have him
+in our front hall. Fancy the feelings of the maids! And the rage on the
+noble brow of Parkins--awful Parkins. I should like to give his pride a
+bump."
+
+Mother and daughter were pacing the colonel's veranda, behind a partial
+screen of rose vines--October vines fast shedding their leaves. Every
+breeze shook a handful down, which the women's skirts swept with them as
+they walked. Mrs. Bogardus turned and clasped Christine's arm above the
+elbow; through the thin sleeve she could feel its cool roundness. It was
+a soft, small, unmuscular arm, that had never borne its own burdens, to
+say nothing of a share in the burdens of others.
+
+"Get your jacket," said the mother. "There is a chill in the air."
+
+"There is no chill in me," laughed Christine. "You know, mamsie, you
+aren't a girl. I should simply die in those awful things that you wear.
+Did you ever know such a hot house as the colonel keeps!"
+
+"The rooms are small, and the colonel is--impulsive," Mrs. Bogardus
+added with a smile.
+
+"There is something very like him about his fire-making. I should know
+by the way he puts on wood that he never would have "--Mrs. Bogardus
+checked herself.
+
+"A large bank account?" Christine supplied, with her quick wit, which
+was not of a highly sensitive order.
+
+"He has a large heart," said her mother.
+
+"And plenty of room for it, bless him! The slope of his chest is like
+the roof of a house. The only time I envy Moya is when she lays her head
+down on it and tries to meet her arms around him as if he were a tree,
+and he strokes her hair as if his hand was a bough! If ever I marry a
+soldier he shall be a colonel with a white mustache and a burnt-sienna
+complexion, and a sword-belt that measures--what is the colonel's
+waist-measure, do you suppose?"
+
+Mrs. Bogardus listened to this nonsense with the smile of a silent
+woman who has borne a child that can talk. Moya had often noticed how
+uncritical she was of Christine's "unruly member."
+
+"It isn't polite to speak of waist-measures to middle-aged persons like
+your mother and the colonel," she said placidly. "You like it very much
+out here?"
+
+"Fascinating! Never had such a good time in my whole life."
+
+"And you like the West altogether? Would you like to live here?"
+
+"Oh, if it came to living, I should want to be sure there was a way
+out."
+
+"There generally is a way out of most things. But it costs something."
+Mrs. Bogardus was so concise in her speech as at times to be almost
+oracular.
+
+"Army people are sure of their way out," said Christine, "and I guess
+they find it costs something."
+
+"Why do they buy so many books, I wonder? If I moved as often as they
+do, I'd have only paper covers and leave them behind."
+
+"You are not a reader, mummy. You're a business woman. You look at
+everything from the practical side."
+
+"And if I didn't, who would?" Mrs. Bogardus spoke with earnestness. "We
+can't all be dreamers like Paul or privileged persons like you. There
+has to be one in every family to say the things no one likes to hear and
+do the things nobody likes to do."
+
+"We are the rich repiners and you are the household drudge!" Christine
+shouted, laughing at her own wit.
+
+"Hush, hush!" her mother smiled. "Don't make so much noise."
+
+"I should like to know who's to be the drudge in Paul's privileged
+family. It doesn't strike me it's going to be Moya. And Paul only
+drudges for people he doesn't know."
+
+"Moya is a girl you can expect anything of. She is a wonderful mixture
+of opposites. She has the Irish quickness, and yet she has learned to
+obey. She has had the freedom and the discipline of these little lordly
+army posts. She is one of the few girls of her age who does not measure
+everything from her own point of view."
+
+"Is that a dig at me, ma'am?"
+
+At that moment Moya came out upon the porch.
+
+She was very striking with the high color and brilliant eyes that
+mail-time fever breeds. Christine looked at her with freshly aroused
+curiosity, moved by her mother's unwonted burst of praise. The faintest
+tinge of jealousy made her feel naughty. As Moya went down the board
+walk, the colonel's orderly came springing up the steps to meet her with
+the mail-bag. He saluted and turned off at an angle down the embankment
+not to present his back to the ladies.
+
+"Did you see that! He never raised his eyes. They are like priests. You
+can't make them look at you." Moya looked at Christine in amazement.
+The man himself might have heard her. It was not the first time
+this privileged guest had rubbed against garrison customs in certain
+directions hardly worth mentioning. Moya hesitated. Then she laughed
+a little, and said: "Only a raw recruity would look at an officer's
+daughter, or any lady of the line."
+
+"Oh, you horrid little aristocrat! Well, I look at them, when they are
+as pretty as that one, and I forgive them if they look at me."
+
+Moya turned and hovered over the contents of the mail-bag. In the
+exercise of one of her prerogatives, it was her habit to sort its
+contents before delivering it at the official door.
+
+"All, all for you!" she offered a huge packet of letters, smiling, to
+Mrs. Bogardus. It was faced with one on top in Paul's handwriting. "All
+but one," she added, and proceeded to open her own much fatter one in
+the same hand. She stood reading it in the hall.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus presently followed and remained beside her. "Could I speak
+to your father a moment?" she asked.
+
+"Certainly, I will call him," said Moya.
+
+"Wait: I hear him now." The study door opened and Colonel Middleton
+joined them. Mrs. Bogardus leading the way into the sitting-room, the
+colonel followed her, and Moya, not having been invited, lingered in the
+hall.
+
+"Well, have the hunters started yet?" the colonel inquired in his breezy
+voice, which made you want to open the doors and windows to give it
+room. "Be seated! Be seated! I hope you have got a long letter to read
+me."
+
+Mrs. Bogardus stood reflecting. "The day this letter was mailed they got
+off--only two days ago," she said. "Could I reach them, Colonel, with a
+telegram?"
+
+"Two days ago," the colonel considered. "They must have made Yankee Fork
+by yesterday. Today they are deep in the woods. No; I should say a man
+on horseback would be your surest telegram. Is it anything important?"
+
+"Colonel, I wish we could call them back! They have gone off, it seems
+to me, in a most crazy way--against the judgment of every one who knows.
+The guide, this man whom they waited for, refused, it appears, to go
+out again with another party so late in the fall. But the Bowens were
+determined. They insisted on making arrangements with another man. Then,
+when 'Packer John,' they call him, heard of this, he went to Paul and
+urged him, if he could not prevent the others from going, to give up the
+trip himself. The Bowens were very much annoyed at his interference,
+and with Paul for listening to him. And Paul, rather than make things
+unpleasant, gave in. You know how young men are! What silly grounds are
+enough for the most serious decisions when it is a question of pride or
+good faith. The Bowens had bought their outfit on Paul's assurance that
+he would go. He felt he could not leave them in the lurch. On that, the
+guide suddenly changed his mind and said he would go with them sooner
+than see them fall into worse hands. They were, in a way, committed to
+the other man, so they took _him_ along as cook--the whole thing done in
+haste, you see, and unpleasant feelings all around. Do you call that a
+good start for a pleasure trip?"
+
+"It's very much the way with young troops when they start
+out--everything wrong end foremost, everybody mad with everybody else. A
+day in the saddle will set their little tempers all right."
+
+"That isn't the point," Mrs. Bogardus persisted gloomily. As she spoke,
+the two girls came into the room and stood listening.
+
+"What is the point, then?" Christine demanded. "Moya has no news; all
+those pages and pages, and nothing for anybody or about anybody!"
+
+"'Such an intolerable deal of sack to such a poor pennyworth of bread,'"
+the colonel quoted, smiling at Moya's bloated envelope.
+
+"But what do you think?" Mrs. Bogardus recalled him. "Don't you think
+it's a mistake all around?"
+
+"Not at all, if they have a good man. This flat-footed fellow, John,
+will take command, as he should. There is no danger in the woods at any
+season unless the party gets rattled and goes to pieces for want of a
+head."
+
+"Father!" exclaimed Moya. "You know there is danger. Often, things have
+happened!"
+
+"Why, what could happen?" asked Christine, with wide eyes.
+
+"Many things very interesting could happen," the colonel boasted
+cheerfully. "That is the object of the trip. You want things to happen.
+It is the emergency that makes the man--sifts him, and takes the chaff
+out of him."
+
+"Take the chaff out of Banks Bowen," Moya imprudently struck in, "and
+what would you have left?" She had met Banks Bowen in New York.
+
+"Tut, tut!" said the colonel. "Silence, or a good word for the
+absent--same as the"--The colonel stopped short.
+
+"You are so scornful about the other men, now you have chosen one!"
+Christine's face turned red.
+
+"Why, Chrissy! You would not compare your brother to those men! Papa, I
+beg your pardon; this is only for argument."
+
+"I don't compare him; but that's not to say all the other men are
+chaff!" Christine joined constrainedly in the laugh that followed her
+speech.
+
+"You need not go fancying things, Moya," she cried, in answer to a
+quizzical look. "As if I hadn't known the Bowen boys since I was so
+high!"
+
+"You might know them from the cradle to the grave, my dear young lady,
+and not know them as Paul will, after a week in the woods with them."
+
+The colonel had missed the drift of the girls' discussion. He was
+considering, privately, whether he had not better send a special
+messenger on the young men's trail. His assurances to the women left
+a wide margin for personal doubt as to the prudence of the trip. Aside
+from the lateness of the start, it was, undoubtedly, an ill-assorted
+company for the woods. There was a wide margin also for suspense, as all
+mail facilities ceased at Challis.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+A HUNTER'S DIARY
+
+Early in November, about a week before the hunters were expected home, a
+packet came addressed to Moya. It was a journal letter from Paul, mailed
+by some returning prospector chance encountered in the forest as the
+party were going in. Moya read it aloud, with asterisks, to a family
+audience which did not include her father.
+
+"To-day," one of the first entries read, "we halt at Twelve-Mile Cabin,
+the last roof we shall sleep under. There are pine-trees near the cabin
+cut off fifteen feet above the ground, felled in winter, John tells us,
+_at the level of the snow!_
+
+"These cabins are all deserted now; the tide of prospecting has turned
+another way. The great hills that crowd one another up against the sky
+are so infested and overridden by this enormous forest-growth, and the
+underbrush is so dense, it would be impossible for a 'tenderfoot' to
+gain any clear idea of his direction. I should be a lost man the moment
+I ventured out of call. Woodcraft must be a sixth sense which we lost
+with the rest of our Eden birthright when we strayed from innocence,
+when we ceased to sleep with one ear on the ground, and to spell our way
+by the moss on tree-trunks. In these solitudes, as we call them,
+ranks and clouds of witnesses rise up to prove us deaf and blind. Busy
+couriers are passing every moment of the day; and we do not see, nor
+hear, nor understand. We are the stocks and stones. Packer John is our
+only wood-sharp;--yet the last half of the name doesn't altogether fit
+him. He is a one-sided character, handicapped, I should say, by some
+experience that has humbled and perplexed him. Two and two perhaps
+refused to make four in his account with men, and he gave up the
+proposition. And now he consorts with trees, and hunts to live, not
+to kill. He has an impersonal, out-door odor about him, such as the
+cleanest animals have. I would as soon eat out of his dry, hard, cool
+hand, as from a chunk of pine-bark.
+
+"It is amusing to see him with a certain member of the party who tries
+to be fresh with him. He has a disconcerting eye when he fixes it on a
+man, or turns it away from one who has said a coarse or a foolish thing.
+
+"'The jungle is large,' he seems to say, 'and the cub he is small. Let
+him think and be still!'"
+
+"Who is this 'certain member' who tries to be 'fresh'?" Christine
+inquired with perceptible warmth.
+
+"The cook, perhaps," said Moya prudently.
+
+"The cook isn't a 'member'!--Well, can't you go on, Moya? Paul seems to
+need a lot of editing." Moya had paused and was glancing ahead, smiling
+to herself constrainedly.
+
+"Is there more disparagement of his comrades?" Christine persisted.
+
+"Christine, be still!" Mrs. Bogardus interfered. "Moya ought to have the
+first reading of her own letter. It's very good of her to let us hear it
+at all."
+
+"Oh dear, there's no disparagement. Quite the contrary! I'll go on with
+pleasure if you don't mind." Moya read hurriedly, laughing through her
+words:--
+
+"'If you were here, (Ah, _if_ you were here!) You should lend me an
+ear--One at the least Of a pair the prettiest'--which is, within a foot
+or two, the rhythm of 'Wood Notes.' Of course you don't know it!"
+
+"This is a gibe at me," Moya explained, "because I don't read Emerson.
+'It is the very measure of a marching chorus,' he goes on to say, 'where
+the step is broken by rocks and tree-roots;'--and he is chanting it
+to himself (to her it was in the original) as they go in single file
+through these 'haughty solitudes, the twilight of the gods!'"
+
+"'Haughty solitudes'!" Christine derided.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus sighed with impatience, and Moya's face became set. "Well,
+here he quotes again," she haughtily resumed. "Anybody who is tired of
+this can be excused. Emerson won't mind, and I'm sure Paul won't!" She
+looked a mute apology to Paul's mother, who smiled and said, "Go on,
+dear. I don't read Emerson either, but I like him when Paul reads him
+for me."
+
+"Well, I warn you there is an awful lot of him here!" Moya's voice was a
+trifle husky as she read on.
+
+"Old as Jove, Old as Love'"
+
+"I thought Love was young!"--Christine in a whisper aside.
+
+"'Who of me Tells the pedigree? Only the mountains old, Only the waters
+cold, Only the moon and stars, My coevals are.'"
+
+Moya sighed, and sank into prose again. "There is a gaudy yellow moss
+in these woods that flecks the straight and mournful tree-trunks like a
+wandering glint of sunlight; and there is a crepe-like black moss that
+hangs funeral scarfs upon the boughs, as if there had been a death in
+the forest, and the trees were in line for the burial procession. The
+grating of our voices on this supreme silence reminds one of 'Why will
+you still be talking, Monsieur Benedick?--nobody marks you.'
+
+"There are silences, and again there are whole symphonies of sound. The
+winds smites the tree-tops over our heads, a surf-like roar comes up
+the slope, and the yellow pine-needles fall across the deepest darks as
+motes sail down a sunbeam. One wearies of the constant perpendicular,
+always these stiff, columnar lines, varied only by the melancholy
+incline where some great pine-chieftain is leaning to his fall supported
+in the arms of his comrades, or by the tragic prostration of the 'down
+timber'--beautiful straight-cut English these woodsmen talk.
+
+"Last evening John and I sat by the stove in the men's tent, while the
+others were in the cabin playing penny-ante with the cook (a sodden
+brute who toadies to the Bowens, and sulks with John because he objected
+to our hiring the fellow--an objection which I sustained, hence his
+logical spite includes me). John was melting pine gum and elk tallow
+into a dressing for our boots. I took a mean advantage of him, his hands
+being in the tallow and the tent-flap down, and tried on him a little
+of--now, don't deride me!--'Wood Notes.' It is seldom one can get the
+comment of a genuine woodsman on Nature according to the poets.'"
+
+Moya read on perfunctorily, feeling that she was not carrying her
+audience with her, and longing for the time when she could take her
+letter away and have it all to herself. If she stopped now, Christine,
+in this sudden new freak of distrustfulness, would be sure to
+misunderstand.
+
+    "'For Nature ever faithful is
+    To such as trust her faithfulness.
+    When the forest shall mislead me,
+    When the night and morning lie,
+    When sea and land refuse to feed me,
+    Will be time enough to die.
+
+    Then will yet my Mother yield
+    A pillow in her greenest field;
+    Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
+    The clay of their departed lover.'"
+
+"That is beautiful," Mrs. Bogardus murmured hastily. "Even I can
+understand that." Moya thanked her with a glance.
+
+"And what did the infallible John say?" Christine inquired.
+
+"John looked at me and smiled, as at a babbling infant"--
+
+"Good for John!"
+
+"Christine, be still!"
+
+"John looked at me and smiled," Moya repeated steadily. Nothing could
+have stopped her now. She only hoped for some further scattering mention
+of that "certain member" who had set them all at odds and spoiled what
+should have been an hour's pure happiness. "'You'll get the pillow all
+right,' he said. 'It might not be a green one, nor I wouldn't bank much
+on the flowers; but you'll be tired enough to sleep without rocking
+about the time you trust to Nature's tuckin' you in and puttin' victuals
+in your mouth. I never _see_ nature till I came out here. I'd seen
+pretty woods and views, that a young lady could take down with her
+paints; but how are you going to paint that?'--he waved his tallow-stick
+towards the night outside. 'Ears can't reach the bottom of that
+stillness. That's creation before God ever thought of man. Long as I've
+been in the woods, I never get over the feeling that there's _something
+behind me_. If you go towards the trees, they come to meet you; if you
+go backwards, they go back; but you can't sit down and sit still without
+they'll come a-creeping up and creeping up, and crowding in'--
+
+"He stirred his 'dope' awhile, and then he struck another note. 'I've
+wintered alone in these mountains,' he said, 'and I've seen snowslides
+pounce out of a clear sky--a puff and a flash and a roar; an' trees four
+foot across snappin' like kindlin' wood--not because it hit 'em; only
+the breath of it struck them; and maybe a man lying dead somewheres
+under his cabin timbers. That's no mother's love-tap. Pillows and
+flowers ain't in it. But it's good poetry,' he added condescendingly.
+
+"I have not quoted him right, not being much of a snap-shot at dialect;
+and his is an undefined, unclassifiable mixture. Eastern farm-hand and
+Western ranchman, prospector, who knows what? His real language is in
+his eye and his rare, pure smile. And just as his countenance expresses
+his thoughts without circumlocution or attempt at effect, so his body
+informs his clothing. Wind and rain have moulded his hat to his head,
+his shoes grip the ground like paws; his buckskins have a surface like
+a cast after Rodin. They are repousseed by the hard bones and sinews
+underneath. I can think of nothing but the clothing of Millet's peasants
+to compare with this exterior of John's. He is himself a peasant of the
+woods. He has not the predatory instincts. If he could have his way, not
+a shot would be fired by any of us for the mere idle sport of killing.
+Shooting these innocent, fearless creatures, who have not learned that
+we are here for their destruction, is too like murder and treachery
+combined. Hunger should be our only excuse. My forbearance, or weakness,
+is a sort of unspoken bond between us. But I am a peasant, too, you
+know. I do not come of the lordly, arms-bearing blood. I shoot at a live
+mark always under protest; and when I fairly catch the look in the great
+eye of a dying elk or black-tail, it knocks me out for that day's hunt."
+
+"Paul is perfectly happy!" Christine broke in. "He has got one of his
+beloved People to grovel to. They can sleep in the same tent and eat
+from the same plate, if you like. Why, it's better than the East Side!
+He'll be blood brother to Packer John before they leave the woods."
+
+Moya blushed with anger.
+
+"You have said enough on that subject, Christine." Mrs. Bogardus bent
+her dark, keen gaze upon her daughter's face. "Come"--she rose. "Come
+with me!"
+
+Christine sat still. "Come!" her mother repeated sternly. "Moya,"--in
+a different voice,--"your letter was lovely. Shall you read it to your
+father?"
+
+"Hardly," said Moya, flushing. "Father does not care for descriptions,
+and the woods are an old story to him."
+
+Mrs. Bogardus placed her hands on the girl's shoulders and gave her one
+of her infrequent, ceremonious kisses, which, like her finest smile, she
+kept for occasions too nice for words.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+THE POWER OF WEAKNESS
+
+Christine followed her mother to their room, and the two faced each
+other a moment in pale silence.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus spoke first. "What does this mean?"--her breath came
+short, perhaps from climbing the stairs. She was a large woman.
+
+"What does what mean? I don't understand you, mother."
+
+"Ah, child, don't repulse me! Twice you and Moya have nearly quarreled
+about those men. Why were you so rude to her? Why did you behave so
+about her letter?"
+
+"Paul is so intolerant! And the airs he puts on! If he is my own brother
+I must say he's an awful prig about other men."
+
+"We are not discussing Paul. That is not the question now. Have you
+anything to tell me, Christine?"
+
+"To tell you?--about what, mother?" Christine spoke lower.
+
+"You know what I mean. Which of them is it? Is it Banks?--don't say it
+is Banks!"
+
+"Mother, how can I say anything when you begin like that?"
+
+"Have you any idea what sort of a man Banks Bowen really is? His father
+supports him entirely--six years now, ever since he left the law school.
+He does nothing, never will do anything. He has no will or purpose in
+life, except about trifles like this hunting-trip. As far as I can see
+he is without common sense."
+
+Christine stood by the dressing-table pleating the cover-frilling with
+her small fingers that were loaded with rings. She pinched the folds
+hard and let them go. "Why did no one ever say these things before?"
+
+"We don't say things about the sons of our friends, unless we are
+compelled to. They were implied in every way possible. When have I asked
+Banks Bowen to the house except when everybody was asked! I would never
+in the world have come out in Mr. Borland's car if I had known the
+Bowens were to be of the party."
+
+"That made no difference," said Christine loftily.
+
+"It was all settled before then, was it?"
+
+"Have I said it was settled, mother? He asked me if I could ever care
+for him; and I said that I did--a little. Why shouldn't I? He does what
+I like a man to do. I don't enjoy people who have wills and purposes. It
+may be very horrid of me, but I wouldn't be in Moya's place for worlds."
+
+"You poor child! You poor, unhappy child!"
+
+"Why am I unhappy? Has Paul added so much to our income since he left
+college?"
+
+"Paul does not make money; neither does he selfishly waste it. He has a
+conscience in his use of what he has."
+
+"I don't see what conscience has to do with it. When it is gone it's
+gone."
+
+"You will learn what conscience has to do with a man's spending if ever
+you try to make both ends meet with Banks Bowen. I suppose he will go
+through the form of speaking to me?"
+
+"Mother dear! He has only just spoken to me. How fast you go!"
+
+"Not fast enough to keep up with my children, it seems. Was it you,
+Christine, who asked them to come here?"
+
+Christine was silent.
+
+"Where did you learn such ways?--such want of frankness, of delicacy, of
+the commonest consideration for others? To be looking out for your own
+little schemes at a time like this!" Mrs. Bogardus saw now what must
+have been Paul's reason for doing what, with all her forced explanations
+of the hunting-trip, she had never until now understood. He had taken
+the alarm before she had, and done what he could to postpone this family
+catastrophe.
+
+Christine retreated to a deep-cushioned chair, and threw herself into
+it, her slender hands, palm upwards, extended upon its arms. Total
+surrender under pressure of cruel odds was the expression of her pointed
+eyebrows and drooping mouth. She looked exasperatingly pretty and
+irresponsibly fragile. Her blue-veined eyelids quivered, her breath came
+in distinct pants.
+
+"Perhaps you will not be troubled with my 'ways' for very many years,
+mother. If you could feel my heart now! It jumps like something trying
+to get out. It will get out some day. Have patience!"
+
+"That is a poor way to retaliate upon your mother, Christine. Your
+health is too serious a matter to trifle with. If you choose to make it
+a shield against everything I say that doesn't please you, you can cut
+yourself off from me entirely. I cannot beat down such a defense as
+that. Anger me you never can, but you can make me helpless to help you."
+
+"I dare say it's better that I should never marry at all," said
+Christine, her eyes closed in resignation. "You never would like anybody
+I like."
+
+"I shall say no more. You are a woman. I have protected you as far as
+I was able on account of your weakness. I cannot protect you from the
+weakness itself."
+
+Mrs. Bogardus rose. She did not offer to comfort her child with
+caresses, but in her eyes as she looked at her there was a profound,
+inalienable, sorrowing tenderness, a depth of understanding beyond
+words.
+
+"I know so well," the dark eyes seemed to say, "how you came to be the
+poor thing that you are!"
+
+The constraint which she felt towards her mother threw Chrissy back upon
+Moya. Being a lesser power, she was always seeking alliances. Moya had
+put aside their foolish tiff as unworthy of another thought; she was
+embarrassed when at bedtime Christine came humbly to her door, and
+putting her arms around her neck implored her not to be cross with
+her "poor pussy." It was always the other person who was "cross" with
+Christine.
+
+"Nobody is cross with anybody, so far as I know," said Moya briskly. A
+certain sort of sentimentality always made her feel like whistling or
+singing or asserting the commonplace side of life in some way.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+THE WHITE PERIL
+
+Mrs. Bogardus received many letters, chiefly on business, and these she
+answered with manlike brevity, in a strong, provincial hand. They took
+up much of her time, and mercifully, for it was now the last week in
+November and the young men did not return.
+
+The range cattle had been driven down into the valleys, deer-tracks
+multiplied by lonely mountain fords; War Eagle and his brethren of the
+Owyhees were taking council under their winter blankets. The nights were
+still, the mornings rimy with hoarfrost. Fogs arose from the river and
+cut off the bases of the mountains, converting the valley before sunrise
+into the likeness of a polar sea.
+
+"You have let your fire go out," said the colonel briskly. He had
+invaded the sitting-room at an unaccustomed hour, finding the lady at
+her letters as usual. She turned and held her pen poised above her paper
+as she looked at him.
+
+"You did not come to see about the fire?" she said.
+
+"No; I have had letters from the north. Would you step into my study a
+moment?"
+
+Moya was in her father's room when they entered. She had been weeping,
+but at sight of Paul's mother she rose and stood picking at the
+handkerchief she held, without raising her eyes.
+
+"Don't be alarmed at Moya's face," said the colonel stoutly. "Paul was
+all right at last accounts. We will have a merry Christmas yet."
+
+"This is not from Paul!" Mrs. Bogardus fixed her eyes upon a letter
+which she held at arm's length, feeling for her glasses. "It's not for
+me--'_Miss_ Bogardus.'"
+
+"Ah, well. I saw it was postmarked Lemhi--Fort Lemhi, you know. Sit
+down, madam. Suppose I give you Mr. Winslow's report first--Lieutenant
+Winslow. You heard of his going to Lemhi?"
+
+"She doesn't know," whispered Moya.
+
+"True. Well, two weeks ago I gave Mr. Winslow a hunter's leave, as we
+call it in the army, to beat up the trail of those boys. I thought it
+was time we heard from them, but it wasn't worth while to raise a hue
+and cry. He started out with a few picked men from Lemhi, the Indian
+Reservation, you know. I couldn't have sent a better man; the thing
+hasn't got into the local papers even. My object, of course, has been
+to save unnecessary alarm. Mr. Winslow has just got back to Challis. He
+rounded up the Bowen youths and the cook and the helper, in bad shape,
+all of them, but able to tell a story. The details we shall get
+later, but I have Mr. Winslow's report to me. It is short and probably
+correct."
+
+"Was Paul not with them?" his mother questioned in a hard, dry voice.
+"Where is he then?"
+
+"He is in camp, madam, in charge of the wounded."
+
+"Dear father! if you would speak plain!" Moya whispered nervously.
+
+"Certainly. There is nothing whatever to hide. We know now that on their
+last day's hunt they met with an accident which resulted in a division
+of the party. A fall of snow had covered the ice on the trails, and
+the guide's horse fell and rolled on him--nature of his injuries not
+described. This happened a day's journey from their camp at Ten-Mile
+cabin, and the retreat with the wounded man was slow and of course
+difficult over such a trail. They put together a sort of horse-litter
+made of pine poles and carried him on that, slung between two mules
+tandem. A beastly business, winding and twisting over fallen timber,
+hugging the canon wall, near a thousand feet down--'Impassable' the
+trail is marked, on the government military maps. This first day's march
+was so discouraging that at Ten Mile they called a council, and the
+packer spoke up like a man. He disposed of his own case in this way. If
+he were to live, they could send back help to fetch him out. If not,
+no help would be needed. The snows were upon them; there was danger in
+every hour's delay. It was insane to sacrifice four sound men for one,
+badly hurt, with not many hours perhaps to suffer."
+
+A murmur from the mother announced her appreciation of the packer's
+argument.
+
+"It was no more than a man should do; but as to taking him at his word,
+why, that's another question." The colonel paused and gustily cleared
+his throat. "They were up against it right then and there, and the party
+split upon it. Three of them went on,--for help, as they put it,--and
+Paul stayed behind with the wounded man."
+
+"Paul stayed--alone?" Mrs. Bogardus uttered with hoarse emphasis. "Was
+not that a very strange way to divide? Among them all, I should think
+they might have brought the man out with them."
+
+"Their story is that his injuries were such that he could not have borne
+the pain of the journey. Rather an unusual case," the colonel added
+dryly. "In my experience, a wounded man will stand anything sooner than
+be left on the field."
+
+"I cannot understand it," Mrs. Bogardus repeated, in a voice of
+indignant pain. "Such a strange division! One man left alone--to nurse,
+and hunt, and cook, and keep up fires! Suppose the guide should die!"
+
+"Paul was not _left_, you know," the colonel said emphatically. "He
+_stayed_. And I should be thankful in your place, madam, that my son was
+the man who made that choice. But setting conduct aside, for we are not
+prepared to judge, it is merely a matter of time our getting in there,
+now that we know where he is."
+
+"How much time?" Mrs. Bogardus opened her ashen lips to say.
+
+The colonel's face fell. "Mr. Winslow reports heavy snows for the past
+week,--soft, clogging snow,--too deep to wade through and too soft to
+bear. A little later, when the cold has formed a crust, our men can get
+in on snowshoes. There is nothing for it but patience, Mrs. Bogardus,
+and faith in the boy's endurance. The pluck that made him stay behind
+will help him to hold out."
+
+Moya gave a hurt sob; the colonel stepped to the desk and stood there a
+moment turning over his papers. Behind his back the mother sent a glance
+to Moya expressive of despair.
+
+"Do you know what happened to his father? Did he ever tell you?" she
+whispered.
+
+Moya assented; she could not speak.
+
+"Twice, twice in a lifetime!" said the older woman.
+
+With a gesture, Moya protested against this wild prophecy; but as Paul's
+mother left the room she rushed upon her father, crying: "Tell _me_ the
+truth! What do you think of it? Did you ever hear of such a dastardly
+thing?"
+
+"It was a rout," said the colonel coolly. "They were in full flight
+before the enemy."
+
+"What enemy? They deserted a wounded comrade, and a servant at that!"
+
+"The enemy was panic,--panic, my dear. In these woods I've seen strong
+men go half beside themselves with fear of something--the Lord knows
+what! Then, add the winter and what they had seen and heard of that.
+Anyway, you can afford to be easy on the other boys. The honors of the
+day are with Paul--and the old packer, though it's all in the day's work
+to him."
+
+"And you are satisfied with Paul, father?"
+
+"He didn't desert his command to save his own skin." The colonel smiled
+grimly.
+
+"When the men of the Fourth discovered those other fellows they had
+literally sat down in the snow to die. Not a man of them knew how to
+pack a mule. Their meat pack slipped, going along one of those high
+trails, and scared the mule, and in trying to kick himself free the
+beast fell off the trail--mule and meat both gone. They got tired of
+carrying their stuff and made a raft to float it down the river, and
+lost that! Paul has been much better off in camp than he would have been
+with them. So cheer up, my girl, and think how you'd like to have your
+bridegroom out on an Indian campaign!"
+
+"Ah, but that would be orders! It's the uselessness that hurts. There
+was nothing to do or to gain. He didn't want to go. Oh, daddy dear, I
+made fun of his shooting,--I did! I laughed at his way with firearms.
+Wretched fool and snob that I was! As if I cared! I thought of what
+other people would say. You remember,--he went shooting up the gulch
+with Mr. Lane, and when he hit but didn't kill he wouldn't--couldn't put
+the birds out of pain. Jephson had to do it for him, and he told it in
+barracks and the men laughed."
+
+"How did you know that! And what does it all amount to! Blame yourself
+all you like, dear, if it does you any good, but don't make him out a
+fool! There's not much that comes to us straight in this world--not
+even orders, you'll find. But we have to take it straight and leave the
+muddles and the blunders as they are. That's the brave man's courage and
+the brave woman's. Orders are mixed, but duty is clear. And the boy
+out there in the woods has found his duty and done it like a man. That
+should be enough for any soldier's daughter."
+
+An hour passed in suspense. Moya was disappointed in her expectation of
+sharing in whatever the letter from Fort Lemhi might contain. Christine
+was in bed with a headache, her mother dully gave out, with no apparent
+expectation that any one would accept this excuse for the girl's
+complete withdrawal. The letter, she told Moya, was from Banks Bowen.
+"There was nothing in it of consequence--to us," she added, and
+Moya took the words to mean "you and me" to the unhappy exclusion of
+Christine.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus's face had settled into lines of anxiety printed years
+before, as the creases in an old garment, smoothed and laid away, will
+reappear with fresh wear. Her plan was to go back to New York with
+Christine, who was plainly unfit to bear a long siege of suspense. There
+she could leave the girl with friends and learn what particulars could
+be gathered from the Bowens, who would have arrived. She would then
+return alone and wait for news at the garrison. That night, with Moya's
+help, she completed her packing, and on the following day the wedding
+party broke up.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+A SEARCHING OF HEARTS
+
+Fine, dry snowflakes were drifting past the upper square of a window
+set in a wall of logs. The lower half was obscured by a white bulk
+that shouldered up against the sash in the likeness of a muffled figure
+stooping to peer in.
+
+Lying in his bunk against the wall, the packer watched this sentinel
+snowdrift grow and become human and bold and familiar. His deep-lined
+visage was reduced to its bony structure. The hand was a claw with
+which he plucked at the ancient fever-crust shredding from his lips: an
+occupation at once so absorbing and so exhausting that often the hand
+would drop and the blankets rise upon the arch of the chest in a sigh of
+retarded respiration. The sigh would be followed by a cough, controlled,
+as in dread of the shock to a sore and shattered frame. The snow came
+faster and faster until the dim, wintry pane was a blur. Millions of
+atoms crossed the watcher's weary vision, whirling, wavering, driven
+with an aimless persistence, unable to pause or to stop. And the blind
+white snowdrift climbed, fed, like human circumstance, from disconnected
+atoms impelled by a common law.
+
+There were sounds in the cabin: wet wood sweating on hot coals; a step
+that went to and fro. Outside, a snow-weighted bough let go its load and
+sprang up, scraping against the logs. Some heavy soft thing slid off
+the roof and dropped with a _chug_. Then the door, that hung awry like a
+drooping eyelid, gave a disreputable wink, and the whole front gable of
+the cabin loomed a giant countenance with a silly forehead and an evil
+leer. Now it seemed that a hand was hurling snow against the door, as
+a sower scatters grain,--snow that lay like beach sand on the floor, or
+melted into a crawling pool--red in the firelight, red as blood!
+
+These and other phantasms had now for an unmeasured time been tenants
+of the packer's brain, sharing and often overpowering the reality of
+the human step that went to and fro. To-day the shapes and relations of
+things were more natural, and the step aroused a querulous curiosity.
+
+"Who's there?" the sick man imagined himself to have said. A croaking
+sound in his throat, which was all he could do by way of speech, brought
+the step to his bedside. A young face, lightly bearded, and gaunt almost
+as his own, bent over him. Large, black eyes rested on his; a hand with
+womanish nails placed its fingers on his wrist.
+
+"You are better to-day. Your pulse is down. I wouldn't try to talk."
+
+"Who's that--outside?"
+
+"There is no one outside," Paul answered, following the direction of his
+patient's eyes. "That? That is only a snowdrift. It grows faster than I
+can shovel it away."
+
+The packer had forgotten his own question. He dozed off, and presently
+roused again as suddenly as he had slept. His utterance was clearer, but
+not his meaning.
+
+"What--you want to fetch me back for?"
+
+"Back?" Paul repeated.
+
+"I was most gone, wa'n't I?"
+
+"Back to life, you mean? You came back of yourself. I hadn't much to do
+with it."
+
+"What's been the matter--gen'ly speaking?"
+
+"You were hurt, don't you remember? Something like wound fever set in.
+The altitude is bad for fevers. You have had a pretty close call."
+
+"Been here all the time?"
+
+"Have I been here?--yes."
+
+"'Lone?"
+
+"With you. How is your chest? Does it hurt you still when you breathe?"
+
+The sick man filled his lungs experimentally. "Something busted inside,
+I guess," he panted. "'Tain't no killing matter, though."
+
+Nourishment, in a tin cup, warm from the fire was offered him, refused
+with a gesture, and firmly urged upon him. This necessitated another
+rest. It was long before he spoke again--out of some remoter train of
+thought apparently.
+
+"Family all in New York?"
+
+"My family? They were at Bisuka when I left them."
+
+"You don't _live_ West!"
+
+"No. I was born in the West, though. Idaho is my native state."
+
+The patient fell to whimpering suddenly like a hurt child. He drew up
+the blanket to cover his face. Paul, interpreting this as a signal for
+more nourishment, brought the sad decoction,--rinds of dried beef cooked
+with rice in snow water.
+
+"Guess that'll do, thank ye. My tongue feels like an old buckskin
+glove."
+
+"When I was a little fellow," said the nurse, beguiling the patient
+while he tucked the spoonfuls down, "I was like you: I wouldn't take
+what the doctor ordered, and they used to pretend I must take it for
+the others of the family,--a kind of vicarious milk diet, or gruel, or
+whatever it was. 'Here's a spoonful for mother, poor mother,' they would
+say; and of course it couldn't be refused when mother needed it so much.
+'And now one for Chrissy'"--
+
+"Who?"
+
+"My sister, Christine. And then I'd take one for 'uncle' and one for
+each of the servants; and the cupful would go down to the health of the
+household, and I the dupe of my sympathies! Now you are taking this for
+me, because it's nicer to be shut up here with a live man than a dead
+one; and we haven't the conveniences for a first-class funeral."
+
+"You never took a spoonful for 'father,'--eh?"
+
+Paul answered the question with gravity. "No. We never used that name in
+common."
+
+"Dead was he?"
+
+"I will tell you some time. Better try to sleep now."
+
+Paul returned the saucepan to the fire, after piecing out its contents
+with water, and retired out of his patient's sight.
+
+Again came a murmur, chiefly unintelligible, from the bunk.
+
+"Did you ask for anything?"
+
+The sick man heaved a worried sigh. "See what a mis'rable presumptuous
+piece of work!" he muttered, addressing the logs overhead. "But that
+Clauson--he wa'n't no more fit to guide ye than to go to heaven!
+Couldn't 'a' done much worse than this, though!"
+
+"He has done worse!" Paul came over to the bunk-side to reason on this
+matter. "They started back from here, four strong men with all the
+animals and all the food they needed for a six weeks' trip. We came in
+in one. If they got through at all, where is the help they were to send
+us?"
+
+"Help!" The packer roused. "They helped themselves, and pretty frequent.
+I said to them more than once--they didn't like it any too well: 'We
+can't drink up here like they do down to the coast. The air is too
+light. What a man would take with his dinner down there would fit him
+out with a first-class jag up here, 'leven thousand above the sea!'"
+
+"It's a waste of breath to talk about them--breath burns up food and we
+haven't much to spare. We rushed into this trouble and we dragged you in
+after us. We have hurt you a good deal more than you have us."
+
+The sick man groaned. He flung one hand back against the logs,
+dislodging ancient dust that fell upon his corpse-like forehead. It was
+carefully wiped away. Helpless tears stole down the rigid face.
+
+"John," said Paul with animation, "your general appearance just now
+reminds me of those worked-out placer claims we passed in Ruby Gulch,
+the first day out. The fever and my cooking have ground-sluiced you to
+the bone."
+
+John smiled faintly. "Don't look very fat yourself. Where'd you git all
+that baird on your face?"
+
+"We have been here some time, you know--or you don't know; you have been
+living in places far away from here. I used to envy you sometimes. And
+other times I didn't."
+
+"You mean I was off my head?"
+
+"At times. But more of the time you were dreaming and talking in your
+dreams; seeing things out loud by the flash-light of fever."
+
+"Talking, was I? Guess there wa'n't much sense in any of it?" The hazard
+was a question.
+
+"A kind of sense,--out of focus, distorted. Some of it was opium. Didn't
+you coax a little of his favorite medicine out of the cook?"
+
+Packer John apologized sheepishly, "I cal'lated I was going to be left.
+You put it up on me--making out you were off with the rest. _That_ was
+all right. But I wa'n't going to suffer it out; why should I? A gunshot
+would have cured me quicker, perhaps. Then some critter might 'a' found
+me and called it murder. A word like that set going can hang a man. No,
+I just took a little to deaden the pain."
+
+"The whole discussion was rather nasty, right before the man we were
+talking about," said Paul. "I wanted to get them off and out of hearing.
+Then we had a few words."
+
+At intervals during that day and the next, Paul's patient expended his
+strength in questions, apparently trivial. His eyes, whenever they were
+open, followed his nurse with a shrinking intelligence. Paul was on his
+guard.
+
+"What day of the month do you make it out to be?"
+
+"The second of December."
+
+"December!" The packer lay still considering. "Game all gone down?"
+
+"I am not much of a pot-hunter," said Paul. "There may be game, but I
+can't seem to get it. The snow is pretty deep."
+
+"Wouldn't bear a man on snowshoes?"
+
+"He would go out of sight."
+
+"Snowing a little every day?"
+
+"Right along, quietly, for I don't know how many days! I think the sky
+is packed with it a mile deep."
+
+"How much grub have we got?"
+
+Paul gave a flattering estimate of their resources. The patient was not
+deceived.
+
+"Where's it all gone to? You ain't eat anything."
+
+"I've eaten a good deal more than you have."
+
+"I was livin' on fever."
+
+"You can't live on fever any longer. The fever has left you, and you'll
+go with it if you don't obey your doctor."
+
+"But where's all the stuff _gone_ to?"
+
+"There were four of them, and they allowed for some delay in getting
+out," Paul explained, with a sickly smile.
+
+"Well, they was hogs! I knew how they'd pan out! That was why"--He
+wearied of speech and left the point unfinished.
+
+On the evening following, when the two could no longer see each other's
+faces in the dusk, Paul spoke, controlling his voice:--
+
+"I need not ask you, John, what you think of our chances?"
+
+"I guess they ain't much worth thinking about." The fire hissed and
+crackled; the soft subsidence of the snow could be heard outside.
+
+"We are 'free among the dead,' how does it go? 'Like unto them that are
+wounded and lie in the grave.' What we say to each other here will stop
+here with our breath. Let us put our memories in order for the last
+reckoning. I think, John, you must, at some time in your life, have
+known my father, Adam Bogardus? He was lost on the Snake River plains,
+twenty-one years ago this autumn."
+
+Receiving no answer, the pale young inquisitor went on, choosing his
+words with intense deliberation as one feeling his way in the dark.
+
+"Most of us believe in some form of communication that we can't explain,
+between those who are separated in body, in this world, but closely
+united in thought. Do I make myself clear?"
+
+There was a sound of deep breathing from the bunk; it produced a similar
+conscious excitement in the speaker. He halted, recovered himself, and
+continued:--
+
+"After my father's disappearance, my mother had a distinct
+presentiment--it haunted her for years--that something had happened to
+him at a place called One Man Station. Did you ever know the place?"
+
+"I might have." The words came huskily.
+
+"Father had left her at this place, and to her knowledge he never came
+back. But she had this intimation--and suffered from it--that he did
+come back and was foully dealt with there--wronged in body or mind. The
+place had most evil associations for her; it was not strange she should
+have connected it with the great disaster of her life. As you lay
+talking to yourself in your fever, you took me back on that lost
+trail that ended, as we thought, in the grave. But we might have been
+mistaken. Is there anything it would not be safe for you and me to speak
+of now? Do you know any tie between men that should be closer than the
+tie between us? Any safer place where a man could lay off the secret
+burdens of his life and be himself for a little while--before the end
+answers all? I know you have a secret. I believe that a share of it
+belongs to me."
+
+"We are better off sometimes if we don't get all that belongs to us,"
+said John gratingly.
+
+"It doesn't seem to be a matter of choice, does it? If you were not
+meant to tell me--what you have partly told me already--where is there
+any meaning in our being here at all? Let us have some excuse for this
+senseless accident. Do you believe much in accidents? How foolish"--Paul
+sighed--"for you and me to be afraid of each other! Two men who have
+parted with everything but the privilege of speaking the truth!"
+
+The packer raised himself in his bunk slowly, like one in pain. He
+looked long at the listless figure crouching by the fire; then he sank
+back again with a low groan. "What was it you heared me say? Come!"
+
+"I can't give you the exact words. The words were nothing. Haven't you
+watched the sparks blow up, at night, when the wind goes searching over
+the ashes of an old camp-fire? It was the fever made you talk, and
+your words were the sparks that showed where there had been fire once.
+Perhaps I had no right to track you by your own words when you lay
+helpless, but I couldn't always leave you. Now I'd like to have my share
+of that--whatever it was--that hurt you so, at One Man Station."
+
+"You ought to been a lawyer," said the packer, releasing his breath.
+There was less strain in his voice. It broke with feeling. "You put up a
+mighty strong case for your way of looking at it. I don't say it's best.
+There, if you will have it! Sonny--my son! It--it's like startin' a
+snow-slide."
+
+The sick man broke down and sobbed childishly.
+
+"Take it quietly! Oh, take it quietly!" Paul shivered. "I have known it
+a long time."
+
+Hours later they were still awake, the packer in his bunk, Paul in his
+blankets by the winking brands. The pines were moving, and in pauses of
+the wind they could hear the incessant soft crowding of the snow.
+
+"When they find us here in the spring," said the packer humbly, "it
+won't matter much which on us was 'Mister' and which was 'John.'"
+
+"Are you thinking of that!" Paul answered with nervous irritation. "I
+thought you had lived in the woods long enough to have got rid of all
+that nonsense!"
+
+"I guess there was some of it where you've been living."
+
+"We are done with all that now. Go to sleep,--Father." He pronounced
+the word conscientiously to punish himself for dreading it. The darkness
+seemed to ring with it and give it back to him ironically. "Father!"
+muttered the pines outside, and the snow, listening, let fall the
+word in elfin whispers. Paul turned over desperately in his blankets.
+"Father!" he repeated out loud. "Do _you_ believe it? Does it do you any
+good?"
+
+"I wouldn't distress myself, one way or t' other, if it don't come
+natural," the packer spoke, out of his corner in the darkness. "Wait
+till you can feel to say it. The word ain't nothing."
+
+"But do you feel it? Is it any comfort to you at all?"
+
+"I ain't in any hurry to feel it. We'll get there. Don't worry. And
+s'pose we don't! We're men. Man to man is good enough for me."
+
+Paul spent some wakeful hours after that, trying not to think of Moya,
+of his mother and Christine. They were of another world,--a world that
+dies hard at twenty-four. Towards morning he slept, but not without
+dreams.
+
+He was in the pent-road at Stone Ridge. It was sunset and long shadows
+striped the lane. A man stood, back towards him, leaning both arms on
+the stone fence that bounds the lane to the eastward,--a plain farmer
+figure, gazing down across the misty fields as he might have stood a
+hundred times in that place at that hour. Paul could not see his face,
+but something told him who it must be. His heart stood still, for he saw
+his mother coming up the lane. She carried something in her hand covered
+with a napkin, and she smiled, walking carefully as if carrying a treat
+to a sick child. She passed the man at the fence, not appearing to have
+seen him.
+
+"Won't you speak to him, mother? Won't you speak to"--He could not utter
+the name. She looked at him bewildered. "Speak? who shall I speak to?"
+The man at the fence had turned and he watched her, or so Paul imagined.
+He felt himself choking, faint, with the effort to speak that one word.
+Too late! The moment passed. The man whom he knew was his father, the
+solemn, quiet figure, moved away up the road unquestioned. He never
+looked back. Paul grew dizzy with the lines of shadow; they stretched on
+and on, they became the ties of a railroad--interminable. He awoke,
+very faint and tired, with a lost feeling and the sense upon him of some
+great catastrophe. The old man was sleeping deeply in his bunk, a ray
+of white sunlight falling on his yellow features. He looked like one who
+would never wake again. But as Paul gazed at him he smiled, and sighed
+heavily. His lips formed a name; and all the blood in Paul's body dyed
+his face crimson. The name was his mother's.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+THE BLOOD-WITE
+
+A few hours seemed days, after the great disclosure. Both men had
+recoiled from it and were feeling the strain of the new relation. Three
+times since their first meeting the elder had adjusted himself quietly
+to a change in the younger's manner to him. First there had been
+respectful curiosity in the presence of a new type, combined with the
+deference due a leader and an expert in strange fields. Then indignant
+partisanship, pity, and the slight condescension of the nurse. This had
+hurt the packer, but he took it as he accepted his physical downfall.
+The last change was hardest to bear; for now the time was short, and, as
+Paul himself had said, they were in the presence of the final unveiling.
+
+So when Paul made artificial remarks to break the pauses, avoiding his
+father's eye and giving him neither name nor title, the latter became
+silent and lay staring at the logs and picking at his hands.
+
+"If I was hunting up a father," he said to himself aloud one day, "I'd
+try to find a better lookin' one. I wouldn't pa'm off on myself no such
+old warped stick as I be." The remark seemed a tentative one.
+
+"I had the choice, to take or leave you," Paul responded. "You were an
+unconscious witness. Why should I have opened the subject at all?"
+
+Both knew that this answer was an evasion. By forcing the tie they had
+merely marked the want of ease and confidence between them. As "Packer
+John" Paul could have enjoyed, nay, loved this man; as his father, the
+sum and finality of his filial dreams, the supplanter of that imaginary
+husband of his mother's youth, the thing was impossible. And the father
+knew it and did not resent it in the least, only pitied the boy for
+his needless struggle. He was curious about him, too. He wanted to
+understand him and the life he had come out of: his roundabout way of
+reaching the simplest conclusions; his courage in argument, and his
+personal shying away from the truth when found. More than all he longed
+for a little plain talk, the exile's hunger for news from home. It
+pleased him when Paul, rousing at this deliberate challenge, spoke up
+with animation, as if he had come to some conclusion in his own mind. It
+could not be expected he would express it simply. The packer had become
+used to his oddly elaborate way of putting things.
+
+"If we had food enough and time, we might afford to waste them
+discussing each other's personal appearance. _I_ propose we talk to some
+purpose."
+
+"Talking sure burns up the food." The packer waited.
+
+"I wish I knew what my father was doing with himself, all those years
+when his family were giving him the honors of the dead."
+
+"I warned ye about this pumping out old shafts. You can't tell what
+you'll find in the bottom. I suppose you know there are things in this
+world, Boy, a good deal worse than death?"
+
+"Desertion is worse. It is not my father's death I want explained, it
+is his life, your life, in secret, these twenty years! Can you explain
+that?"
+
+The packer doubled his bony fist and brought it down on the bunk-side.
+"Now you talk like a man! I been waiting to hear you say that. Yes, I
+can answer that question, if you ain't afeard of the answer!"
+
+"I am keeping alive to hear it!" said Paul in a guarded voice.
+
+"You might say you're keeping me alive to tell it. It's a good thing to
+git off of one's mind; but it's a poor thing to hand over to a son. All
+I've got to leave ye, though: the truth if you can stand it! Where do
+you want I should begin?"
+
+"At the night when you came back to One Man Station."
+
+"How'd you know I come back?"
+
+"You were back there in your fever, living over something that happened
+in that place. There was a wind blowing and the door wouldn't shut. And
+something had to be lifted,"--the old man's eyes, fixed upon his son,
+took a look of awful comprehensions,--"something heavy."
+
+"Yes; great Lord, it was heavy! And I been carrying it ever since!" His
+chest rose as if the weight of that load lay on it still, and his breath
+expired with a hoarse "haugh." "I got out of the way because it was _my_
+load. I didn't want no help from them." He paused and sat picking at his
+hands. "It's a dreadful ugly story. I'd most as soon live it over again
+as have to tell it in cold blood. I feel sometimes it _can't be!_"
+
+"You need not go back beyond that night. I know how my mother was left,
+and what sort of a man you were forced to leave her with. Was it--the
+keeper?"
+
+"That's what it was. That was the hard knot in my thread. Nothing
+wouldn't go past that. Some, when they git things in a tangle, they just
+reach for the shears an' cut the thread. I wa'n't brought up that way.
+I was taught to leave the shears alone. So I went on stringin' one year
+after another. But they wouldn't join on to them that went before. There
+was the knot."
+
+"It was between you and him--and the law?" said Paul.
+
+"You've got it! I was there alone with it,--witness an' judge an' jury;
+I worked up my own case. Manslaughter with extenuatin' circumstances,
+I made it--though he was more beast than man. I give myself the outside
+penalty,--imprisonment for life. And I been working out my sentence
+ever since. The Western country wa'n't home to me then--more like a big
+prison. It's been my prison these twenty-odd years, while your mother
+was enjoying what belonged to her, and making a splendid job of your
+education. If I had let things alone I might have finished my time out:
+but I didn't, and now the rest of it's commuted--for the life of my
+son!"
+
+"Don't put it that way! I am no lamb of sacrifice. Why, how can we let
+things alone in this world! Should I have stood off from this secret and
+never asked my father for his defense?"
+
+"Do you mean to say a boy like you can take hold of this thing and
+understand it?"
+
+"I can," said Paul. "I could almost tell the story myself."
+
+"Put it up then!" said the packer. The fascination of confession was
+strong upon him.
+
+"You had been out in the mountains--how long?"
+
+"Two days and three nights, just as I left camp."
+
+"You were crazed with anxiety for us. You came back to find your camp
+empty, the wife and baby gone. You had reason to distrust the keeper.
+Not for what he did--for what you knew he meant to do."
+
+"For what he meant and tried to do. I seen it in his eye. The devil that
+wanted him incited him to play with me and tell me lies about my wife.
+She scorned the brute and he took his mean revenge. He kep' back her
+letter, and he says to me, leerin' at me out of his wicked eyes, 'Your
+livestock seems to be the strayin' kind. The man she went off with
+give me that,'--he lugged a gold piece out of his clothes and showed
+me,--'give me that,' he says, 'to keep it quiet.' He kep' it quiet! Half
+starved and sick's I was, the strength was in me. But vengeance in the
+hand of a man, it cuts both ways, my son! His bunk had a sharp edge
+to it like this. He fell acrost it with my weight on top of him and he
+never raised up again. There wasn't a mark on him. His back was broke.
+He died slow, his eyes mocking me.
+
+"'You fool,' he says. 'Go look in that coat hangin' on the wall.' I
+found her letter there inside of one from Granger. He watched me read it
+and he laughed. 'Now, go tell her you've killed a man!' He knew I didn't
+come of a killin' breed. There was four hours to think it over. Four
+hours! I thought hard, I tell you! 'T was six of one and half a dozen of
+t' other 'twixt him and me, but I worked it back 'n' forth a good long
+while about her. First, taking her away from her father, an old man
+whose bread I'd eat. She was like a child of my own raising. I always
+had felt mean about that. We'd had bad luck from the start,--my
+luck,--and now disgrace to cap it all. Whether I hid it or told her and
+stood my trial, I'd never be a free man again. There he lay! And a sin
+done in secret, it's like a drop of nitric acid: it's going to eat its
+way out--and in!
+
+"I knew she'd have friends enough, once she was quit of me. That was the
+case between us. The thing that hurt me most was to put her letter
+back where I found it, and leave it, there with him. Her little cry to
+me--and I couldn't come! I read the words over and over, I've said 'em
+to myself ever since. I've lived on them. But I had to leave the letter
+there to show I'd never come back. I put it back after he was dead.
+
+"The sins of the parents shall be visited,--when it's in the blood! But
+I declare to the Almighty, murder wa'n't in my blood! It come on me like
+a stroke of lightning hits a tree, and I had a clear show to fall alone.
+
+"That's the answer. Maybe I didn't see all sides of it, but there never
+was no opening to do different, after that night. Now, you've had an
+education. I should be glad to hear your way of looking at it?"
+
+"I should think you might stand your trial, now, before any judge or
+jury, in this world or the next," Paul answered.
+
+"There is only one Judge." The packer smiled a beautiful quiet smile
+that covered a world of meanings. "What a man re'ly wants, if he'd own
+up it, is a leetle shade of partiality. Maybe that's what we're all
+going to need, before we git through."
+
+Paul was glad to be saved the necessity of speech, and he felt the swift
+discernment with which the packer resumed his usual manner. "Got any
+more of that stuff you call soup? Divide even! I won't be made no baby
+of."
+
+"We might as well finish it up. It's hardly worth making two bites of a
+cherry."
+
+"Call this 'cherry'! It's been a good while on the bough. What's it
+mostly made of?"
+
+"Rind of bacon, snow water,--plenty of water,--and a tablespoonful of
+rice."
+
+"Good work! Hungry folks can live on what the full bellies throw away."
+
+"Oh, I can save. But there comes a time when you can't live by saving
+what you haven't got."
+
+"That's right! Well, let's talk, then, before the bacon-rind fades out
+of us."
+
+The packer's face and voice, his whole manner, showed the joy of a soul
+that has found relief. Paul was not trying now to behave dutifully; they
+were man to man once more. The quaint, subdued humor asserted itself,
+and the narrator's speech flowed on in the homely dialect which
+expressed the man.
+
+"I stayed out all that winter, workin' towards the coast. One day, along
+in March, I fetched a charcoal burner's camp, and the critter took me in
+and nursed my frost-bites and didn't ask no questions, nor I of him. We
+struck up a trade, my drivin' stock, mostly skin and bone, for a show in
+his business. He wa'n't gettin' rich at it, that was as plain as the hip
+bones on my mules. I kep' in the woods, cuttin' timber and tendin' kiln,
+and he hauled and did the sellin'. Next year he went below to Portland
+and brought home smallpox with him. It broke out on him on the road. He
+was a terrible sick man. I buried him, and waited for my turn. It didn't
+come. I seemed kind o' insured. I've been in lots of trouble since then,
+but nothing ever touched me till now. I banked on it too strong, though.
+I sure did! My pardner was just such another lone bird like me. If
+he had any folks of his own he kep' still about them. So I took his
+name--whether it was his name there's no knowing. Guess I've took full
+as good care of it as he would. 'Hagar?' folk would say, sort o' lookin'
+me over. 'You ain't Jim Hagar.' No, but I was John, and they let it go
+at that.
+
+"I heard of your mother that summer, from a prospector who came up past
+my camp. He'd wintered in Mountain Home. He told me my own story, the
+way they had it down there, and what straits your mother was in. I had
+scraped up quite a few dollars by then, and was thinking how I'd shove
+it into a bank like an old debt coming to Adam Bogardus. I was studying
+how I was going to rig it. There wasn't any one who knew me down there,
+so I felt safe to ventur' a few inquiries. What I heard was that she'd
+gone home to her folks and was as well off as anybody need be. That
+broke me all up at first. I must have had a sneakin' notion that maybe
+some day I could see my way to go back to her, but that let me out
+completely. I quit then, and I've stayed quit. The only break I made was
+showin' up here at the 'leventh hour, thinking I could be some use to my
+son!"
+
+"It was to be," said Paul. "For years our lives have been shaping
+towards this meeting. There were a thousand chances against it. Yet here
+we are!"
+
+"Here we are!" the packer repeated soberly. "But don't think that I lay
+any of my foolishness on the Almighty! Maybe it was meant my son should
+close my eyes, but it's too dear at the price. Anybody would say so, I
+don't care who."
+
+"But aside from the 'price,' is it something to you?"
+
+"More--more than I've got words to say. And yet it grinds me, every
+breath I take! Not that I wish you'd done different--you couldn't and be
+a man. I knew it even when I was kickin' against it. Oh, well! It ain't
+no use to kick. I thought I'd learned something, but I ain't--learned--a
+thing!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+CURTAIN
+
+A greater freedom followed this confession, as was natural. It became
+the basis for lighter confidences and bits of autobiography that came to
+the surface easily after this tremendous effort at sincerity. Paul found
+that he could speak even of the family past, into which by degrees he
+began to fit the real man in place of that bucolic abstraction which
+had walked the fields of fancy. He had never dared to actuate the "hired
+man," his father, on a basis of fact. He knew the speech and manners of
+the class from which he came,--knew men of that class, and talked with
+them every summer at Stone Ridge; but he had brooded so deeply over the
+tragic and sentimental side of his father's fate as to have lost sight
+of the fact that he was a man.
+
+Reality has its own convincing charm, not inconsistent with plainness or
+even with commonness. To know it is to lose one's taste for toys of
+the imagination. Paul, at last, could look back almost with, a sense of
+humor at the doll-like progenitor he had played with so long. But when
+it came to placing the real man, Adam Bogardus, beside that real woman,
+once his wife, their son could but own with awe that there is mercy in
+extinction, after all; in the chance, however it may come to us, for
+slipping off those cruel disguises that life weaves around us.
+
+In the strange, wakeful nights, full of starvation dreams, he saw his
+mother as she would look on state occasions in the hostess's place at
+her luxurious table; the odor of flowers, the smell of meats and wines,
+tantalized and sickened him. Christine would come in her dancing frocks,
+always laughing, greedy in her mirth; but Moya, face to face, he could
+never see. It was torture to feel her near him, a disembodied embrace.
+Passionate panegyrics and hopeless adjurations he would pour out to
+that hovering loveliness just beyond his reach. The agony of
+frustration would waken him, if indeed it were sleep that dissolved his
+consciousness, and he would be irritable if spoken to.
+
+The packer broke in, one morning, on these unnerving dreams. "You
+wouldn't happen to have a picture of her along with you?"
+
+Paul stared at him.
+
+"No, of course you wouldn't! And I'd be 'most afeard to look at it, if
+you had. She must have changed considerable. Time hasn't stood still
+with her any more than the rest of us."
+
+"I have no picture of my mother," Paul replied.
+
+The packer saw that his question had jarred; he had waited weeks to ask
+it. He passed it off now with one of his homely similes. "If you was to
+break a cup clean in two, and put the halves together again while the
+break was fresh, they'd knit so you wouldn't hardly see a crack. But you
+take one half and set it in the chainy closet and chuck the other half
+out on the ash-heap,--them halves won't look much like pieces of the
+same cup, come a year or two. The edges won't jine no more than the lips
+of an old cut that's healed without stitches. No; married folks they
+grow together or they grow apart, and they're a-doing of the one or the
+other every minute of the time, breaks or no breaks. Does she go up to
+the old place summers?"
+
+"Not lately, except on business," said Paul. "A company was formed to
+open slate quarries on the upper farm, a good many years ago. They are
+worth more than all the land forty times over."
+
+"I always said so; always told the old man he had a gold mine in that
+ridge. Was this before he died?"
+
+"Long after. It was my mother's scheme mainly. She controls it now. She
+is a very strong business woman."
+
+"She got her training, likely, from that uncle in New York. He had the
+business head. The old man had no more contrivance than one of the bulls
+in his pastures. He could lock horns and stay there, but it wa'nt no
+trouble to outflank him. More than once his brother Jacob got to the
+windward of him in a bargain. He was made a good deal like his own land.
+Winters of frost it took to break up that ground, and sun and rain to
+meller it, and then't was a hatful of soil to a cartful of stone. The
+plough would jump the furrows if you drew it deep. My arms used to ache
+as if they'd been pounded, with the jar of them stones. They used to
+tell us children a story how Satan, he flew over the earth a-sowing
+it with rocks and stones, and as he was passing over our county a hole
+bu'st through his leather apron and he lost his whole load right slam
+there. I could 'a' p'inted out the very spot where the heft on it fell.
+Ten Stone meadow, so-called. Ten million stone! I was pickin' stone in
+that field all of one summer when I was fifteen year old. We built a
+mile of fence with it.
+
+"Them quarries must have brought a mint of money into the country.
+Different sort of labor, too. Well, the world grows richer and poorer
+every year. More difference every year between the way rich folks and
+poor folks live. I wouldn't know where I belonged, 't ain't likely, if
+I was to go back there. I'd be way off! One while I used to think a
+good deal about going back, just to take a look around. It comes over
+me lately like hunger and thirst. I think about the most curious things
+when I'm asleep--foolish, like a child! I can smell all the good home
+smells of a frosty morning: apple pomace, steaming in the barnyard;
+sausage frying; Becky scouring the brass furnace-kittle with salt and
+vinegar. Killin' time, you know--makes you think of boiling souse and
+head-cheese. You ever eat souse?" The packer sucked in his breath with a
+lean smile. "It ain't best to dwell on it. But you can't help yourself,
+at night. I can smell Becky's fresh bread, in my dreams, just out of the
+brick oven. Never eat bread cooked in a stove till I came out here. I
+never drunk any water like that spring on the ridge. Last night I was
+back there, and the maples were all yellow like sunshine. Once it
+was spring, and apple-blooms up in the hill orchard. And little Emmy,
+a-setting on the fence, with her bunnit throwed back on her neck.
+'Addy!' she called, way across the lot; 'Addy, come, help me down!' She
+was a master hand for venturin' up on places, but she didn't like the
+gettin' down.
+
+"Well, she 'a learned the ups and downs by this time. She don't need
+Addy to help her. I'd have helped a big sight more if I had kep' my
+distance. It's a thing so con-demned foolish and unnecessary--I can't be
+reconciled to it noway!"
+
+"You see only one side of it," said Paul. Unspeakable thoughts had kept
+pace with his father's words. "Nothing that happens, happens through
+us--or to us--alone. There was a girl I knew, outside. She was as happy,
+when I knew her first, as you say my mother used to be. Then she met
+some one--a man--and the shadow of his life crossed hers. He would have
+wrapped her up in it and put out her sunshine if he had stayed in the
+same world. Now she can be herself again, after a while. It cannot take
+long to forget a person you have known only a little over a year."
+
+The packer rose on one elbow. He reached across and shook his son.
+
+"Where is that girl? Answer me! Take your face out of your hands!"
+
+"At Bisuka Barracks. She is the commandant's daughter. I came out to
+marry her."
+
+"What possessed ye not to tell me?"
+
+"Why should I tell you? We buried the wedding-day months back, in the
+snow."
+
+"Boy, boy!" the packer groaned.
+
+"What difference can it make now?"
+
+"_All_ the difference--all the difference there is! I thought you were
+out here touring it with them fool boys and they were all the chance
+you had for help outside. You suppose her father is going to see her git
+left? _They_'ll get in here, if they have to crawl on their bellies or
+climb through the tree-limbs. They know how! And we've wasted the grub
+and talked like a couple of women!"
+
+"Oh, don't--don't torment me!" Paul groaned. "It was all over. Can't you
+leave the dead in peace!"
+
+"We are not the dead! I 'most wish we were. Boy, I've got a big word to
+say to you about that. Come closer!" The packer's speech hoarsened and
+failed. They could only hear each other breathe. Then it seemed to the
+packer that his was the only breath in the darkness. He listened. A
+faint cheer arose in the forest and a crashing of the dead underlimbs of
+the pines.
+
+He turned frantically upon his son, but no pledge could be extorted now.
+Paul's lips were closed. He had lost consciousness.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+KIND INQUIRIES
+
+The colonel's drawing-room was as hot as usual the first hour after
+dinner, and as usual it was full of kindly participant neighbors who had
+dropped in to repeat their congratulations on the good news, now almost
+a week old. Mrs. Bogardus had not come down, and, though asked after by
+all, the talk was noticeably freer for her absence.
+
+Mrs. Creve, in response to a telegram from her brother, had arrived from
+Fort Sherman on the day before, prepared for anything, from frozen feet
+to a wedding. She had spent the afternoon in town doing errands for
+Moya, and being late for dinner had not changed her dress. There never
+was such a "natural" person as aunt Annie. At present she was addressing
+the company at large, as if they were all her promising children.
+
+"Nobody talks about their star in these days. I used to have a star. I
+forget which it was. I know it was a pretty lucky one. Now I trust in
+Providence and the major and wear thick shoes." She exhibited the shoes,
+a particularly large and sensible kind which she imported from the East.
+Everybody laughed and longed to embrace her. "Has Moya got a star?" she
+asked seriously.
+
+"The whole galaxy!" a male voice replied. "Doesn't the luck prove it?"
+
+"Moya has got a 'temperament,'" said Doctor Fleming, the Post surgeon.
+"That's as good as having a star. You know there are persons who attract
+misfortune just as sickly children catch all the diseases that are
+going. I knew that boy was sure to be found. Anything of Moya's would
+be."
+
+"So you think it was Moya's 'temperament' that pulled him out of the
+snow?" said the colonel, wheeling his chair into the discussion.
+
+"How about Mr. Winslow's temperament? I prefer to leave a little of the
+credit to him," said Moya sweetly.
+
+A young officer, who had been suffering in the corner by the fire,
+jumped to his feet and bowed, then blushed and sat down again,
+regretting his rashness. Moya continued to look at him with steadfast
+friendliness. Winslow had led the rescue that brought her lover home.
+A glow of sympathy united these friends and neighbors; the air was
+electrical and full of emotion.
+
+"I suppose no date has been fixed for the wedding?" Mrs. Dawson, on the
+divan, murmured to Mrs. Creve. The latter smiled a non-committal assent.
+
+"I should think they would just put the doctor aside and be married
+anyhow. My husband says he ought to go to a warmer climate at once."
+
+"My dear, a young man can't be married in his dressing-gown and
+slippers!"
+
+"No! It's not as bad as that?"
+
+"Well, not quite. He's up and dressed and walks about, but he doesn't
+come down to his meals,--he can eat so very little at a time, and
+it tires him to sit through a dinner. It isn't one of those ravenous
+recoveries. It went too far with him for that."
+
+"His mother was perfectly magnificent through it all, they say."
+
+"Have you seen much of Mrs. Bogardus?"
+
+"No; we left them alone, poor things, when the pinch came. But I used to
+see her walking the porch, up and down, up and down. Moya would go off
+on the hills. They couldn't walk together! That was after Miss Chrissy
+went home. Her mother took her back, you know, and then returned alone.
+Perfectly heroic! They say she dressed every evening for dinner as
+carefully as if she were in New York, and led the conversation. She used
+to make Moya read aloud to her--history, novels--anything to pretend
+they were not thinking. The strain must have begun before any of us
+knew. The colonel kept it so quiet. What is the dear man doing with your
+bonnet?"
+
+The colonel had plucked his sister's walking-hat, a pert piece of
+millinery froward in feathers, from the trunk of the headless Victory,
+where she had reposed it in her haste before dinner.
+
+"Mustn't be disrespectful to the household Lar," he kindly reminded her.
+
+"Where am I to put my hats, then? I shall wear them on my head and come
+down to breakfast in them. Moya, dear, will you please rescue my hat?
+Put it anywhere, dear,--under your chair. There is not really a place
+in this house to put a thing. A wedding that goes off on time is bad
+enough, but one that hangs on from month to month--and doesn't even take
+care of its clothes! Forgive me, dear! The clothes are very pretty.
+I open a bureau-drawer to put away my middle-aged bonnet--a puff of
+violets! A pile of something white, and, behold, a wedding veil! There
+isn't a hook in the closet that doesn't say, 'Standing-room only,' and
+the standing-room is all stood on by a regiment of new shoes."
+
+"My dear woman, go light on our sore spots. We are only just out of the
+woods."
+
+"Isn't it bad to coddle your sore spots, Doctor? Like a saddle-gall,
+ride them down!" Mrs. Creve and Dr. Fleming exchanged a friendly smile
+on the strength of this nonsense. On the doctor's side it covered a
+suspicion: "'The lady, methinks, protests too much'!" The colonel, too,
+was restless, and Moya's sweet color came and went. She appeared to be
+listening for steps or sounds from some other part of the house.
+
+The men all rose now as Mrs. Bogardus entered; one or two of the ladies
+rose also, compelled by something in her look certainly not intended.
+She was careful to greet everybody; she even crossed the room and gave
+her hand to Lieutenant Winslow, whom she had not seen since the night of
+his return. The doctor she casually passed over with a bow; they had met
+before that day. It was in the mind of each person present not of the
+family, and excepting the doctor, to ask her: 'How is your son this
+evening?' But for some reason the inquiry did not come off.
+
+The company began suddenly to feel itself _de trop_. Mrs. Dawson, who
+had come under the doctor's escort, glanced at him, awaiting the moment
+when it would do to make the first move.
+
+"I hear you lost a patient from the hospital yesterday?" said Lieutenant
+Winslow, at the doctor's side.
+
+"_From_, did you say? That's right! He was to have been operated on
+to-day." The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"What!"
+
+"Two broken ribs. One grown fast to the lung."
+
+"Wh-ew!"
+
+"He just walked out. Said I had ordered him to have fresh air. There was
+a new hall-boy, a greenhorn."
+
+"He can't go far in that shape, can he?"
+
+"Oh, there's no telling. The constitution of those men is beyond
+anything. You can't kill him. He'll suffer of course, suffer like an
+animal, and die like one--away from the herd. Maybe not this time,
+though."
+
+"Was he afraid of the operation?"
+
+"I can't say. He did not seem to be either afraid or anxious for help.
+Not used to being helped. He would be taken to the Sisters' Hospital.
+Wouldn't come up here as the guest of the Post, not a bit! I believe
+from the first he meant to give us the slip, and take his chance in his
+own way."
+
+"Did you hear,"--Mrs. Creve spoke up from the opposite side of the room
+under that hypnotic influence by which a dangerous topic spreads,--"did
+you hear about the poor guide who ran away from the hospital to escape
+from our wicked doctor here? What a reputation you must have, Doctor!"
+
+"All talk, my dear; town gossip," said the colonel. "You gave him his
+discharge, didn't you, Doctor?" The colonel looked hard at the medical
+officer; he had prepared the way for a statement suited to a mixed
+company, including ladies. But Doctor Fleming stated things usually to
+suit himself.
+
+"There was a man who left the Sisters' Hospital rather informally
+yesterday. I won't say he is not just as well off to-day as if he had
+stayed."
+
+"Who was it? Was it our man, father?"
+
+"The doctor has more than one patient at the hospital." Colonel
+Middleton looked reproachfully at the doctor, who continued to put aside
+as childish these clumsy subterfuges. "I think you ladies frightened him
+away with your attentions. He knew he was under heavy liabilities for
+all your flowers and fancy cookery."
+
+"Attentions! Are we going to let him die on the road somewhere?" cried
+Moya.
+
+"Miss Moya?" Lieutenant Winslow spoke up with a mixture of embarrassment
+and resolution to be heard, though every voice in the room conspired
+against him. "Those men are a big fraternity. They have their outfitting
+places where they put in for repairs. Packer John had his blankets sent
+to the Green Meadow corral. They know him there. They say he had money
+at one of the stores. They all have a little money cached here and
+there. And they _can't_ get lost, you know!"
+
+Moya's eyes shone with a suspicious brightness.
+
+    "'When the forest shall mislead me;
+    When the night and morning lie.'"
+
+She turned her swimming eyes upon Paul's mother, who would be sure to
+remember the quotation.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus remained perfectly still, her lips slightly parted. She
+grew very pale. Then she rose and walked quickly to the door.
+
+"Just a breath of cold air!" she panted. The doctor, Moya, and Mrs.
+Creve had followed her into the hall. Moya placed herself on the settle
+beside her and leaned to support her, but she sat back rigidly with her
+eyes closed. Mrs. Creve looked on in quiet concern. "Let me take you
+into the study, Mrs. Bogardus!" the doctor commanded. "A glass of water,
+Moya, please."
+
+"How is she? What is it? Can we do anything?" The company crowded
+around Mrs. Creve on her return to the drawing-room. She glanced at
+her brother. There was no clue there. He stood looking embarrassed and
+mystified. "It is only the warm welcome we give our friends," she said
+aloud, smiling calmly. "Mrs. Bogardus found the room too hot. I think I
+should have succumbed myself but for that little recess in the hall."
+
+The colonel attacked his fire. He thought he was being played with.
+Things were not right in the house, and no one, not the doctor, or even
+Annie, was frank with him. His kind face flushed as he straightened up
+to bid his guests good-night.
+
+"Well, if it's not anything serious, you think. But you'll be sure
+to let us know?" said Mrs. Dawson. "Well, good-night, Mrs. Creve.
+_Good_-night, Colonel! You'll say good-night to Moya? Do let us know if
+there is anything we can do."
+
+Dr. Fleming was in the hall looking for his cape. The colonel touched
+him on the shoulder. "Don't be in a hurry, Doctor. Mrs. Dawson will
+excuse you."
+
+"I don't think you need me any more to-night. Moya is with Mrs.
+Bogardus. She is not ill. The room was a little close."
+
+"Never mind the _room_! Come in here. I want a word with you."
+
+The doctor laughed oddly, and obeyed.
+
+"Annie, you needn't leave us."
+
+"Why, thank you, dear boy! It's awfully good of you," Annie mocked him.
+"But I must go and relieve Moya."
+
+"I don't believe you are wanted in there," said Doctor Fleming.
+
+"It's more than obvious that I'm not in here."
+
+"Oh, do sit down," said the teased colonel.
+
+The fire sulked and smoked a trifle with its brands apart. Doctor
+Fleming leaned forward upon his knees and regarded it thoughtfully. The
+colonel sat fondling the tongs. In a deep chair Mrs. Creve lay back and
+shaded her face with the end of her lace scarf. By her manner she might
+have been alone in the room, yet she was keenly observant of the men,
+for she felt that developments were taking place.
+
+"What is the matter with your patient upstairs, Doctor?" the colonel
+began his cross-examination. Doctor Fleming raised his eyebrows.
+
+"He's had nothing to eat to speak of for six weeks, at an altitude"--
+
+"Yes; we know all that. But he's twenty-four years old. They made an
+easy trip back, and he has been here a week, nearly. He's not as strong
+as he was when they brought him in, is he?"
+
+"That was excitement. You have to allow for the reaction. He has had
+a shock to the entire system,--nerves, digestion,--must give him time.
+Very nervous temperament too much controlled."
+
+"Make it as you like. But I'm disappointed in his rallying powers,
+unless you are keeping something back. A boy with the grit to do what he
+did, and stand it as he did--why isn't he standing it better now?"
+
+"We are all suffering from reaction, I think," said Mrs. Creve
+diplomatically; "and we show it by making too much of little things.
+Tom, we oughtn't to keep the doctor up here talking nonsense. He wants
+to go to bed."
+
+"_I_'m not talking nonsense," said the doctor. "I should be if I
+pretended there was anything mysterious about that boy's case upstairs.
+He has had a tremendous experience, say what you will; and it's pulled
+him down nervously, and every other way. He isn't ready or able to
+talk of it yet. And he knows as soon as he comes down there'll be forty
+people waiting to congratulate him and ask him how it was. I don't
+wonder he fights shy. If he could take his bride by the hand and walk
+out of the house with her I believe he could start to-morrow; but if
+there must be a wedding and a lot of fuss"--
+
+Mrs. Creve nodded her head approvingly. The three had risen and stood
+around the hearth, while the colonel put the brands delicately together
+with the skill of an old campaigner. The flames breathed again.
+
+"I don't offer this as a professional opinion," said the doctor. "But a
+case like his is not a disease, it's a condition"--
+
+"Of the mind, perhaps?" the colonel added significantly. He glanced at
+Mrs. Creve. "You've thought about that, Doctor? The letter his mother
+consulted you about?"
+
+"Have you been worrying about that, Colonel? Why didn't you say so?
+There is nothing in it whatever. Why, it's so plain a case the other
+way--any one can see where the animus comes from!"
+
+"Now you _are_ getting mysterious, and I'm going to bed!" said Mrs.
+Creve.
+
+"No; we're coming to the point now," said the colonel.
+
+"What is it you want Bogardus to do?" asked Doctor Fleming. "Want him to
+get up and walk out of the house as my patient did at the hospital? Dare
+say he could do it, but what then? Will you let me speak out, Colonel?
+No regard to anybody's feelings? Now, this may be gossip, but I think
+it has a bearing on the case upstairs. I'm going to have it off my mind
+anyhow! When Mrs. Bogardus came to see the guide,--Packer John,--day
+before yesterday, was it?--he asked to see her alone. Said he had
+something particular to say to her about her son. We thought it a queer
+start, but she was willing to humor him. Well, she wasn't in there above
+ten minutes, but in that time something passed between them that hit
+her very hard, no doubt of that! Now, Bogardus holds his tongue like
+a gentleman as to what happened in the woods. He doesn't mention
+his comrades' names. And the packer has disappeared; so he can't be
+questioned. Seems to me a little bird told me there was an attachment
+between one of those Bowen boys and Miss Christine?
+
+"Now we, who know what brutes brute fear will make of men, are not going
+to deny that those boys behaved badly. There are some things that can't
+be acknowledged among men, you know, if there is a hole to crawl out of.
+Cowardice is one of them. Well then, they lied, that's the whole of
+it. The little boys lied. They wrote Mrs. Bogardus a long letter from
+Lemhi,"--the doctor was reviewing now for Mrs. Creve's benefit,--"when
+they first got out. They probably judged, by the time they had had,
+that Paul and the packer would never tell their own story. Very well: it
+couldn't hurt Paul, it might be the saving of them, if they could show
+that something had queered him in the woods. They asked his mother
+if she had heard of the effects of altitude upon highly sensitive
+organizations. They recounted some instances--I will mention them later.
+One of the boys is a lawyer, isn't he? They are a pair of ingenious
+youths. Bogardus, they claim, avoided them almost from the time they
+entered the woods,--almost lived with the packer, behaved like a crank
+about the shooting. Whereas they had gone there to kill things, he made
+it a personal matter whenever they pursued this intention in a natural
+and undisguised manner. He had pangs, like a girl, when the creatures
+expired. He hated the carcases, the blood--forgive me, Mrs. Creve. In
+short, he called the whole business butchery."
+
+"Do you make _that_ a sign of lunacy?" Mrs. Creve flung in.
+
+"I am quoting, you know." The doctor smiled indulgently. "They declare
+that they offered--even begged--to stay behind with him, one of them, at
+least, but he rejected their company in a manner so unpleasant that they
+saw it would only be courting a quarrel to remain. And so, treating him
+perforce like a child _or_ a lunatic _pro tem._, and having but little
+time to decide in, they cut loose and hurried back for help. This is the
+tale, composed on reflection. They said nothing of this to Winslow--to
+save publicity, of course! Mrs. Bogardus's lips are doubly sealed, for
+her son's sake and for the sake of the young scamp who is to be her
+son, by and by! I saw she winced at my opinion, which I gave her
+plainly--brutally, perhaps. And she asked me particularly to say
+nothing, which I am particularly not doing.
+
+"This, I think, you will find is the bitter drop in the cup of rejoicing
+upstairs. And they are swallowing it in silence, those two, for the sake
+of the little girl and the old friends in New York. Of course she has
+kept from Paul that last shot in the back from those sweet boys! The
+packer had some unruly testimony he was bursting with, which he had
+sense enough to keep for her alone, and she doesn't want the case to
+spread. It is singular how a man in his condition could get out of
+the way as suddenly as he did. You might think he'd been taken up in a
+cloud."
+
+"Doctor, what do you mean by such an insinuation as that?"
+
+"Colonel, have I insinuated anything? Did I say she had oiled the wheels
+of his departure?"
+
+"Come, come! You go too far!"
+
+"Not at all. That's your own construction. I merely say that I am not
+concerned about that man's disappearance. I think he'll be looked after,
+as a valuable witness should be."
+
+"Well," the colonel grumbled uneasily, "I don't like mysteries myself,
+and I don't like family quarrels nor skeletons at the feasts of old
+friends. But I suppose there must be a drop in every cup. What were your
+altitude cases, Doctor?"
+
+"The same old ones; poor Addison, you know. All those stories they tell
+an Easterner. As I pointed out to Mrs. Bogardus, in every case there was
+some predisposing cause. Addison had been too long in the mountains, and
+he was frightfully overworked; short of company officers. He came to me
+about an insect he said had got into his ear; buzzed, and bothered him
+day and night. The story got to the men's quarters. They joked about the
+colonel's 'bug.' I knew it was no joke. I condemned him for duty, but
+the Sioux were out. They thought at Washington no one but Addison could
+handle an Indian campaign. He was on the ground, too. So they sent him
+up higher where it was dry, with a thousand men in his hands. I knew
+he'd be a madman or a dead man in a month! There were a good many of the
+dead! By Jove! The boys who took his orders and loved the old fellow and
+knew he was sending them to their death! Well for him that he'll never
+know."
+
+"The 'altitude of heartbreak,'" sighed Mrs. Creve. The phrase was her
+own, for many a reason deeply known unto herself, but she gave it the
+effect of a quotation before the men.
+
+"Then you think there is no 'altitude' in ours?"
+
+"No; nor 'heartbreak' either," said the doctor, helping himself to one
+of the colonel's cigars. "But I don't say there isn't enough to keep a
+woman awake nights, and to make those young men avoid the sight of each
+other for a time. Thanks, I won't smoke now. I'm going to take a look at
+Mrs. Bogardus as I go out."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+A BRIDEGROOM OF SNOW
+
+The doctor had taken his look, feeling a trifle guilty under his
+patient's counter gaze, yet glad to have relieved the good colonel's
+anxiety. If he loved to gossip, at least he was particular as to whom he
+gossiped with.
+
+Moya closed the door after him and silently resumed her seat. Mrs.
+Bogardus helped herself to a sip of water. She was struggling with a
+dry constriction of the throat, and Moya protested a little, seeing the
+effort that it cost her to speak, even in the hoarse, unnatural tone
+which was all the voice she had left.
+
+"I want to finish now," she said, "and never speak of this again. It was
+I who accused them first--and then I asked him:--if there was anything
+he could say in their defense, to say it, for Chrissy's sake! 'I will
+never break bread with them again,' said he,--'either Banks or Horace.
+I will not eat with them, or drink with them, or speak with them again!'
+Think of it! How are we to live? How are they to inhabit the same
+city? He thinks I have been weak. I am weak! The only power I have is
+through--the property. Banks will never marry a poor girl. But that
+would be a dear-bought victory. Let her keep what faith in him she can.
+No; in families, the ones who can control themselves have to give in--to
+those who can't. If you argue with Christine she simply gives way, and
+then she gets hysterical, and then she is ill. It's a disease. Mothers
+know how their children--Christine was marked--marked with trouble! I
+am thankful she has any mind at all. She needs me more than Paul does. I
+cannot be parted from my power to help her--such as it is."
+
+"When she is Banks Bowen's wife she will need you more than ever!" said
+Moya.
+
+"She will. I could prevent the marriage, but I am afraid to. I am
+afraid! So, as the family is cut in two--in three, for I--" Mrs. Bogardus
+stopped and moistened her lips again. "So--I think you and Paul had
+better make your arrangements and go as soon as you can wherever it
+suits you, without minding about the rest of us."
+
+Moya gave a little sobbing laugh. "You don't expect me to make the first
+move!"
+
+"Doesn't he say anything to you--anything at all?"
+
+"He is too ill."
+
+"He is not ill!" Mrs. Bogardus denied it fiercely. "Who says he is ill?
+He is starved and frozen. He is just out of the grave. You must be good
+to him, Moya. Warm him, comfort him! You can give him the life he needs.
+Your hands are as soft as little birds. They comfort even me. Oh, don't
+you understand!"
+
+"Of course I understand!" Moya answered, her face aflame. "But I cannot
+marry Paul. He has got to marry me."
+
+"What nonsense that is! People say to a girl: 'You can't be too cold
+before you are married or too kind after!' That does not mean you and
+Paul. If you are not kind to him _now_, you will make a great mistake."
+
+"He is not thinking of marriage," said Moya. "Something weighs on him
+all the time. I cannot ask him questions. If he wanted to tell me he
+would. That is why I come downstairs and leave him. But he won't come
+down! Is it not strange? If we could believe such things I would say a
+Presence came with, him out of that place. It is with him when I find
+him alone. It is in his eyes when he looks at me. It is not something
+past and done with, it is here--now--in this house! _What_ is it? What
+do _you_ believe?"
+
+The eyes she sought to question hardened under her gaze. Here, too, was
+a veil. Mrs. Bogardus sat with her hands clasped in her lap. She was
+motionless, but the creaking of her silks could be heard as her bosom
+rose and fell. After a moment she said: "Paul's tray is on the table in
+the dining-room. Will you take it when you go up?"
+
+Moya altered her own manner instantly. "But you?" she hesitated. "I must
+not crowd you out of all your mother privileges. You have handed over
+everything to me."
+
+"A mother's privilege is to see herself no longer needed. I can do
+nothing more for my son"--her smile was hard--"except take care of his
+money."
+
+"Paul's mother!"
+
+"My dear, do you suppose we mind? It is a very great privilege to be
+allowed to step aside when your work is done."
+
+"Paul's _mother!_" Moya insisted.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus rose. "You don't remember your own mother, my dear. You
+have an exaggerated idea of the--the importance of mothers. They are
+only a temporary arrangement." She put out her hands and the girl's
+cheek touched hers for an instant; then she straightened herself and
+walked calmly out of the room. Moya remained a little longer, afraid
+to follow her. "If she would not smile! If she would do anything but
+smile!"
+
+Paul was walking about his room, half an hour later, when Moya stopped
+outside his door. She placed the tray on a table in the hall. The door
+was opened from within. Paul had heard his mother go up before, heard
+her pause at the stairs, and, after a silence, enter her own room.
+
+"She knows that I know," he said to himself. "That knowledge will be
+always between us; we can never look each other in the face again." To
+Moya he endeavored to speak lightly.
+
+"It sounded very gay downstairs to-night. You must have had a houseful."
+
+"I have been with your mother the last hour," answered Moya, vaguely on
+the defensive. Since Paul's return there had been little of the old free
+intercourse in words between them, and without this outlet their mutual
+consciousness became acute. Often as they saw each other during the day,
+the keenest emotion attached to the first meeting of their eyes.
+
+Paul was unnerved by his sudden recall from death to life. Its contrasts
+were overwhelming to his starved senses: from the dirt and dearth and
+grimy despair of his burial hutch in the snow to this softly lighted,
+close-curtained room, warm and sweet with flowers; from the gaunt,
+unshaven spectre of the packer and his ghostly revelations, to Moya,
+meekly beautiful, her bright eyes lowered as she trailed her soft skirts
+across the carpet; Moya seated opposite, silent, conscious of him
+in every look and movement. Her lovely hands lay in her lap, and the
+thought of holding them in his made him tremble; and when he recalled
+the last time he had kissed her he grew faint. He longed to throw
+off this exhausting self-restraint, but feared to betray his helpless
+passion which he deemed an insult to his soul's worship of her.
+
+And she was thinking: "Is this all it is going to mean--his coming
+home--our being together? And I was almost his wife!"
+
+"So it was my mother you were talking to in the study? I thought I heard
+a man's voice."
+
+"It was the doctor. Your mother was not quite herself this evening. He
+came in to see her, but he does not think she is ill. 'Rest and change,'
+he says she needs."
+
+Paul gave the words a certain depth of consideration. "Are you as well
+as usual, Moya?"
+
+"Oh, I am always well," she answered cheerlessly. "I seem to thrive on
+anything--everything," she corrected herself, and blushed.
+
+The blush made him gasp. "You are more beautiful than ever. I had
+forgotten that beauty is a physical fact. The sight of you confuses me."
+
+"I always told you you were morbid." Moya's happy audacity returned.
+"Now, how long are you going to sit and think about that?"
+
+"Do I sit and think about things?" His reluctant, boyish smile, which
+all women loved, captured his features for a moment. "It is very rude of
+me."
+
+"Suppose I should ask you what you are thinking about?"
+
+"Ah! I am afraid you would say 'morbid' again."
+
+"Try me! You ought to let me know at once if you are going to break out
+in any new form of morbidness."
+
+"I wish it might amuse you, but it wouldn't. Let me put you a
+case--seriously."
+
+Moya smiled. "Once we were serious--ages ago. Do you remember?"
+
+"Do I remember!"
+
+"Well? You are you, and I am I, still."
+
+"Yes; and as full of fateful surprises for each other."
+
+"I bar 'fateful'! That word has the true taint of morbidness."
+
+"But you can't 'bar' fate. Listen: this is a supposing, you know.
+Suppose that an accident had happened to our leader on the way home--to
+your Lieutenant Winslow, we'll say"--
+
+"_My_ lieutenant!"
+
+"Your father's--the regiment's--Lieutenant Winslow 'of ours.' Suppose we
+had brought him back in a state to need a surgeon's help; and without a
+word to any one he should get up and walk out of the hospital with his
+hurts not healed, and no one knew why, or where he had gone? There would
+be a stir about it, would there not? And if such a poor spectre of a
+bridegroom as I were allowed to join the search, no one would think it
+strange, or call it a slight to his bride if the fellow went?"
+
+"I take your case," said Moya with a beaming look. "You want to go after
+that poor man who suffered with you."
+
+"Who went with us to save us from our own headstrong folly, and would
+have died there alone"--
+
+"Yes; oh, yes!--before you begin to think about yourself, or me. Because
+he is nobody 'of ours,' and no one seems to feel responsible, and we go
+on talking and laughing just the same!"
+
+"Do they talk of this downstairs?"
+
+"To-night they were talking--oh, with such philosophy! But how came you
+to know it?"
+
+Paul did not answer this question. "Then"--he drew a long breath,--"then
+you could bear it, dear?--the comment, even if they called it a slight
+to you and a piece of quixotic lunacy? Others will not take my case,
+remember."
+
+"What others?"
+
+"They will say: 'Why doesn't he send a better man? He is no trailer.' It
+is true. Money might find him and bring him back, but all the money
+in the world could not teach him to trust his friends. There is a
+misunderstanding here which is too bitter to be borne. It is hard to
+explain,--the intimacy that grows up between men placed as we were. But
+as soon as help reached us, the old lines were drawn. I belonged with
+the officers, he with the men. We could starve together, but we could
+not eat together. He accepted it--put himself on that basis at once.
+He would not come up here as the guest of the Post. He is done with us
+because he thinks we are done with him. And he knows that I must know
+his occupation is gone. He will never guide nor pack a mule again."
+
+"Your mother and my father, they will understand. What do the others
+matter?"
+
+"I must tell you, dear, that I do not propose to tell them--especially
+them--why I go. For I am going. I must go! There are reasons I cannot
+explain." He sighed, and looked wildly at Moya, whose smile was becoming
+mechanical. "I hate the excuse, but it will have to be said that I go
+for a change--for my health. My health! Great God! But it's 'orders,'
+dear."
+
+"Your orders are my orders. You are never going anywhere again without
+me," said Moya slowly. Her smile was gone. She stood up and faced him,
+pale and beautiful. He rose, too, and stooped above her, taking her
+hands and gazing into her full blue eyes arched like the eyes of angels.
+
+"I thought she was a girl! But she is a woman," he said in a voice of
+caressing wonder. "A woman, and not afraid!"
+
+"I am afraid. I will not be left--I will not be left again! Oh, you
+won't take me, even when I offer myself to you!"
+
+"Don't--don't tempt me!" Paul caught her to him with a groan. "You don't
+know me well enough to be afraid of _me!_"
+
+"You! You will not let me know you."
+
+"Oh, hush, dear--hush, my darling! This isn't thinking. We must think
+for our lives. I must take care of you, precious. We don't know where
+this search may take us, or where it will end, or what the end will be."
+He kissed the sleeve of her dress, and put her gently from him, so that
+he could look her in the eyes. She gave him her full pure gaze.
+
+"It is the poor man again. You said he would spoil our lives."
+
+"He is _our_ poor man. You didn't go out of your way to find him. And
+your way is mine."
+
+"It is so heavenly to be convinced! Who taught you to see things at a
+glance,--things I have toiled and bungled over and don't know now if I
+am right! _Who_ taught you?"
+
+"Do you think I stood still while you were away! Oh, my heart was sifted
+out by little pieces."
+
+"You shall sift mine. You shall tell me what to do. For I know nothing!
+Not even if I may dare to take this angel at her word!"
+
+"I knew you would not take me!" the girl whispered wildly. "But I shall
+go."
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+THE NATURE OF AN OATH
+
+"Your tray! It is after ten o'clock. Your 'angel' is a bad nurse." Moya
+brought the tray and set it on a little stand beside Paul's chair. He
+watched her shy, excited preparations as she moved about, conscious of
+his eyes. The saucepan staggered upon the coals and they both sprang
+to save the broth, and pouring it she burnt her thumb a little, and he
+behaved quite like any ordinary young man. They were ecstatic to find
+themselves at ease with each other once more. Moya became disrespectful
+to her charge; such sweet daring looked from her eyes into his as made
+him riotous with joy.
+
+"Won't you take some with me?" He turned the cup towards her and watched
+her as she sipped.
+
+"'It was roast with fire,'" he pronounced softly and dreamily, 'because
+of the dreadful pains. It was to be eaten with bitter herbs'"--
+
+"What _are_ you saying?"--
+
+"'To remind them of their bondage.'"
+
+"I object to your talking about bondage and bitter herbs when you are
+eating aunt Annie's delicious consomme."
+
+He gravely sipped in turn, still with his eyes in hers. "Can you
+remember what you were doing on the second of November?"
+
+"Can I remember!"
+
+"Yes; tell me. I have a reason for asking."
+
+"Tell _me_ the reason first."
+
+"May we have a little more fire, darling? It gives me chills to think of
+that day. It was the last of my wretched pot-hunting. There was nothing
+to hunt for--the game had all gone down, but I did not know that.
+Somewhere in the woods, a long way from the cabin, it began to occur to
+me that I should not make shelter that night. A fool and his strength
+are soon parted. It was a little hollow with trees all around so deep
+that in the distance their trunks closed in like a wall. Snow can make
+a wonderful silence in the woods. I seemed to hear the thoughts of
+everybody I loved in the world outside. There had been a dullness over
+me for weeks. I could not make it true that I had ever been happy--that
+you really loved me. All that part of my life was a dream. Now, in that
+silence suddenly I felt you! I knew that you cared. It was cruel to
+die so if you did love me! It brought the 'pang and spur'! I fought the
+drowsiness that was taking away my pain. I had begun to lean on it as
+a comfortable breast. I woke up and tore myself away from that siren
+sleep. It was my darling,--her love that saved me. Without that thought
+of you, I never would have stirred again. Where were you, what were you
+thinking that brought you so close to me?"
+
+"Ah," said Moya in a whisper. "I was in that room across the hall,
+alone. They were good to me that day; they made excuses and left me to
+myself. In the afternoon a box came,--from poor father,--white roses,
+oh, sweet and cold as snow! I took them up to that room and forced
+myself to go in. It was where my things were kept, the trunks half
+packed, all the drawers and closets full. And my wedding dress laid
+out on the bed. We girls used to go up there at first and look at the
+things, and there was laughing and joking. Sometimes I went up alone and
+tried on my hats before the glass, and thought where I should be when
+I wore them, and--Well! all that stopped. I dreaded to pass the door.
+Everything was left just as it was; the shutters open, the poor dress
+covered with a sheet on the bed. The room was a death-chamber. I went
+in. I carried the roses to my dead. I drew down the sheet and put my
+face in that empty dress. It was my selfish self laid out there--the
+girl who knew just what she wanted and was going to get it if she could.
+Happiness I dared not even pray for--only remembrance--everlasting
+remembrance. That we might know each other again when no more life
+was left to part us--_my_ life. It seemed long to wait, but that was
+my--marriage vow. I gave you all I could, remembrance, faith till
+death."
+
+"Then you are my own!" said Paul, his face transformed. "God was our
+witness. Life of my life--for life and death!" Solemnly he took a
+bridegroom's kiss from her lips.
+
+"How do _you_ know that it is life that parts?"
+
+"Speak so I can understand you!" Moya cried. "Ah, if I might! A man
+must not have secrets from his wife. Secrets are destruction, don't you
+think?"
+
+Moya waited in silence.
+
+"Now we come to this bondage!" He let the words fall like a load from
+his breast. "This is a hideous thing to tell you, but it will cut us
+apart unless you know it. It compels me to do things." He paused, and
+they heard a door down the passage open,--the door of his mother's room.
+A step came forward a few paces. Silence; it retreated, and the door
+closed again stealthily.
+
+"She has not slept," Paul murmured. "Poor soul, poor soul! Now, in what
+I am going to say, please listen to the facts, Moya dear. Try not to
+infer anything from my way of putting things. I shall contradict myself,
+but the facts do that.
+
+"The--the guide--John, we will call him, had a long fever in the woods.
+It would come on worse at night, and then--he talked--words, of a
+shocking intimacy. They say that nothing the mind has come in contact
+with under strong emotion is ever lost, no matter how long in the past.
+It will return under similar excitement. This man had kept stored away
+in his mind, under some such pressure, the words of a woman's message,
+a woman in great distress. Over and over, as his pulse rose, countless
+times he would repeat that message. I went out of the hut at night and
+stood outside in the snow not to hear it, but I knew it as well as he
+did before we got through. Now, this was what he said, word for word.
+
+"'Do not blame me, my dear husband. I have held out in this place as
+long as I can. Don't wait for anything. Don't worry about anything. Come
+back to me with your bare hands. Come!--to your loving Emmy!'
+
+"'Come, come!' he would shout out loud. Then in another voice he would
+whisper, 'Come back to me with your bare hands!' And he would stare at
+his hands and his face would grow awful."
+
+Moya drew a long sigh of scared attention.
+
+"Those words were all over the cabin walls. I heard them and saw them
+everywhere. There was no rest from them. I could have torn the roof down
+to stop his talking, but the words it was not possible to forget. And
+where was the horror of it? Was not this what we had asked, for years,
+to know?"
+
+"You need not explain to me," said Moya, shuddering.
+
+"Yes; but all one's meanest motives were unearthed in a place like that.
+Would I have felt so with a different man? Some one less uncouth? Was it
+the man himself, or his"--
+
+"Paul, if anything could make you a snob, it would be your deadly fear
+of being one!"
+
+"Well, if they had found us then, God knows how that fight would have
+ended. But I won it--when there was nothing left to fight for. I owned
+him--in the grave. We owned each other and took a bashful sort of
+comfort in it, after we had shuffled off the 'Mister' and 'John.' I grew
+quite fond of him, when we were so near death that his English didn't
+matter, or his way of eating. I thought him a very remarkable man,
+you remember, when he was just material for description. He was, he is
+remarkable. Most remarkable in this, he was not ashamed of his son."
+
+"Do please let that part alone. I want to know what he was doing, hiding
+away by himself all these years? I believe he is an impostor!"
+
+"We came to that, of course; though somehow I forgave him before he
+could answer the question. In the long watch beside him I got very close
+to him. It was not possible to believe him a deserter, a sneak. Can you
+take my word for his answer? It was given as a death-bed confession and
+he is living."
+
+"I would take your word for anything except yourself!" Moya did not
+smile, or think what she was saying.
+
+"That answer cleared him, in my mind, with something over to the credit
+of blind, stupid heroism. He is not a clever man. But, speaking as one
+who has teen face to face with the end of things, I can say that I know
+of no act of his that should prevent his returning to his family--if he
+had a family--not even his deserting them for twenty years. _If_, I say!
+
+"When the soldiers found us we were too far gone to realize the issue
+that was upon us. He was the first to take it in. It was on the march
+home, at night, he touched me and began speaking low in our corner of
+the tent. 'As we came in here, so we go out again, and so we stay,' he
+said. I told him it could not be. To suppress what I had learned would
+make the whole of life a lie, a coward's lie. That knowledge belonged to
+my mother. I must render it up to her. To do otherwise would be to treat
+her like a child and to meddle with the purposes of God. 'No honest man
+robs another of his secrets,' he said. He was very much excited. She
+was the only one now to be considered--and what did I know about God's
+purposes? He refused to take my scruples into consideration, except such
+as concerned her. But, after a long argument, very painful, weak as we
+were and whispering in the dark, he yielded this much. If I were bent on
+digging up the dead, as he called it, it must be done in such a way as
+to leave her free. Free she was in law, and she must be given a chance
+to claim her freedom without talk or publicity. Absolute secrecy he
+demanded of me in the mean time. I begged him to see how unfair it was
+to her to bring her face to face with such a discovery without one word
+of preparation, of excuse for him. She would condemn him on the very
+fact of his being alive. So she would, he said, if she were going
+to judge him; not if she felt towards him as--as a wife feels to her
+husband. It was that he wanted to know. It was that or nothing he would
+have from her. 'Bring me face to face with her alone, and as sudden as
+you like. If she knows me, I am the man. And if she wants me back, she
+will know me--and that way I'll come and no other way.' Was not that
+wonderful? A gentleman could hardly have improved on that. Whatever
+feeling he might be supposed to have towards her in the matter we
+could never touch upon. But I think he had his hopes. That decision was
+hanging over us--and I trembled for her. Day before yesterday, was it, I
+persuaded her to see the sick guide. She wondered why I was faint as
+she kissed me good-by. I ought to have prepared her. It was a horrible
+snare. And yet he meant it all in delicacy, a passionate consideration
+for her. Poor fool. How could I prepare _him!_ How could he keep
+pace with the changes in her! After all, it is externals that make
+us,--habits, clothes. Great God! Things you could not speak of to a
+naked soul like him. But he would have it 'straight,' he said--and
+straight he got it. And he is gone; broke away like an animal out of
+a trap. And I am going to find him, to see at least that he has a roof
+over his head. God knows, he may not die for years!"
+
+"She has got years before her too."
+
+"She!--What am I saying! We have plunged into those damnable inferences
+and I haven't given you the facts. Wait. I shall contradict all this in
+a moment. I thought, she must have done this for her children. She
+must be given another chance. And I approached the thing on my very
+knees--not to let her know that I knew, only to hint that I was not
+unprepared, had guessed--could meet it, and help her to meet the
+problems it would bring into our lives. Help her! She stood and faced
+me as if I had insulted her. 'I have been your father's widow for
+twenty-two years. If that fact is not sacred to you, it is to me. Never
+dare to speak of this to me again!'"
+
+"Ah," said Moya in a long-drawn sigh, "then she did not"--
+
+"Oh, she did, explicitly! For I went on to speak of it. It was my last
+chance. I asked her how she--we--could possibly go through with it; how
+with this knowledge between us we could look each other in the face--and
+go on living.
+
+"'Put this hallucination out of your mind,' she said. 'That man and I
+are strangers.'"
+
+"Was that--would you call that a lie?" asked Moya fearfully.
+
+"You can see your answer in her face. I do not say that hers was the
+first lie. It must always be foolish, I think, to evade the facts of
+life as we make them for ourselves. He refused to meet his facts, from
+the noblest motives;--but now I'm tangling you all up again! Rest your
+head here, darling. This is such a business! It is a pity I cannot tell
+you his whole story. Half the meaning of all this is lost. But--here is
+a solemn declaration in writing, signed John Hagar, in which this man we
+are speaking of says that Adam Bogardus was his partner, who died in the
+woods and was buried by his hand; that he knew his story, all the scenes
+and circumstances of his life in many a long talk they had together, as
+well as he knew his own. In his delirium he must have confused himself
+with his old partner, and half in dreams, he said, half in the crazy
+satisfaction of pretending to himself he had a son, he allowed the
+delusion to go on; saw it work upon me, and half feared it, half
+encouraged it. Afterwards he was frightened at the thought of meeting
+my mother, who would know him for an impostor. His seeming scruples were
+fear of exposure, not consideration for her. This was why he guarded
+their interview so carefully. 'No harm's been done,' he says, 'if you'll
+act now like a sensible man. I'll be disappointed in you if you make
+your mother any trouble about this. You've treated me as square as any
+man could treat another. Remember, I say so, and think as kindly as
+you can of a harmless, loony old impostor'--and he signs himself 'John
+Hagar,'--which shows again how one lie leads to another. We go to find
+'John Hagar.'"
+
+"Have you shown your mother this letter? You have not? Paul, you will
+not rob her of her just defense!"
+
+"I will not heap coals of fire on her head! This letter simply completes
+his renunciation, and he meant it for her defense. But when a man signs
+himself 'John Hagar' in the handwriting of my father, it shows that
+somebody is not telling the truth. I used to pore over the old farm
+records in my father's hand at Stone Ridge in the old account books
+stowed away in places where a boy loves to poke and pry. I know it as
+well as I know yours. Do you suppose she would not know it? When a man
+writes as few letters as he does, the handwriting does not change." Paul
+laid the letter upon the coals. "It is the only witness against her, but
+it loses the case."
+
+"She never could have loved him. I never believed she did!" said Moya.
+
+"She thinks she can live out this deep-down, deliberate--But it will
+kill her, Moya. Her life is ended from this on. How could I have
+driven her to that excruciating choice! I ought to have listened to him
+altogether or not at all. There is a hell for meddlers, and the ones who
+meddle for conscience' sake are the deepest damned, I think."
+
+Moya came and wreathed her arm in his, and they paced the room in
+silence. At length she said, "If we go to find John Hagar, shall we not
+be meddling again? A man who respects a woman's freedom must love his
+own. It is the last thing left him. Don't hunt him down. I believe
+nothing could hurt him now like seeing you again."
+
+"He shall not see me unless he wants to, but he shall know where I stand
+on this question of the Impostor. It shall be managed so that even he
+can see I am protecting her. No, call himself what he will, the tie
+between him and me is another of those facts."
+
+"But do you love him, Paul?"
+
+"Oh--I cannot forget him! He is--just as he used to be--'poor father out
+there in the cold.' We must find him and comfort him somehow."
+
+"For our own peace of mind? Forgive me for arguing when everything is so
+difficult. But he is a man--a brave man who would rather be forever out
+in the cold than be a burden. Do not rob him of his right to _be_ John
+Hagar if he wants to, for the sake of those he loves. You do not tell me
+it was love, but I am sure it was, in some mistaken way, that drove him
+into exile. Only love as pure as his can be our excuse for dragging him
+back. He did not want shelter and comfort from her. Only one thing. Have
+we got that to give him?"
+
+"Well then, I go for my own sake--it is a physical necessity; and I go
+for hers. She has put it out of her own power to help him. It will ease
+her a little to know I am trying to reach him in his forlorn disguise."
+
+"But you were not going to tell her?"
+
+"In words, no. But she will understand. There is a strange clairvoyance
+between us, as if we were accomplices in a crime!"
+
+Moya reflected silently. This search which Paul had set his heart upon
+would equally work his own cure, she saw. Nor could she now imagine for
+themselves any lover's paradise inseparable from this moral tragedy,
+which she saw would be fibre of their fibre, life of their life. A
+family is an organism; one part may think to deny or defy another, but
+with strange pains the subtle union exerts itself; distance cannot break
+the thread.
+
+They kissed each other solemnly like little children on the eve of a
+long journey full of awed expectancy.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus stood holding her door ajar as Moya passed on her way
+downstairs. "You are very late," she uttered hoarsely. "Is nothing
+settled yet?"
+
+"Everything!" Moya hesitated and forced a smile, "everything but where
+we shall go. We will start--and decide afterwards."
+
+"You go together? That is right. Moya, you have a genius for happiness!"
+
+"I wish I had a genius for making people sleep who lie awake hours in
+the night thinking about other people!"
+
+"If you mean me, people of my age need very little sleep."
+
+"May I kiss you good-night, Paul's mother?"
+
+"You may kiss me because I am Paul's mother, not because I do not
+sleep."
+
+Moya's lips touched a cheek as white and almost as cold as the frosted
+window-panes through which the moon was glimmering. She thought of the
+icy roses on her wedding dress.
+
+Downstairs her father was smoking his bedtime cigar. Mrs. Creve, very
+sleepy and cosy and flushed, leaned over the smouldering bed of coals.
+She held out her plump, soft hand to Moya.
+
+"Come here and be scolded! We have been scolding you steadily for the
+last hour."
+
+"If you want that young man to get his strength back, you'd better not
+keep him up talking half the night," the colonel growled softly. "Do you
+see what time it is?"
+
+Moya knelt and leaned her head against her father. She reached one hand
+to Mrs. Creve. They did not speak again till her weak moment had passed.
+"It will be very soon," she said, pressing the warm hand that stroked
+her own. "You will help me pack, aunt Annie; and then you'll stay--with
+father? I know you are glad to have me out of the way at last!"
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+THE HIDDEN TRAIL
+
+Because they had set forth on a grim and sorrowful quest, it need not
+be supposed that Paul and Moya were a pair of sorrowful pilgrims. It was
+their wedding journey. At the outset Moya had said: "We are doing the
+best we know. For what we don't know, let us leave it and not brood."
+
+They did not enter at once upon the more eccentric stages of the search.
+They went by way of the Great Northern to Portland, descending from snow
+to roses and drenching rains. At Pendleton, which is at the junction
+of three great roads, Paul sent tracers out through express agents
+and train officials along the remotest slender feeders of these lines.
+Through the same agents it was made known that for any service rendered
+or expense incurred on behalf of the person described, his friends would
+hold themselves gratefully responsible.
+
+At Portland, Paul searched the steamer lists and left confidential
+orders in the different transportation offices; and Moya wrote to his
+mother--a woman's letter, every page shining with happiness and as free
+from apparent forethought as a running brook.
+
+They returned by the Great Northern and Lake Coeur d'Alene, stopping
+over at Fort Sherman to visit Mrs. Creve, who was giddy with joy
+over the wholesome change in Paul. She, too, wrote a woman's letter
+concerning that visit, to the colonel, which cleared a crowd of shadows
+from his lonely hearth.
+
+Thence again to Pendleton came the seekers, and Paul gathered in his
+lines, but found nothing; so cast them forth again. But through all
+these distant elaborations of the search, in his own mind he saw the
+old man creeping away by some near, familiar trail and lying hid in some
+warm valley in the hills, his prison and his home.
+
+It was now the last week in March. The travelers' bags were in the
+office, the carriage at the door, when a letter--pigeon-holed and
+forgotten since received some three weeks before--was put into Paul's
+hand.
+
+I run up against your ad. in the Silver City Times [the communication
+began]. If you haven't found your man yet, maybe I can put you onto
+the right lead. I'm driving a jerky on the road from Mountain Home to
+Oriana, but me and the old man we don't jibe any too well. I've got
+a sort of disgust on me. Think I'll quit soon and go to mining. Jimmy
+Breen he runs the Ferry, he can tell you all I know. Fifty miles from
+Mountain Home good road can make it in one day. Yours Respecfully,
+
+J. STRATTON.
+
+It was in following up this belated clue that the pilgrims had come to
+the Ferry inn, crossing by team from valley to valley, cutting off a
+great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River
+desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that
+open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little
+rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners,
+emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn of
+enterprise.
+
+Business at the Ferry had shrunk since the railroad went through. The
+house-staff consisted of Jimmy Breen, a Chinese cook of the bony, tartar
+breed, sundry dogs, and a large bachelor cat that mooned about the empty
+piazzas. In a young farming country, hungry for capital, Jimmy could not
+do a cash business, but everything was grist that came to his mill; and
+he was quick to distinguish the perennial dead beat from a genuine case
+of hard luck.
+
+"That's a good axe ye have there," pointing suggestively to a new one
+sticking out of the rear baggage of an emigrant outfit. "Ye better l'ave
+that with me for the dollar that's owing me. If ye have money to buy
+new axes ye can't be broke entirely." Or: "Slip the halter on that calf
+behind there. The mother hasn't enough to keep it alive. There's har'ly
+a dollar's wort' of hide on its bones, but I'll take it to save it
+droppin' on the road." Or, he would try sarcasm: "Well, we'll be
+shuttin' her down in the spring. Then ye can go round be Walter's Ferry
+and see if they'll trust ye there." Or: "Why wasn't ye workin' on the
+Ditch last winter? Settin' smokin' your poipe in the tules, the wife and
+young ones packin' sagebrush to kape ye warm!"
+
+On the morning after their distinguished arrival, Jimmy's guests came
+down late to a devastated breakfast-table. Little heaps of crumbs here
+and there showed where earlier appetites had had their destined hour and
+gone their way. At an impartial distance from the top and the foot of
+the table stood the familiar group of sauce and pickle bottles, every
+brand dear to the cowboy, including the "surrup-jug" adhering to its
+saucer. There was a fresh-gathered bunch of wild phlox by Moya's plate
+in a tumbler printed round the edge with impressions of a large moist
+male thumb.
+
+"Catchee plenty," the Chinaman grinned, pointing to the plain outside
+where the pale sage-brush quivered stiffly in the wind. "Bymbye plenty
+come. Pretty col' now."
+
+"You'll be getting a large hump on yourself, Han, me boy. 'T is a cash
+crowd we have here--and a lady, by me sowl!" Thus Jimmy exhorted his
+household. Times were looking up. They would be a summer resort before
+the Ditch went through; it should be mentioned in the Ditch company's
+prospectus. Jimmy had put his savings into land-office fees and had a
+hopeful interest in the Ditch.
+
+A spur in the head is worth two in the heel. Without a word from "the
+boss" Han had found time to shave and powder and polish his brown
+forehead and put on his whitest raiment over his baggiest trousers.
+There was loud panic among the fowls in the corral. The cat had
+disappeared; the jealous dogs hung about the doors and were pushed out
+of the way by friends of other days.
+
+Seated by the office fire, Paul was conferring with Jimmy, who was
+happy with a fresh pipe and a long story to tell to a patient and paying
+listener. He rubbed the red curls back from his shining forehead,
+took the pipe from his teeth, and guided a puff of smoke away from his
+auditor.
+
+"I seen him settin' over there on his blankets,"--he pointed with
+his pipe to the opposite shore plainly visible through the office
+windows,--"but he niver hailed me, so I knowed he was broke. Some, whin
+they're broke, they holler all the louder. Ye would think they had an
+appointment wit' the Governor and he sint his car'iage to meet them. But
+he was as humble, he was, as a yaller dog.--Out! Git out from here--the
+pack of yez! Han, shut the dure an' drive thim bloody curs off the
+piazzy. They're trackin' up the whole place.--As I was sayin', sor,
+there he stayed hunched up in the wind, waitin' on the chanst of a team
+comin', and I seen he was an ould daddy. I stud the sight of him as long
+as I cud, me comin' and goin'. He fair wore me out. So I tuk the boat
+over for 'im. One of his arrums he couldn't lift from the shoulder, and
+I give him a h'ist wit' his bundle. Faith, it was light! 'Twinty years
+a-getherin',' he cackles, slappin' it. 'Ye've had harrud luck,' I says.
+''T is not much of a sheaf ye are packin' home.' 'That's as ye look at
+it,' he says.
+
+"I axed him what way was he goin'. He was thinking to get a lift as far
+as Oriana, if the stages was runnin' on that road. 'Then ye 'll have to
+bide here till morning,' I says, 'for ye must have met the stage
+goin' the other way.' 'I met nothing,' says he; 'I come be way of the
+bluffs,'--which is a strange way for one man travelin' afoot.
+
+"The grub was on the table, and I says, 'Sit by and fill yourself up.'
+His cheeks was fallin' in wit' the hunger. With that his poor ould eye
+begun to water. 'Twas one weak eye he had that was weepin' all the time.
+'I've got out of the habit of reg'lar aitin',' he says. 'It don't take
+much to kape me goin'.' 'Niver desave yourself, sor! 'T is betther feed
+three hungry men than wan "no occasion."' His appetite it grew on him
+wit' every mouthful. There was a boundless emptiness to him. He lay
+there on the bench and slep' the rest of the evening, and I left him
+there wit' a big fire at night. And the next day at noon we h'isted him
+up beside of Joe Stratton. A rip-snorter of a wind was blowin' off the
+Silver City peaks. His face was drawed like a winter apple, but he wint
+off happy. I think he was warm inside of himself."
+
+"Did you ask him his name?"
+
+"Sure. Why not? John Treagar he called himself."
+
+"Treagar? Hagar, you mean!"
+
+"It was Treagar he said."
+
+"John Hagar is the man I am looking for."
+
+"Treagar--Hagar? 'T is comin' pretty close to it."
+
+"About what height and build was he?"
+
+"He was not to say a tall man; and he wasn't so turrible short neither.
+His back was as round as a Bible. A kind of pepper and saltish beard he
+had, and his hair was blacker than his beard but white in streaks."
+
+"A _dark_ man, was he?"
+
+"He would be a _dark_ man if he was younger."
+
+"The man I want is blue-eyed."
+
+"His eyes was blue--a kind of washed-out gray that maybe was blue wanst;
+and one of them always weepin' wit' the cold."
+
+"And light brown hair mixed with gray, like sand and ashes--mostly
+ashes; and a thin straggling beard, thinner on the cheeks? A high head
+and a tall stooping figure--six feet at least; hands with large joints
+and a habit of picking at them when"--
+
+"Ye are goin' too fast for me now, sor. He was not that description of
+a man, nayther the height nor the hair of him. Sure't is a pity for ye
+comin' this far, and him not the man at all. Faith, I wish I was the man
+meself! I wonder at Joe Stratton anyhow! He's a very hasty man, is Joe.
+He jumps in wit' both feet, so he does. I could have told ye that."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Moya, always helplessly natural, and now very tired as well, when Paul
+described with his usual gravity this anti-climax, fell below all the
+dignities at once in a burst of childish giggling. Paul looked on
+with an embarrassed smile, like a puzzled affectionate dog at the
+incomprehensible mirth of humans. Paul was certainly deficient in humor
+and therefore in breadth. But what woman ever loved her lover the less
+for having discovered his limitations? Humor runs in families of the
+intenser cultivation. The son of the soil remains serious in the face of
+life's and nature's ironies.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+THE STAR IN THE EAST
+
+So the search paused, while the searchers rested and revised their
+plans. Spring opened in the valley as if for them alone. There were
+mornings "proud and sweet," when the humblest imagination could have
+pictured Aurora and her train in the jocund clouds that trooped along
+the sky,--wind-built processions which the wind dispersed. Wild flowers
+spread so fast they might have been spilled from the rainbow scarf of
+Iris fleeting overhead. The river was in flood, digging its elbows into
+its muddy banks. The willow and wild-rose thickets stooped and washed
+their spring garments in its tide.
+
+Primeval life and love were all around them. Meadow larks flung their
+brief jets of song into the sunlight; the copses rustled with wings;
+wood-doves cooed from the warm sunny hollows, and the soft booming of
+their throaty call was like a beating in the air,--the pulse of spring.
+They had found their Garden. Humanity in the valley passed before them
+in forms as interesting and as alien as the brother beasts to Adam:
+the handsome driver of the jerky, Joe Stratton's successor, who sat at
+dinner opposite and combed his flowing mustache with his fork in a lazy,
+dandified way; the darkened faces of sheep-herders enameled by sun and
+wind, their hair like the winter coats of animals; the slow-eyed farmers
+with the appetites of horses; the spring recruits for the ranks of labor
+footing it to distant ranches, each with his back-load of bedding, and
+the dust of three counties on his garments.
+
+The sweet forces of Nature shut out, for a season, Paul's _cri du
+coeur_. One may keep a chamber sacred to one's sadder obligations and
+yet the house be filled with joy. Further ramifications of the search
+were mapped out with Jimmy's indifferent assistance. For good reasons of
+his own, Jimmy did little to encourage an early start. He would explain
+that his maps were of ancient date and full of misinformation as to
+stage routes. "See that now! The stages was pulled off that line five
+year ago, on account of the railroad cuttin' in on them. Ye couldn't
+make it wid'out ye took a camp outfit. There's ne'er a station left, and
+when ye come to it, it's ruins ye'll find. A chimbly and a few rails,
+if the mule-skinners hasn't burned them. 'Tis a country very devoid
+of fuel; sagebrush and grease-wood, and a wind, bedad! that blows the
+grass-seeds into the next county."
+
+When these camping-trips were proposed to Moya, she hesitated and
+responded languidly; but when Paul suggested leaving her even for a day,
+her fears fluttered across his path and wiled him another way. Vaguely
+he felt that she was unlike herself--less buoyant, though often
+restless; and sometimes he fancied she was pale underneath her
+sun-burned color like that of rose-hips in October. Various causes kept
+him inert, while strength mounted in his veins, and life seemed made for
+the pure joy of living.
+
+The moon of May in that valley is the moon of roses, for the heats once
+due come on apace. The young people gave up their all-day horseback
+rides and took morning walks instead, following the shore-paths lazily
+to shaded coverts dedicated to those happy silences which it takes two
+to make. Or, they climbed the bluffs and gazed at the impenetrable
+vast horizon, and thought perhaps of their errand with that pang
+of self-reproach which, when shared, becomes a subtler form of
+self-indulgence.
+
+But at night, all the teeming life of the plain rushed up into the sky
+and blazed there in a million friendly stars. After the languor of the
+sleepy afternoons, it was like a fresh awakening--the dawn of those
+white May nights. The wide plain stirred softly through all its miles
+of sage. The river's cadenced roar paused beyond the bend and outbroke
+again. All that was eerie and furtive in the wild dark found a curdling
+voice in the coyote's hunting-call.
+
+In a hollow concealed by sage, not ten minutes' walk from the Ferry inn,
+unknown to the map-maker and innocent of all use, lay a perfect floor
+for evening pacing with one's eyes upon the stars. It was the death mask
+of an ancient lake, done in purest alkali silt, and needing only the
+shadows cast by a low moon to make the illusion almost unbelievable.
+Slow precipitation, season after season, as the water dried, had left
+the lake bed smooth as a cast in plaster. Subsequent warpings had lifted
+the alkali crust into thin-lipped wavelets. But once upon the floor
+itself the resemblance to water vanished. The warpings and Grumblings
+took the shape of earth as made by water and baked by fire. Moya
+compared it to a bit of the dead moon fallen to show us what we are
+coming to. They paced it soft-footed in tennis shoes lest they should
+crumble its talc-like whiteness. But they read no horoscopes, for they
+were shy of the future in speaking to each other,--and they made no
+plans.
+
+One evening Moya had said to Paul: "I can understand your mother so much
+better now that I am a wife. I think most women have a tendency towards
+the state of being _un_married. And if one had--children, it would
+increase upon one very fast. A widow and a mother--for twenty years. How
+could she be a wife again?"
+
+Paul made no reply to this speech which long continued to haunt him;
+especially as Moya wrote more frequently to his mother and did not offer
+to show him her letters. In their evening walks she seemed distrait, and
+during the day more restless.
+
+One night of their nightly pacings she stopped and stood long, her head
+thrown back, her eyes fixed upon the dizzy star-deeps. Paul waited a
+step behind her, touching her shoulders with his hands. Suddenly she
+reeled and sank backwards into his arms. He held her, watching her
+lovely face grow whiter; her eyelids closed. She breathed slowly,
+leaning her whole weight upon him.
+
+Coming to herself, she smiled and said it was nothing. She had been that
+way before. "But--we must go home. We must have a home--somewhere.
+I want to see your mother. Paul, be good to her--forgive her--for my
+sake!"
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS
+
+Aunt Polly Lewis was disappointed in the latest of her beneficiaries.
+It was nine years since her husband had locked up his savings in the
+Mud Springs ranch, a neglected little health-plant at the mouth of the
+Bruneau. If you were troubled with rheumatism, or a crick in the back,
+or your "pancrees" didn't act or your blood was "out o' fix, why, you'd
+better go up to Looanders' for a spell and soak yourself in that blue
+mud and let aunt Polly diet ye and dost ye with yerb tea."
+
+When Leander courted aunt Polly in the interests of his sanitarium, she
+was reputed the best nurse in Ada County. The widow--by desertion--of a
+notorious quack doctor of those parts: it was an open question whether
+his medicine had killed or her nursing had cured the greater number of
+confiding sick folk. Leander drove fifty miles to catechise this notable
+woman, and finding her sound on the theory of packs hot and cold, and
+skilled in the practice of rubbing,--and having made the incidental
+discovery that she was a person not without magnetism,--he decided on
+the spot to add her to the other attractions of Mud Springs ranch; and
+she drove home with him next day, her trunk in the back of his wagon.
+
+The place was no sinecure. Bricks without straw were a child's pastime
+to the cures aunt Polly and the Springs effected without a pretense
+to the comforts of life in health, to say nothing of sickness. Modern
+conveniences are costly, and how are you to get the facilities for "pay
+patients" when you have no patients that pay! Prosperity had overlooked
+the Bruneau, or had made false starts there, through detrimental schemes
+that gave the valley a bad name with investors. The railroad was still
+fifty miles away, and the invalid public would not seek life itself,
+in these days of luxurious travel, at the cost of a twelve hours'
+stage-ride. However, as long as the couple had a roof over their
+heads and the Springs continued to plop and vomit their strange,
+chameleon-colored slime, Leander would continue to bring home the sick
+and the suffering for Polly and the Springs to practice on. Health
+became his hobby, and in time, with isolation thrown in, it began to
+invade his common sense. He tried in succession all the diet fads of the
+day and wound up a convert to the "Ralston" school of eating. Aunt Polly
+had clung a little longer to the flesh-pots, but the charms of a system
+that abolished half the labor of cooking prevailed with her at last, and
+in the end she kept a sharper eye upon Leander at mealtime than ever he
+had upon her.
+
+The ignorant gorgings of their neighbors were a head-shaking and a
+warning to them, and more than once Leander's person was in jeopardy
+through his zealous but unappreciated concern for the brother who eats
+in darkness.
+
+He had started out one winter morning from Bisuka, a virtuous man. His
+team had breakfasted, but not he. A Ralstonite does not load up his
+stomach at dawn after the manner of cattle, and such pious substitutes
+for a cup of coffee as are permitted the faithful cannot always be had
+for a price. At Indian Creek he hauled up to water his team, and to
+make for himself a cinnamon-colored decoction by boiling in hot water
+a preparation of parched grains which he carried with him. This he
+accomplished in an angle of the old corral fence out of the wind. There
+is no comfort nor even virtue in eating cold dust with one's sandwiches.
+Leander sunk his great white tushes through the thick slices of
+whole-wheat bread and tasted the paste of peanut meal with which they
+were spread. He ate standing and slapped his leg to warm his driving
+hand.
+
+A flutter of something colored, as a garment, caught his eye, directing
+it to the shape of a man, rolled in an old blue blanket, lying
+motionless in a corner of the tumble-down wall. "Drunk, drunk as a hog!"
+pronounced Leander. For no man in command of himself would lie down to
+sleep in such a place. As if to refute this accusation, the wind
+turned a corner of the blanket quietly off a white face with closed
+eyelids,--an old, worn, gentle face, appealing in its homeliness, though
+stamped now with the dignity of death. Leander knelt and handled the
+body tenderly. It was long before he satisfied himself that life was
+still there. Another case for Polly and the Springs. A man worth saving,
+if Leander knew a man; one of the trustful, trustworthy sort. His heart
+went out to him on the instant as to a friend from home.
+
+It was closing in for dusk when he reached the Ferry. Jimmy was away,
+and Han, in high dudgeon, brought the boat over in answer to Leander's
+hail. He had grouse to dress for supper, inconsiderately flung in upon
+him at the last moment by the stage, four hours late.
+
+"Huh! Why you no come one hour ago? All time 'Hullo, hullo'! Je' Cli'!
+me no dam felly-man--me dam cook! Too much man say 'Hullo'!"
+
+The prospect was not good for help at the Ferry inn, so, putting his
+trust in Polly and the Springs, Leander pushed on up the valley.
+
+When Aunt Polly's patients were of the right sort, they stayed on after
+their recovery and helped Leander with the ranch work. But for the most
+part they "hit the trail" again as soon as their ills were healed,
+not forgetting to advertise the Springs to other patients of their own
+class. The only limit to this unenviable popularity was the size of the
+house. Leander saw no present advantage in building.
+
+But in case they ever did build--and the time was surely coming!--here
+was the very person they had been looking for. Cast your bread upon the
+waters. The winter's bread and care and shelter so ungrudgingly bestowed
+had returned to them many-fold in the comfortable sense of dependence
+and unity they felt in this last beneficiary, the old man of Indian
+Creek whom they called "Uncle John."
+
+"The kindest old creetur' ever lived! Some forgitful, but everybody's
+liable to forgit. Only tell him one thing at once, and don't confuse
+him, and he'll git through an amazin' sight of chores in a day."
+
+"Just the very one we'll want to wait on the men patients," Aunt Polly
+chimed in. "He can carry up meals and keep the bathrooms clean, and wash
+out the towels, and he's the best hand with poultry. He takes such good
+care of the old hens they're re'lly ashamed not to lay!"
+
+It was spring again; old hopes were putting forth new leaves. Leander
+had heard of a capitalist in the valley; a young one, too, more prone to
+enthusiasm if shown the right thing.
+
+"I'm going down to Jimmy's to fetch them up here!" Leander announced.
+
+"Are there two of them?"
+
+"He has brought his wife out with him. They are a young couple. He's the
+only son of a rich widow in New York, and Jimmy says they've got money
+to burn. Jimmy don't take much stock in this 'ere 'wounded guide'
+story--thinks it's more or less of a blind. He's feeling around for
+a good investment--desert land or mining claims. Jimmy thinks he
+represents big interests back East."
+
+Aunt Polly considered, and the corners of her mouth moistened as she
+thought of the dinner she would snatch from the jaws of the system on
+the day these young strangers should visit the ranch.
+
+"By Gum!" Leander shouted. "I wonder if Uncle John wouldn't know
+something about the party they're advertising for. That'd be the way
+to find out if they're really on the scent. I'll take him down with
+me--that's what I'll _do_--and let him have a talk with the young man
+himself. It'll make a good opening. Are you listening, Polly?" She was
+not. "I wish you'd git him to fix himself up a little. Layout one o'
+my clean shirts for him, and I'll take him down with me day after
+to-morrow."
+
+"I'll have a fresh churning to-morrow," Aunt Polly mused. "You can take
+a little pat of it with you. I won't put no salt in it, and I'll send
+along a glass or two of my wild strawberry jam. It takes an awful time
+to pick the berries, but I guess it'll be appreciated after the table
+Jimmy sets. I don't believe Jimmy'll be offended?"
+
+"Bogardus is their name," continued Leander. "Mr. and Mrs. Bogardus,
+from New York. Jimmy's got it down in his hotel book and he's showing
+it to everybody. Jimmy's reel childish about it. I tell him one swallow
+don't make a summer."
+
+Uncle John had come into the room and sat listening, while a yellow
+pallor crept over his forehead and cheeks. He moved to get up once, and
+then sat down again weakly.
+
+"What's the matter, Uncle?" Aunt Polly eyed him sharply. "You been out
+there chopping wood too long in this hot sun. What did I tell you?"
+
+She cleared the decks for action. Paler and paler the old man grew. He
+was not able to withstand her vigorous sympathies. She had him tucked up
+on the calico lounge and his shoes off and a hot iron at his feet; but
+while she was hurrying up the kettle to make him a drink of something
+hot, he rose and slipped up the outside stairs to his bedroom in the
+attic. There he seated himself on the side of his neat bed which he
+always made himself camp fashion,--the blankets folded lengthwise with
+just room for one quiet sleeper to crawl inside; and there he sat,
+opening and clinching his hands, a deep perplexity upon his features.
+
+Aunt Polly called to him and began to read the riot act, but Leander
+said: "Let him be! He gits tired o' being fussed over. You're at him
+about something or other the whole blessed time."
+
+"Well, I have to! My gracious! He'd forgit to come in to his meals if I
+didn't keep him on my mind."
+
+"It just strikes me--what am I going to call him when I introduce him to
+those folks? Did he ever tell you what his last name is?"
+
+"I wouldn't be surprised," Aunt Polly lowered her voice, "if he couldn't
+remember it himself! I've heard of such cases. Whenever I try to draw
+him out to talk about himself and what happened to him before you found
+him, it breaks him all up; seemingly gives him a back-set every time.
+He sort of slinks into himself in that queer, lost way--just like he was
+when he first come to."
+
+"He's had a powerful jar to his constitution, and his mind is taking a
+rest." Leander was fond of a diagnosis. "There wasn't enough life left
+in him to keep his faculties and his bod'ly organs all a-going at once.
+The upper story's to let."
+
+"I wish you'd go upstairs, and see what he is doing up there."
+
+"Aw, no! Let him be. He likes to go off by himself and do his thinking.
+I notice it rattles him to be talked to much. He sets out there on the
+choppin'-block, looking at the bluffs--ever notice? He looks and
+don't see nothin', and his lips keep moving like he was learning a
+spellin'-lesson. If I speak to him sharp, he hauls himself together and
+smiles uneasy, but he don't know what I said. I tell you he's waking up;
+coming to his memories, and trying to sort 'em out."
+
+"That's just what _I_ say," Aunt Polly retorted, "but he's got to eat
+his meals. He can't live on memories."
+
+Uncle John was restless that evening, and appeared to be excited. He
+waited upon Aunt Polly after supper with a feverish eagerness to be of
+use. When all was in order for bedtime, and Leander rose to wind the
+clock, he spoke. It was getting about time to roll up his blankets
+and pull out, he said. Leander felt for the ledge where the clock-key
+belonged, and made no answer.
+
+"I was saying--I guess it's about time for me to be moving on. The grass
+is starting"--
+
+"Are you cal'latin' to live on grass?" Leander drawled with cutting
+irony. "Gettin' tired of the old woman's cooking? Well, she ain't much
+of a cook!"
+
+Uncle John remained silent, working at his hands. His mouth, trembled
+under his thin straggling beard. "I never was better treated in my life,
+and you know it. It ain't handsome of you, Lewis, to talk that way!"
+
+"He don't mean nothing, Uncle John! What makes you so foolish, Looander!
+He just wants you to know there's no begrudgers around here. You're
+welcome, and more than welcome, to settle down and camp right along with
+us."
+
+"Winter and summer!" Leander put in, "if you're satisfied. There's
+nobody in a hurry to see the last of ye."
+
+Uncle John's mild but determined resistance was a keen disappointment
+to his friends. Leander thought himself offended. "What fly's stung you,
+anyhow! Heard from any of your folks lately?"
+
+The old man smiled.
+
+"Got any money salted down that needs turning?"
+
+"Looander! Quit teasing of him!"
+
+"Let him have his fun, ma'am. It's all he's likely to get out of me. I
+have got a little money," he pursued. "'T would be an insult to name it
+in the same breath with what you've done for me. I'd like to leave it
+here, though. You could pass it on. You'll have chances enough. 'T ain't
+likely I'll be the last one you'll take in and do for, and never git
+nothing out of it in return."
+
+There was a mild sensation, as the speaker, fumbling in his loose
+trousers, appeared to be seeking for that money. Aunt Polly's eyes
+flamed indignation behind her tears. She was a foolish, warm-hearted
+creature, and her eyes watered on the least excuse.
+
+"Looander, you shouldn't have taunted him," she admonished her husband,
+who felt he had been a little rough.
+
+"Look here, Uncle John, d'you ever know anybody who wasn't by way of
+needing help some time in their lives? We don't ask any one who comes
+here"--
+
+"He didn't come!" Aunt Polly corrected.
+
+"Well, who was brought, then! We don't ask for their character, nor
+their private history, nor their bank account. I don't know but you're
+the first one for years I've ever took a real personal shine to, and
+we've h'isted a good many up them stairs that wasn't able to walk much
+further. I'd like you to stay as a favor to us, dang it!"
+
+Leander delivered this invitation as if it were a threat. His
+straight-cut mustache stiffened and projected itself by the pressure of
+his big lips; his dark red throat showed as many obstinate creases as an
+old snapping-turtle's.
+
+"I'm much obliged to you both. I want you to remember that. We--I--I'll
+talk with ye in the morning."
+
+"That means he's going all the same," said Leander, after Uncle John had
+closed the outside door.
+
+Sure enough, next morning he had made up his little pack, oiled his
+boots, and by breakfast-time was ready for the road. They argued the
+point long and fiercely with him whether he should set out on foot or
+wait a day and ride with Leander to the Ferry. It was not supposed he
+could be thinking of any other road. By to-morrow, if he would but wait,
+Aunt Polly would have comfortably outfitted him after the custom of the
+house; given his clothes a final "going over" to see everything taut
+for the journey, shoved a week's rations into a corn-sack, choosing such
+condensed forms of nourishment as the system allowed--nay, straining a
+point and smuggling in a nefarious pound or two of real miner's coffee.
+
+Aunt Polly's distress so weighed with her patient that he consented
+to remain overnight and ride with Leander as far as the dam across the
+Bruneau, at its junction with the Snake. There he would cross and take
+the trail down the river, cutting off several miles of the road to the
+Ferry. As for going on to see Jimmy or Jimmy's "folks," the nervous
+resistance which this plan excited warned the good couple not to press
+the old man too far, or he might give them the slip altogether.
+
+A strangeness in his manner which this last discussion had brought out,
+lay heavy on aunt Polly's mind all day after the departure of the team
+for the Ferry. She watched the two men drive off in silence, Leander's
+bush beard reddening in the sun, his big body filling more than his half
+of the seat.
+
+"Well, by Gum! If he ain't the blamedest, most per-sistent old fool!"
+he complained to his wife that night. Their first words were of the old
+man, already missed like one of the family from the humble place he had
+made for himself. Leander was still irritable over his loss. "I set him
+down with his grub and blankets, and I watched him footing it acrost the
+dam. He done it real handsome, steady on his pins. Then he set down
+and waited, kind o' dreaming, like he used to, settin' on the
+choppin'-block. I hailed him. 'What's the matter?' I says. 'Left
+anything?' No: every time I hailed he took off his hat and waved to me
+real pleasant. Nothing the matter. There he set. Well, thinks I, I can't
+stay here all day watching ye take root. So I drove on a piece. And, by
+Gum! when I looked back going around the bend, there he went a-pikin'
+off up the bluffs--just a-humping himself for all he was worth. I
+wouldn't like to think he was cunning, but it looked that way for
+sure,--turning me off the scent and then taking to the bluffs like he
+was sent for! Where in thunder is he making for? He knows just as well
+as I do--you have heard me tell him a dozen times--the stages were
+hauled off that Wood River road five year and more ago. He won't git
+nowhere! And he won't meet up with a team in a week's walking."
+
+"His food will last him a week if he's careful; he's no great eater. I
+ain't afraid his feet will get lost; he's to home out of doors almost
+anywhere;--it's his head I'm afraid of. He's got some sort of a skew on
+him. I used to notice if he went out for a little walk anywhere, he'd
+always slope for the East."
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+A STATION IN THE DESERT
+
+That forsworn identity which Adam Bogardus had submitted to be clothed
+in as a burial garment was now become a thing for the living to flee
+from. He had seen a woman in full health whiten and cower before
+it;--she who stood beside his bed and looked at him with dreadful eyes,
+eyes of his girl-wife growing old in the likeness of her father. Hard,
+reluctant eyes forced to own the truth which the ashen lips denied.
+Are we responsible for our silences? He had not spoken to her. Nay, the
+living must speak first, or the ghostly dead depart unquestioned. He
+asked only that he might forget her and be himself forgotten. If it were
+that woman's right to call herself Emily Bogardus, then was there no
+Adam her husband. Better the old disguise which left him free to work
+out his own sentence and pay his forfeit to the law. He had never
+desired that one breath of it should be commuted, or wished to accept an
+enslaving pardon from those for whose sake he had put himself out of the
+way. If he could have taken his own comparative spiritual measurement,
+he might have smiled at the humor of that forgiveness promised him in
+the name of the Highest by his son.
+
+For many peaceful years solitude had been the habit of his soul. Gently
+as he bore with human obligations, he escaped from them with a sense of
+relief which shamed him somewhat when he thought of the good friends to
+whom he owed this very blessed power to flee. It was quite as
+Leander had surmised. He could not command his faculties--memory
+especially--when a noise of many words and questions bruised his brain.
+
+The stillness of the desert closed about him with delicious healing.
+He was a world-weary child returned to the womb of Nature. His old
+camp-craft came back; his eye for distance, his sense of the trail, his
+little pet economies with food and fire. There was no one to tell him
+what to eat and when to eat it. He was invisible to men. Each day's
+march built up his muscle, and every night's deep sleep under the great
+high stars steadied his nerves and tightened his resolve.
+
+He thought of the young man--his son--with a mixture of pain and
+tenderness. But Paul was not the baby-boy he had put out of his arms
+with a father's smile at One Man station. Paul was himself a man now; he
+had coerced him at the last, neither did he understand.
+
+The blind instinct of flight began after a while to shape its own
+direction. It was no new leaning with the packer. As many times as he
+had crossed this trail he never had failed to experience the same pull.
+He resisted no longer. He gave way to strange fancies and made them his
+guides.
+
+At some time during his flight from the hospital, in one of those blanks
+that overtook him, he knew not how, he had met with a great loss. The
+words had slipped from his memory--of that message which had kept him in
+fancied touch with his wife all these many deluding years. Without them
+he was like a drunkard deprived of his habitual stimulant. The craving
+to connect and hold them--for they came to him sometimes in tantalizing
+freaks of memory, and slipped away again like beads rolling off a
+broken thread--was almost the only form of mental suffering he was now
+conscious of. What had become of the message itself? Had they left it
+exposed to every heartless desecration in that abandoned spot?--a scrap
+of paper driven like a bit of tumble-weed before the wind, snatched at
+by spikes of sage, trampled into the mire of cattle, nuzzled by wild
+beasts? Or, had they put it away with that other beast where he lay with
+the scoff on his dead face? Out of dreams and visions of the night that
+place of the parting ways called to him, and the time was now come when
+he must go.
+
+He approached it by one of those desert trails that circle for miles
+on the track of water and pounce as a bird drops upon its prey into the
+trampled hollow at One Man station--a place for the gathering of hoofs
+in the midst of the plain.
+
+He could trace what might have been the foundation of a house, a few
+blackened stones, a hearthstone showing where a chimney perhaps had
+stood, but these evidences of habitation would never have been marked
+except by one who knew where to look. He searched the ground over for
+signs of the tragedy that bound him to that spot--a smiling desolation,
+a sunny nothingness. The effect of this careless obliteration was
+quieting. Nature had played here once with two men and a woman. One of
+the toy men was lost, the other broken. She had forgotten where she
+put the broken one. There were mounds which looked like graves, but the
+seeker knew that artificial mounds in a place like this soon sink into
+hollows; and there were hollows like open graves, filled with unsightly
+human rubbish, washed in by the yearly rains.
+
+He spent three days in the hollow, doing nothing, steeped in sunshine,
+lying down to rest broad awake in the tender twilight, making his peace
+with this place of bitter memory before bidding it good-by. His thoughts
+turned eastward as the planets rose. Time he was working back towards
+home. He would hardly get there if he started now, before his day was
+done. He saw his mother's grave beside his father's, in the southeast
+corner of the burying-ground, where the trees were thin. All who drove
+in through the big gate of funerals could see the tall white shafts of
+the Beviers and Brodericks and Van Eltens, but only those who came on
+foot could approach his people in the gravelly side-hill plots. "I'd
+like to be put there alongside the old folks in that warm south corner."
+He could see their names on the plain gray slate stones, rain-stained
+and green with moss.
+
+On the third May evening of his stay the horizon became a dust-cloud,
+the setting sun a ball of fire. Loomed the figure of a rider topping
+the heaving backs of his herd. All together they came lumbering down
+the slopes, all heading fiercely for the water. The rider plunged down
+a side-draw out of the main cloud. Clanking bells, shuffling hoofs, the
+"Whoop-ee-youp!" came fainter up the gulch. The cowboy was not pleased
+as he dashed by to see an earlier camp-fire smoking in the hollow. But
+he was less displeased, being half French, than if he had been pure-bred
+American.
+
+The old man, squatting by his cooking-fire, gave him a civil nod, and
+he responded with a flourish of his quirt. The reek of sage smoke, the
+smell of dust and cattle rose rank on the cooling air. It was good to
+Boniface, son of the desert; it meant supper and bed, or supper and
+talk, for "Bonny" Maupin ("Bonny Moppin," it went in the vernacular)
+would talk every other man to sleep, full or empty, with songs thrown
+in. To-night, however, he must talk on an empty stomach, for his chuck
+wagon was not in sight.
+
+"W'ich way you travelin'?" he began, lighting up after a long pull at
+his flask. The old man had declined, though he looked as if he needed a
+drink.
+
+"East about," was the answer.
+
+"Goin' far?"
+
+"Well; summer's before us. I cal'late to keep moving till snow falls."
+
+"Shucks! You ain' pressed for time. Maybe you got some friend back
+there. Goin' back to git married?" He winked genially to point the jest
+and the old man smiled indulgently.
+
+"Won't you set up and take a bite with me? You don't look to have much
+of a show for supper along."
+
+"Thanks, very much! I had bully breakfast at Rock Spring middlin' late
+this morning. They butcherin' at that place. Five fat hog. My chuck
+wagon he stay behin' for chunk of fresh pig. I won' spoil my appetide
+for that tenderloin. Hol' on yourself an' take supper wis me. No?--That
+fellah be 'long 'bout Chris'mas if he don' git los'! He always behin',
+pig or no pig!"
+
+Bonny strolled away collecting fire-wood. Presently he called back,
+pointing dramatically with his small-toed boot. "Who's been coyotin'
+round here?" The hard ground was freshly disturbed in spots as by the
+paws of some small inquisitive animal. There was no answer.
+
+"What you say? Whose surface diggin's is these? I never know anybody do
+some mining here."
+
+"That was me"--Bonny backed a little nearer to catch the old man's
+words. "I was looking round here for something I lost."
+
+"What luck you have? You fin' him?"
+
+"Well, now, doos it reely matter to you, sonny?"
+
+"Pardner, it don' matter to me a d--n, if you say so! I was jus' askin'
+myself what a man _would_ look for if he los' it here. Since I strike
+this 'ell of a place the very groun' been chewed up and spit out
+reg'lar, one hundred times a year. 'T'is a gris' mill!"
+
+"I didn't gretly expect to find what I was lookin' for. I was just
+foolin' around to satisfy myself."
+
+"That satisfy me!" said Bonny pleasantly; and yet he was a trifle
+discomfited. He strolled away again and began to sing with a boyish show
+of indifference to having been called "sonny."
+
+"Oh, Sally is the gal for me! Oh, Sally's the gal for me! On moonlight
+night when the star is bright--Oh"--
+
+"Halloa! This some more your work, oncle? You ain' got no chicken wing
+for arm if you lif' this.--Ah, be dam! I see what you lif' him with.
+All same stove-lid." Talking and swearing to himself cheerfully, Bonny
+applied the end of a broken whiffletree to the blunt lip of the old
+hearthstone which marked the stage-house chimney. He had tried a
+step-dance on it and found it hollow. More fresh digging, and marks upon
+the stone where some prying tool had taken hold and slipped, showed he
+was not the first who had been curious.
+
+"There you go, over on you' back, like snap' turtle; I see where you lay
+there before. What the dev'! I say!" Bonny, much excited with his find,
+extracted a rusty tin tobacco-box from the hole, pried open the spring
+lid and drew forth its contents: a discolored canvas bag bulging with
+coin and whipped around the neck with a leather whang. The canvas was
+rotten; Bonny supported its contents tenderly as he brought it over to
+the old man.
+
+"Oncle, I ask you' pardon for tappin' that safe. Pretty good lil'
+nest-egg, eh? But now you got to find her some other place."
+
+"That don't belong to me," said the old man indifferently.
+
+"Aw--don't be bashful! I onderstan' now what you los'. You dig
+here--there--migs up the scent. I just happen to step on that
+stone--ring him, so, with my boot-heel!"
+
+"That ain't my pile," the other persisted. "I started to build a fire
+on that stone two nights ago. It rung hollow like you say. I looked and
+found what you found--"
+
+"And put her back! My soul to God! An' you here all by you'self!"
+
+"Why not? The stuff ain't mine."
+
+"Who _is_ she? How long since anybody live here?"
+
+"I don't know,--good while, I guess."
+
+"Well, sar! Look here! I open that bag. I count two hondre' thirteen
+dolla'--make it twelve for luck, an' call it you' divvee! You strike her
+first. What you say: we go snac'?"
+
+"I haven't got any use for that money. You needn't talk to me about it."
+
+"Got no h'use!--are you a reech man? Got you' private car waitin' for
+you out in d' sagebrush? Sol' a mine lately?"
+
+"I don't know why it strikes you so funny. It's no concern of mine if a
+man puts his money in the ground and goes off and leaves it."
+
+"Goes off and die! There was one man live here by himself--he die, they
+say, 'with his boots on.' He, I think, mus' be that man belong to this
+money. What an old stiff want with two hondre' thirteen dolla'? That
+money goin' into a live man's clothes." Bonny slapped his chappereros,
+and the dust flew.
+
+"I've no objection to its going into _your_ clothes," said the old man.
+
+"You thing I ain' particular, me? Well, eef the party underground was
+my frien', and I knew his fam'ly, and was sure the money was belong to
+him--I'd do differend--perhaps. Mais,--it is going--going--gone! You
+won' go snac'?"
+
+The old man smiled and looked steadily away.
+
+"Blas' me to h--l! but you aire the firs' man ever I strike that jib at
+the sight of col' coin. She don' frighten me!"
+
+Bonny always swore when he felt embarrassed.
+
+"Well, sar! Look here! You fin' you'self so blame indifferend--s'pose
+you _so_ indifferend not to say nothing 'bout this, when my swamper
+fellah git in. I don' wish to go snac' wis him. I don' feel oblige'.
+See?"
+
+"What you want to pester me about this money for!" The old man was
+weary. "I didn't come here, lookin' for money, and I don't expect to
+take none away with me. So I'll say good-night to ye."
+
+"Hol' on, hol' on! Don' git mad. What time you goin' off in the
+morning?"
+
+"Before you do, I shouldn't wonder."
+
+"But hol'! One fine idea--blazin' good idea--just hit me now in the
+head! Wan' to come on to Chicago wis me? I drop this fellah at Felton.
+He take the team back, and I get some one to help me on the treep. Why
+not you? Ever tek' care of stock?"
+
+"Some consid'able years ago I used to look after stock. Guess I'd know
+an ox from a heifer."
+
+"Ever handle 'em on cattle-car?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"Well, all there is, you feed 'em, and water 'em, and keep 'em on their
+feets. If one fall down, all the others they have too much play. They
+rock"--Bonny exhibited--"and fall over and pile up in heap. I like to
+do one turn for you. We goin' the same way--you bring me the good luck,
+like a bird in the han'. This is my clean-up, you understand. You bring
+me the beautiful luck. You turn me up right bower first slap. Now it's
+goin' be my deal. I like to do by you!"
+
+The packer turned over and looked up at the cool sky, pricked through
+with early stars. He was silent a long time. His pale old face was like
+a fine bit of carving in the dusk.
+
+"What you think?" asked Moppin, almost tenderly. "I thing you better
+come wis me. You too hold a man to go like so--alone."
+
+"I'll have to think about it first;--let you know in the morning."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+INJURIOUS REPORTS CONCERNING AN OLD HOUSE
+
+A Rush of wheels and a spatter of hoofs coming up the drive sent
+Mrs. Dunlop to the sitting-room window. She tried to see out through
+streaming showers that darkened the panes.
+
+"Isn't that Mrs. Bogardus? Why, it is! Put on your shoes, Chauncey,
+quick! Help her in 'n' take her horse to the shed. Take an umbrella with
+you." Chauncey the younger, meekly drying his shoes by the kitchen
+fire, put them on, not stopping to lace them, and slumped down the
+porch steps, pursued by his mother's orders. She watched him a moment
+struggling with a cranky umbrella, and then turned her attention to
+herself and the room.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus made her calls in the morning, and always plainly on
+business. She had not seen the inside of Cerissa's parlor for ten years.
+This was a grievance which Cerissa referred to spasmodically, being
+seized with it when she was otherwise low in her mind.
+
+"My sakes! Can't I remember my mother telling how _her_ mother used
+to drive over and spend the afternoon, and bring her sewing and the
+baby--whichever one was the baby. They called each other Chrissy and
+Angevine, and now she don't even speak of her own children to us by
+their first names. It's 'Mrs. Bowen' and 'Mr. Paul;' just as if she was
+talking to her servants."
+
+"What's that to us? We've got a good home here for as long as we want to
+stay. She's easy to work for, if you do what she says."
+
+Chauncey respected Mrs. Bogardus's judgment and her straightforward
+business habits. Other matters he left alone. But Cerissa was ambitious
+and emotional, and she stayed indoors, doing little things and thinking
+small thoughts. She resented her commanding neighbor's casual manners.
+There was something puzzling and difficult to meet in her plainness of
+speech, which excluded the personal relation. It was like the cut and
+finish of her clothes--mysterious in their simplicity, and not to be
+imitated cheaply.
+
+When the two met, Cerissa was immediately reduced to a state of
+flimsy apology which she made up for by being particularly hot and
+self-assertive in speaking of the lady afterward.
+
+"There is the parlor, in perfect order," she fretted, as she stood
+waiting to open the front door; "but of course she wouldn't let me take
+her in there--that would be too much like visiting."
+
+The next moment she had corrected her facial expression, and was
+offering smiling condolences to Mrs. Bogardus on the state of her
+attire.
+
+"It is only my jacket. You might put that somewhere to dry," said the
+lady curtly. Raindrops sparkled on the wave of thick iron-gray hair that
+lifted itself, with a slight turn to one side, from her square low brow.
+Her eyes shone dark against the fresh wind color in her cheeks. She had
+the straight, hard, ophidian line concealing the eyelid, which gives
+such a peculiar strength to the direct gaze of a pair of dark eyes. If
+one suspects the least touch of tenderness, possibly of pain, behind
+that iron fold, it lends a fascination equal to the strength. There was
+some excitement in Mrs. Bogardus's manner, but Cerissa did not know her
+well enough to perceive it. She merely thought her looking handsomer,
+and, if possible, more formidable than usual.
+
+She sat by the fire, folding her skirts across her knees, and showing
+the edges of the most discouragingly beautiful petticoats,--a taste
+perhaps inherited from her wide-hipped Dutch progenitresses. Mrs.
+Bogardus reveled in costly petticoats, and had an unnecessary number of
+them.
+
+"How nice it is in here!" she said, looking about her. Cerissa, with the
+usual apologies, had taken her into the kitchen to dry her skirts.
+There was a slight taint of steaming shoe leather, left by Chauncey when
+driven forth. Otherwise the kitchen was perfection,--the family room
+of an old Dutch farmhouse, built when stone and hardwood lumber were
+cheap,--thick walls; deep, low window-seats; beams showing on the
+ceiling; a modern cooking-stove, where Emily Bogardus could remember
+the wrought brass andirons and iron backlog, for this room had been her
+father's dining-room. The brick tiled hearth remained, and the color of
+those century and a half old bricks made a pitiful thing of Cerissa's
+new oil-cloth. The woodwork had been painted--by Mrs. Bogardus's orders,
+and much to Cerissa's disgust--a dark kitchen green,--not that she liked
+the color herself, but it was the artistic demand of the moment,--and
+the place was filled with a green golden light from the cherry-trees
+close to the window, which a break in the clouds had suddenly illumined.
+
+"You keep it beautifully," said Mrs. Bogardus, her eyes shedding
+compliments as she looked around. "I should not dare go in my own
+kitchen at this time of day. There are no women nowadays who know how to
+work in the way ladies used to work. If I could have such a housekeeper
+as you, Cerissa."
+
+Cerissa flushed and bridled. "What would Chauncey do!"
+
+"I don't expect you to be my housekeeper," Mrs. Bogardus smiled. "But I
+envy Chauncey."
+
+"She has come to ask a favor," thought Cerissa. "I never knew her
+so pleasant, for nothing. She wants me to do up her fruit, I guess."
+Cerissa was mistaken. Mrs. Bogardus simply was happy--or almost
+happy--and deeply stirred over a piece of news which had come to her in
+that morning's mail.
+
+"I have telephoned Bradley not to send his men over on Monday. My son is
+bringing his wife home. They may be here all summer. The place belongs
+to them now. Did Chauncey tell you? Mr. Paul writes that he has some
+building plans of his own, and he wishes everything left as it is for
+the present, especially this house. He wants his wife to see it first
+just as it is."
+
+"Well, to be sure! They've been traveling a long time, haven't they? And
+how is his health now?"
+
+"Oh, he is very well indeed. You will be glad not to have the trouble of
+those carpenters, Cerissa? Pulling down old houses is dirty work."
+
+"Oh, dear! I wouldn't mind the dirt. Anything to get rid of that old
+rat's nest on top of the kitchen chamber. I hate to have such out of the
+way places on my mind. I can't get around to do every single thing,
+and it's years--years, Mrs. Bogardus, since I could get a woman to do a
+half-day's cleaning up there in broad daylight!"
+
+Mrs. Bogardus stared. What was the woman talking about!
+
+"I call it a regular eyesore on the looks of the house besides. And it
+keeps all the old stories alive."
+
+"What stories?"
+
+"Why, of course your father wasn't out of his head--we all know
+that--when he built that upstairs room and slep' there and locked
+himself in every night of his life. It was only on one point he was a
+little warped: the fear of bein' robbed. A natural fear, too,--an old
+man over eighty livin' in such a lonesome place and known to be well
+off. But--you'll excuse my repeating the talk--but the story goes now
+that he re'ly went insane and was confined up there all the last years
+of his life. And that's why the windows have got bars acrost them.
+Everybody notices it, and they ask questions. It's real embarrassin',
+for of course I don't want to discuss the family."
+
+"Who asks questions?" Mrs. Bogardus's eyes were hard to meet when her
+voice took that tone.
+
+"Why, the city folks out driving. They often drive in the big gate and
+make the circle through the grounds, and they're always struck when they
+see that tower bedroom with windows like a prison. They say, 'What's the
+story about that room, up there?'"
+
+"When people ask you questions about the house, you can say you did
+not live here in the owner's time and you don't know. That's perfectly
+simple, isn't it?"
+
+"But I do know! Everybody knows," said Cerissa hotly. "It was the talk
+of the whole neighborhood when that room was put up; and I remember how
+scared I used to be when mother sent me over here of an errand."
+
+Mrs. Bogardus rose and shook out her skirts. "Will Chauncey bring my
+horse when it stops raining? By the way, did you get the furniture down
+that was in that room, Cerissa?--the old secretary? I am going to have
+it put in order for Mr. Paul's room. Old furniture is the fashion now,
+you know."
+
+Cerissa caught her breath nervously. "Mrs. Bogardus--I couldn't do a
+thing about it! I wanted Chauncey to tell you. All last week I tried
+to get a woman, or a man, to come and help me clear out that place,
+but just as soon as they find out what's wanted--'You'll have to get
+somebody else for that job,' they say."
+
+"What is the matter with them?"
+
+"It's the room, Mrs. Bogardus; if I was you--I'm doing now just as I'd
+be done by--I would not take Mrs. Paul Bogardus up into that room--not
+even in broad daylight; not if it was my son's wife, in the third month
+of her being a wife."
+
+"Well, upon my word!" said Mrs. Bogardus, smiling coldly. "Do you mean
+to say these women are afraid to go up there?"
+
+"It was old Mary Hornbeck who started the talk. She got what she called
+her 'warning' up there. And the fact is, she was a corpse within six
+months from that day. Chauncey and me, we used to hear noises, but old
+houses are full of noises. We never thought much about it; only, I must
+say I never had any use for that part of the house. Chauncey keeps his
+seeds and tools in the lower room, and some of the winter vegetables,
+and we store the parlor stove in there in summer."
+
+"Well, about this 'warning'?" Mrs. Bogardus interrupted.
+
+"Yes! It was three years ago in May, and I remember it was some such a
+day as this--showery and broken overhead, and Mary disappointed me; but
+she came about noon, and said she'd put in half a day anyhow. She got
+her pail and house-cloths; but she wasn't gone not half an hour when
+down she come white as a sheet, and her mouth as dry as chalk. She set
+down all of a shake, and I give her a drink of tea, and she said: 'I
+wouldn't go up there again, not for a thousand dollars.' She unlocked
+the door, she said, and stepped inside without thinkin'. Your father's
+old rocker with the green moreen cushions stood over by the east window,
+where he used to sit. She heard a creak like a heavy step on the floor,
+and that empty chair across the room, as far as from here to the window,
+begun to rock as if somebody had just rose up from them cushions. She
+watched it till it stopped. Then she took another step, and the step she
+couldn't see answered her, and the chair begun to rock again."
+
+"Was that all?"
+
+"No, ma'am; that wasn't all. I don't know if you remember an old wall
+clock with a brass ball on top and brass scrolls down the sides and a
+painted glass door in front of the pendulum with a picture of a castle
+and a lake? The paint's been wore off the glass with cleaning, so the
+pendulum shows plain. That clock has not been wound since we come to
+live here. I don't believe a hand has touched it since the night he was
+carried feet foremost out of that room. But Mary said she could count
+the strokes go tick, tick, tick! She listened till she could have
+counted fifty, for she was struck dumb, and just as plain as the clock
+before her face she could see the minute-hand and the pendulum, both of
+'em dead still. Now, how do you account for that!
+
+"I told Chauncey about it, and he said it was all foolishness. Do all I
+could he would go up there himself, that same evening. But he come down
+again after a while, and he was almost as white as Mary. 'Did you see
+anything?' I says. 'I saw what Mary said she saw,' says he, 'and I heard
+what she heard.' But no one can make Chauncey own up that he believes it
+was anything supernatural. 'There is a reason for everything,' he says.
+'The miracles and ghosts of one generation are just school-book learning
+to the next; and more of a miracle than the miracles themselves.'"
+
+"Chauncey shows his sense," Mrs. Bogardus observed.
+
+"He was real disturbed, though, I could see; and he told me particular
+not to make any talk about it. I never have opened the subject to a
+living soul. But when Mary died, within six months, folks repeated what
+she had been saying about her 'warning.' The 'death watch' she called
+it. We can't all of us control our feelings about such things, and she
+was a lonely widow woman."
+
+"Well, do you believe that ticking is going on up there now?" asked Mrs.
+Bogardus.
+
+Cerissa looked uneasy.
+
+"Is the door locked?"
+
+"I re'ly couldn't say," she confessed.
+
+"Do you mean to say that all you sensible people in this house have
+avoided that room for three years? And you don't even know if the door
+is locked?"
+
+"I--I don't use that part for anything, and cleaning is wasted on a
+place that's never used, and I can't _get_ anybody"--
+
+"I am not criticising your housekeeping. Will you go up there with me
+now, Cerissa? I want to understand about this."
+
+"What, just now, do you mean? I'm afraid I haven't got the time this
+morning, Mrs. Bogardus. Dinner's at half-past twelve. It's a quarter to
+eleven"--
+
+"Very well. You think the door is not locked?"
+
+"If it is, the key must be in the door. Oh, don't go, please, Mrs.
+Bogardus. Wait till Chauncey conies in"--
+
+"I wish you'd send Chauncey up when he does come in. Ask him to bring a
+screw-driver." Mrs. Bogardus rose and examined her jacket. It was still
+damp. She asked for a cape, or some sort of wrap, as her waist was thin,
+and the rain had chilled the morning air.
+
+For the sake of decency, Cerissa escorted her visitor across the hall
+passage into the loom-room--a loom-room in name only for upwards of
+three generations. Becky had devoted it to the rough work of the
+house, and to certain special uses, such as the care of the butchering
+products, the making of soft soap and root beer. Here the churning was
+done, by hand, with a wooden dasher, which spread a circle of white
+drops, later to become grease-spots. The floor of the loom-room was
+laid in large brick tiles, more or less loose in their sockets, with
+an occasional earthy depression marking the grave of a missing tile.
+Becky's method of cleaning was to sluice it out and scrub it with an old
+broom. The seepage of generations before her time had thus added their
+constant quota to the old well's sum of iniquity.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus had not visited this part of the old house for many years.
+After her father's death she had shrunk from its painful associations.
+Later she grew indifferent; but as she passed now into the gloomy
+place--doubly dark with the deep foliage of June on a rainy morning--she
+was afraid of her own thoughts. Henceforth she was a woman with a
+diseased consciousness. "What can't be cured must be _seared_," flashed
+over her as she set her face to the stairway.
+
+These stairs, leading up into the back attic or "kitchen chamber," being
+somewhat crowded for space, advanced two steps into the room below. As
+the stair door opened outward, and the stairs were exceedingly steep
+and dark, every child of the house, in turn, had suffered a bad fall in
+consequence; but the arrangement remained in all its natural depravity,
+for "children must learn."
+
+Little Emmy of the old days had loved to sit upon these steps, a trifle
+raised above the kitchen traffic, yet cognizant of all that was going
+on, and ready to descend promptly if she smelled fresh crullers frying,
+or baked sweet apples steaming hot from the oven. If Becky's foot were
+heard upon the stairs above, she would jump quick enough; but if the
+step had a clumping, boyish precipitancy, she sat still and laughed,
+and planted her back against the door. Often she had teased Adam in this
+way, keeping him prisoner from his duties, helpless in his good nature
+either to scold her or push her off. But once he circumvented her,
+slipping off his shoes and creeping up the stairs again, and making his
+escape by the roof and the boughs of the old maple. Then it was Emmy who
+was teased, who sat a foolish half hour on the stairs alone and missed a
+beautiful ride to the wood lot; but she would not speak to Adam for two
+days afterward.
+
+Becky's had been the larger of the two bedrooms in the attic, Adam's the
+smaller--tucked low under the eaves, and entered by crawling around the
+big chimney that came bulking up to the light like a great tree caught
+between house walls. The stairs hugged the chimney and made use of
+its support. Adam would warm his hands upon it coming down on bitter
+mornings. From force of habit, Emily Bogardus laid her smooth white hand
+upon the clammy bricks. No tombstone could be colder than that heart of
+house warmth now.
+
+The roof of the kitchen chamber had been raised a story higher, and the
+chimney as it went up contracted to quite a modern size. This elevation
+gave room for the incongruous tower bedroom that had hurt the symmetry
+of the old house, spoiled its noble sweep of roof, and given rise to so
+much unpleasant conjecture as to its use. It was this excrescence, the
+record of those last unloved and unloving years of her father's life,
+which Mrs. Bogardus would have removed, but was prevented by her son.
+
+"You go back now, Cerissa," she said to the panting woman behind her. "I
+see the key is in the lock. You may send Chauncey after a while; there
+is no hurry."
+
+"Oh!" gasped Cerissa. "Do you see _that!_"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I thought there was something--something behind that slit."
+
+"There isn't. Step this way. There, can't you see the light?"
+
+Mrs. Bogardus grasped Cerissa by the shoulders and held her firmly in
+front of a narrow loophole that pierced the partition close beside
+the door. Light from the room within showed plainly; but it gave an
+unpleasantly human expression to the entrance, like a furtive eye on the
+watch.
+
+"He would always be there," Cerissa whispered.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Your father. If anybody wanted to see him after he shut himself in
+there for the night, they had to stand to be questioned through that
+wall-slit before he opened the door. Yes, ma'am! He was on the watch in
+there the whole time like a thing in a trap."
+
+"Are you afraid to go back alone?" Mrs. Bogardus spoke with chilling
+irony.
+
+Cerissa backed away in silence, her heart thumping. "She's putting it
+on," she said to herself. "I never see her turn so pale. Don't tell _me_
+she ain't afraid!"
+
+There was a hanging shelf against the chimney on which a bundle of dry
+herbs had been left to turn into dust. Old Becky might have put them
+there the autumn before she died; or some successor of hers in the years
+that were blank to the daughter of the house. As she pushed open the
+door a sighing draught swept past her and seemed to draw her inward.
+It shook the sere bundle. Its skeleton leaves, dissolving into motes,
+flickered an instant athwart the light. They sifted down like ashes on
+the woman's dark head as she passed in. Her color had faded, but not
+through fear of ghost clocks. It was the searing process she had to
+face. And any room where she sat alone with certain memories of her
+youth was to her a torture chamber.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"She's been up there an awful long time. I wouldn't wonder if she's
+fainted away."
+
+"What would she faint at? I guess it's pretty cold, though. Give me some
+more tea; put plenty of milk so I can drink it quick."
+
+Chauncey's matter of fact tone always comforted Cerissa when she was
+nervous. She did not mind that he jeered or that his words were often
+rude; no man of her acquaintance could say things nicely to women, or
+ever tried. A certain amount of roughness passed for household wit.
+Chauncey put the screw-driver in his pocket, his wife and son watching
+him with respectful anxiety. He thought rather well of his own courage
+privately. But the familiar details of the loom-room cheered him on his
+way, the homely tools of his every-day work were like friendly faces
+nodding at him. He knocked loudly on the door above, and was answered by
+Mrs. Bogardus in her natural voice.
+
+"Bosh--every bit of it bosh!" he repeated courageously.
+
+She was seated by the window in the chair with the green cushions. Her
+face was turned towards the view outside. "What a pity those cherries
+were not picked before the rain," she observed. "The fruit is bursting
+ripe; I'm afraid you'll lose the crop."
+
+Chauncey moved forward awkwardly without answering.
+
+"Stop there one moment, will you?" Mrs. Bogardus rose and demonstrated.
+"You notice those two boards are loose. Now, I put this chair
+here,"--she laid her hand on the back to still its motion. "Step this
+way. You see? The chair rocks of itself. So would any chair with a
+spring board under it. That accounts for _that_, I think. Now come over
+here." Chauncey placed himself as she directed in front of the high
+mantel with the clock above it. She stood at his side and they listened
+in silence to that sound which Mary Hornbeck, deceased, had deemed a
+spiritual warning.
+
+"Would you call that a 'ticking'? Is that like any sound an insect could
+make?" the mistress asked.
+
+"I should call it more like a 'ting,'" said Chauncey. "It comes kind o'
+muffled like through the chimbly--a person might be mistaken if they was
+upset in their nerves considerable."
+
+"What old people call the 'death-watch' is supposed to be an insect that
+lives in the walls of old houses, isn't it? and gives warning with a
+ticking sound when somebody is going to be called away? Now to me that
+sounds like a soft blow struck regularly on a piece of hollow iron--say
+the end of a stove-pipe sticking in the chimney. When I first came up
+here, there was only a steady murmur of wind and rain. Then the clouds
+thinned and the sun came out and drops began to fall--distinctly. Your
+wife says the ticking was heard on a day like this, broken and showery.
+Now, if you will unscrew that clock, I think you will find there's a
+stove-pipe hole behind it; and a piece of pipe shoved into the chimney
+just far enough to catch the drops as they gather and fall."
+
+Chauncey went to work. He sweated in the airless room. The powerful
+screws blunted the lips of his tool but would not start.
+
+"I guess I'll have to give it up for to-day. The screws are rusted in
+solid. Want I should pry her out of the woodwork?"
+
+"No, don't do that," said Mrs. Bogardus. "Why should we spoil the panel?
+This seems a very comfortable room. My son is right. It would be foolish
+to tear it down. Such a place as this might be very useful if you people
+would get over your notions about it."
+
+"I never had no notions," Chauncey asserted. "When the women git talkin'
+they like to make out a good story, and whichever one sees the most and
+hears the most makes the biggest sensation."
+
+Mrs. Bogardus waited till he had finished without appearing to have
+heard what he was saying.
+
+"Where is the key to this door?" she laid her hand over a knob to the
+right of the stairs.
+
+"I guess if there is one it's on the other side. Yes, it's in the
+key-hole." Chauncey turned the knob and shoved and lifted. The door
+yielded to his full strength, and he allowed Mrs. Bogardus to precede
+him. She stepped into a room hardly bigger than a closet with one
+window, barred like those in the outer room. It was fitted up with
+toilet conveniences according to the best advices of its day. Over all
+the neat personal arrangements there was the slur of neglect, a sad
+squalor which even a king's palace wears with time.
+
+Chauncey tested the plumbing with a noise that was plainly offensive
+to his companion, but she bore with it--also with his reminiscences
+gathered from neighborhood gossip. "He wa'n't fond of spending money,
+but he didn't spare it here: this was his ship cabin when he started
+on his last voyage. It looked funny--a man with all his land and houses
+cooped up in a place like this; but he wanted to be independent of the
+women. He hated to have 'em fussin' around him. He had a woman to come
+and cook up stuff for him to help himself to; but she wouldn't stay here
+overnight, nor he wouldn't let her. As for a man in the house,--most
+men were thieves, he thought, or waiting their chance to be. It was real
+pitiful the way he made his end."
+
+"Open that window and shut the door when you come out," said Mrs.
+Bogardus. "I will send some one to help you down with that secretary.
+Cerissa knows about it. It is to be sent up on the Hill."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+THE CASE STRIKES IN
+
+Christine's marriage took place while Paul and Moya were lingering in
+the Bruneau, for Paul's health ostensibly. Banks and Horace had been
+left to the smiling irony of justice. They never had a straight chance
+to define their conduct in the woods; for no one accused them. No
+awkward questions were asked in the city drawing-rooms or at the clubs.
+For a tough half hour or so at Fort Lemhi they had realized how they
+stood in the eyes of those unbiased military judges. The shock had a
+bracing effect for a time. Both boys were said to be much improved
+by their Western trip and by the hardships of that frightful homeward
+march.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus had matched her gift of Stone Ridge to her son, which
+was a gift of sentiment, with one of more substantial value to her
+daughter,--the income from certain securities settled upon her and her
+heirs. Banks was carefully unprovided for. The big house in town was
+full of ghosts--the ghosts that haunt such homes, made desolate by a
+breach of hearts. The city itself was crowded with opportunities for
+giving and receiving pain between mother and daughter. Christine had
+developed all the latent hardness of her mother's race with a sickly
+frivolity of her own. She made a great show of faith in her marriage
+venture. She boomed it in her occasional letters, which were full of
+scarce concealed bravado as graceful as snapping her fingers in her
+mother's face.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus leased her house in town, and retired before the ghosts,
+but not escaping them; Stone Ridge must be put in order for its new
+master and mistress, and Stone Ridge had its own ghosts. She informed
+her absentees that, before their return, she should have left for
+Southern California to look after some investments which she had
+neglected there of late. It was then she spoke of her plan for restoring
+the old house by pulling down that addition which disfigured it; and
+Paul had objected to this erasure. It would take from the house's
+veracity, he said. The words carried their unintentional sting.
+
+But it was Moya's six lines at the bottom of his page that changed
+and softened everything. Moya--always blessed when she took the
+initiative--contrived, as swiftly as she could set them down, to say the
+very words that made the home-coming a coming home indeed.
+
+"Will Madam Bogardus be pleased to keep her place as the head of her
+son's house?" she wrote. "This foolish person he has married wants to be
+anything rather than the mistress of Stone Ridge. She wants to be always
+out of doors, and she needs to be. Oh, must you go away now--now when we
+need you so much? It cannot be said here on paper how much _I_ need you!
+Am I not your motherless daughter? Please be there when we come, and
+please stay there!"
+
+"For a little while then," said the lonely woman, smiling at the image
+of that sweet, foolish person in her thoughts. "For a little while, till
+she learns her mistake." Such mistakes are the cornerstone of family
+friendship.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was an uneventful summer on the Hill, but one of rather wearing
+intensity in the inner relations of the household, one with another; for
+nothing could be quite natural with a pit of concealment to be avoided
+by all, and an air of unconsciousness to be carefully preserved in
+avoiding it. Moya's success in this way was so remarkable that Paul half
+hated it. How was it possible for her to speak to his mother so lightly;
+never the least apparent premeditation or fear of tripping; how look at
+her with such sweet surface looks that never questioned or saw beneath?
+He could not meet his mother's eyes at all when they were alone
+together, or endure a silence in her company.
+
+Both women were of the type called elemental. They understood each other
+without knowing why. Moya felt the desperate truth contained in the
+mother's falsehood, and broke forth into passionate defense of her as
+against her husband's silence.
+
+He answered her one day by looking up a little green book of fairy tales
+and reading aloud this fragment of "The Golden Key."
+
+"'I never tell lies, even in fun.' (The mysterious Grandmother speaks.)
+
+"'How good of you!' (says the Child in the Wood.)
+
+"'I couldn't if I tried. It would come true if I said it, and then I
+should be punished enough.'"
+
+Moya's eyes narrowed reflectively.
+
+"How constantly you are thinking of this! I think of it only when I
+am with you. As if a woman like your mother, who has done _one thing_,
+should be all that thing, and nothing more to us, her children!"
+
+Moya was giving herself up, almost immorally, Paul sometimes thought,
+to the fascination Mrs. Bogardus's personality had for her. In a keenly
+susceptible state herself, at that time, there was something calming and
+strengthening in the older woman's perfected beauty, her physical poise,
+and the fitness of everything she did and said and wore to the given
+occasion. As a dark woman she was particularly striking in summer
+clothing. Her white effects were tremendous. She did not pretend to
+study these matters herself, but in years of experience, with money to
+spend, she had learned well in whom to confide. When women are shut up
+together in country houses for the summer, they can irritate each other
+in the most foolish ways. Mrs. Bogardus never got upon your nerves.
+
+But, for Paul, there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in
+her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the
+awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every
+cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. "She is
+a queen of mothers!" she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful
+to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. "I love her
+perfect love for you--for me, even! She is above all jealousy. She
+doesn't even ask to be understood."
+
+Paul was silent.
+
+"And oh, she knows, she knows! She has been through it all--in such
+despair and misery--all that is before me, with everything in the world
+to make it easy and all the beautiful care she gives me. She is the
+supreme mother. And I never had a mother to speak to before. Don't,
+don't, please, keep putting that dreadful thing between us now!"
+
+So Paul took the dreadful thing away with him and was alone with it, and
+knew that his mother saw it in his eyes when their eyes met and avoided.
+When, after a brief household absence, he would see her again he
+wondered, "Has she been alone with it? Has it passed into another
+phase?"--as of an incurable disease that must take its time and course.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus did not spare her conscience in social ways all this time.
+It was a part of her life to remember that she had neighbors--certain
+neighbors. She included Paul without particularly consulting him
+whenever it was proper for him to support her in her introduction of his
+wife to the country-house folk, many of whom they knew in town.
+
+All his mother's friends liked Paul and supposed him to be very clever,
+but they had never taken him seriously. "Now, at last," they said, "he
+has done something like other people. He is coming out." Experienced
+matrons were pleased to flatter him on his choice of a bride. The
+daughters studied Moya, and decided that she was "different," but "all
+right." She had a careless distinction of her own. Some of her "things"
+were surprisingly lovely--probably heirlooms; and army women are so
+clever about clothes.
+
+Would they spend the winter in town?
+
+Paul replied absently: they had not decided. Probably they would not go
+down till after the holidays.
+
+What an attractive plan? What an ideal family Christmas they would have
+all together in the country! Christine had not been up all summer,
+had she? Here Moya came to her husband's relief, through a wife's dual
+consciousness in company, and covered his want of spirits with a flood
+of foolish chatter.
+
+The smiling way in which women the most sincere can posture and prance
+on the brink of dissimulation was particularly sickening to Paul at this
+time. Why need they put themselves in situations where it was required?
+The situations were of his mother's creation. He imagined she must
+suffer, but had little sympathy with that side of her martyrdom. Moya
+seemed a trifle feverish in her acceptance of these affairs of which
+she was naturally the life and centre. A day of entertaining often faded
+into an evening of subtle sadness.
+
+Paul would take her out into the moonlight of that deep inland country.
+The trees were dark with leaves and brooded close above them; old
+water-fences and milldams cast inky shadows on the still, shallow ponds
+clasped in wooded hills. No region could have offered a more striking
+contrast to the empty plains. Moya felt shut in with old histories. The
+very ground was but moulding sand in which generations of human lives
+had been poured, and the sand swept over to be reshaped for them.
+
+"We are not living our own life yet," Paul would say; not adding, "We
+are protecting her." Here was the beginning of punishment helplessly
+meted out to this proud woman whose sole desire was towards her
+children--to give, and not to receive.
+
+"But this is our Garden?" Moya would muse. "We are as nearly two alone
+as any two could be."
+
+"If you include the Snake. We can't leave out the Snake, you know."
+
+"Snake or Seraph--I don't believe I know the difference. Paul, I cannot
+have you thinking things."
+
+"I?--what do I think?"
+
+"You are thinking it is bad for me to be so much with her. You, as a man
+and a husband, resent what she, as a woman and a wife, has dared to do.
+And I, as another woman and wife, I say she could do nothing else and be
+true. For, don't you see? She never loved him. The wifehood in her has
+never been reached. She was a girl, then a mother, then a widow. How
+could she"--
+
+"Do you think he would have claimed her as his wife? Oh, you do not know
+him;--she has never known him. If we could be brave and face our duty
+to the whole truth, and leave the rest to those sequences, never dreamed
+of, that wait upon great acts. Such surprises come straight from God.
+Now we can never know how he would have risen to meet a nobler choice
+in her. He had not far to rise! Well, we have our share of blessings,
+including piazza teas; but as a family we have missed one of the
+greatest spiritual opportunities,--such as come but once in a lifetime."
+
+"Ah, if she was not ready for it, it was not _her_ opportunity. God is
+very patient with us, I believe."
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+RESTIVENESS
+
+Mothers and sons are rarely very personal in their intimacy after
+the son has taken to himself a wife. Apart from certain moments
+not appropriate to piazza teas, Paul and his mother were perhaps as
+comfortable together as the relation averages. It was much that they
+never talked emotionally. Private judgments which we have refrained from
+putting into words may die unfruitful and many a bitter crop be spared.
+
+"This is Paul's apology for being happy in spite of himself--and of
+us!" Moya teased, as she admired the beautifully drawn plans for the
+quarrymen's club-house.
+
+"It doesn't need any apology; it's a very good thing," said Mrs.
+Bogardus, ignoring double meanings. No caps that were flying around ever
+fitted her head. Paul's dreams and his mother's practical experience
+had met once more on a common ground of philanthropy. This time it was
+a workingmen's club in which the interests of social and mental
+improvement were conjoined with facilities for outdoor sport. Up to date
+philanthropy is an expensive toy. Paul, though now a landowner, was far
+from rich in his own right. His mother financed this as she had many
+another scheme for him. She was more openhanded than heretofore, but all
+was done with that ennuyed air which she ever wore as of an older
+child who has outgrown the game. It was in Moya and Moya's prospective
+maternity that her pride reinstated itself. Her own history and
+generation she trod underfoot. Mistakes, humiliations, whichever way she
+turned. Paul had never satisfied her entirely in anything he did until
+he chose this girl for the mother of his children. Now their house might
+come to something. Moya moved before her eyes crowned in the light of
+the future. And that this noble and innocent girl, with her perfect
+intuitions, should turn to _her_ now with such impetuous affection was
+perhaps the sweetest pain the blighted woman had ever known. She lay
+awake many a night thinking mute blessings on the mother and the child
+to be. Yet she resisted that generous initiative so dear to herself,
+aware with a subtle agony of the pain it gave her son.
+
+One day she said to Paul (they were driving home together through a
+bit of woodland, the horses stepping softly on the mould of fallen
+leaves)--"I don't expect you to account for every dollar of mine you
+spend in helping those who can be helped that way. You have a free
+hand."
+
+"I understand," said Paul. "I have used your money freely--for a purpose
+that I never have accounted for."
+
+"Don't you need more?"
+
+"No; there is no need now."
+
+"Why is there not?"
+
+Paul was silent. "I cannot go into particulars. It is a long story."
+
+"Does the purpose still exist?" his mother asked sharply.
+
+"It does; but not as a claim--for that sort of help."
+
+"Let me know if such a claim should ever return."
+
+"I will, mother," said Paul.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There came a day when mother and son reaped the reward of their mutual
+forbearance. There was a night and a day when Paul became a boy again in
+his mother's hands, and she took the place that was hers in Nature. She
+was the priestess acquainted with mysteries. He followed her, and hung
+upon her words. The expression of her face meant life and death to him.
+The dreadful consciousness passed out of his eyes; tears washed it out
+as he rose from his knees by Moya's bed, and his mother kissed him, and
+laid his son in his arms.
+
+The following summer saw the club-house and all its affiliations in
+working order. The beneficiaries took to it most kindly, but were
+disposed to manage it in their own way: not in all respects the way of
+the founder's intention.
+
+"To make a gift complete, you must keep yourself out of it," Mrs.
+Bogardus advised. "You have done your part; now let them have it and run
+it themselves."
+
+Paul was not hungry for leadership, but he had hoped that his interest
+in the men's amusements would bring him closer to them and equalize the
+difference between the Hill and the quarry.
+
+"You have never worked with them; how can you expect to play with them?"
+was another of his mother's cool aphorisms. Alas! Paul, the son of the
+poor man, had no work, and hence no play.
+
+It was time to be making winter plans again. Mrs. Bogardus knew that
+her son's young family was now complete without her presence. Moya had
+gained confidence in the care of her child; she no longer brought every
+new symptom to the grandmother. Yet Mrs. Bogardus put off discussing the
+change, dreading to expose her own isolation, a point on which she was
+as sensitive as if it were a crime. Paul was never entirely frank with
+her: she knew he would not be frank in this. They never expressed their
+wills or their won'ts to each other with the careless rudeness of a
+sound family faith, and always she felt the burden of his unrelenting
+pity. She began to take long drives alone, coming in late and excusing
+herself for dinner. At such times she would send for her grandson in
+his nurse's arms to bid him good-night. The mother would put off her
+own good-night, not to intrude at these sessions. One evening, going up
+later to kiss her little son, she found his crib empty, the nurse gone
+to her dinner. He was fast asleep in his grandmother's arms, where she
+had held him for an hour in front of the open fire in her bedroom. She
+looked up guiltily. "He was so comfortable! And his crib is cold. Will
+he take cold when Ellen puts him back?"
+
+"I am sure he won't," Moya whispered, gathering up the rosy sleeper. But
+she was disturbed by the breach of bedtime rules.
+
+In the drawing-room a few nights later she said energetically to Paul.
+
+"One might as well be dead as to live with a grudge."
+
+"A good grudge?"
+
+"There are no good grudges."
+
+"There are some honest ones--honestly come by."
+
+"I don't care how they are come by. Grudges 'is p'ison.'" She laughed,
+but her cheeks were hot.
+
+"Do you know that Christine has been at death's door? Your mother heard
+of it--through Mrs. Bowen! Was that why you didn't show me her letter?"
+
+"It was not in my letter from Mrs. Bowen."
+
+"I think she has known it some time," said Moya, "and kept it to
+herself."
+
+"Mrs. Bowen!"
+
+"Your mother. Isn't it terrible? Think how Chrissy must have needed her.
+They need each other so! Christine was her constant thought. How can
+all that change in one year! But she cannot go to Banks Bowen's house
+without an invitation. We must go to New York and make her come with
+us--we must open the way."
+
+"Yes," said Paul, "I have seen it was coming. In the end we always do
+the thing we have forsworn."
+
+"_I_ was the one. I take it back. Your work is there. I know it calls
+you. Was not Mrs. Bowen's letter an appeal?"
+
+Paul was silent.
+
+"She must think you a deserter. And there is bigger work for you, too!
+Here is a great political fight on, and my husband is not in it. Every
+man must slay his dragon. There is a whole city of dragons!"
+
+"Yes," smiled Paul; "I see. You want me to put my legs under the same
+cloth with Banks and ask him about his golf score."
+
+"If you want to fight him, have it out on public grounds; fight him in
+politics."
+
+"We are on the same side!"
+
+Moya laughed, but she looked a little dashed.
+
+"Banks comes of gentlemen. He inherited his opinions," said Paul.
+
+"He may have inherited a few other things, if we could have patience
+with him."
+
+"Are you sorry for Banks?"
+
+"I shall be sorry for him--when he meets you. He has been spared that
+too long."
+
+"Dispenser of destinies, I bow as I always do!"
+
+"You will speak to your mother at once?"
+
+"I will."
+
+"And do it beautifully?"
+
+"As well as I know how."
+
+"Ah, you have had such practice! How good it would be if we could only
+dare to quarrel in this family! You and I--of course!"
+
+"_We_ quarrel, of course!" laughed Paul.
+
+"I _love_ to quarrel with you!"
+
+"You do it beautifully. You have had such practice!"
+
+"I am so happy! It is clear to me now that we shall live down this
+misery. Christine will love to see me again; I know she will. A wife is
+a very different thing from a girl--a haughty girl!"
+
+"I should think the wife of Banks Bowen might be."
+
+"And we'll part with our ancient and honorable grudge! We are getting
+too big for it. _We_ are parents!"
+
+Paul made the proposition to his mother and she agreed to it in every
+particular save the one. She would remain at Stone Ridge. It was
+impossible to move her. Moya was in despair. She had cultivated an
+overweening conscience in her relations with Mrs. Bogardus. It turned
+upon her now and showed her the true state of her own mind at the
+thought of being Two once more and alone with the child God had given
+them. Mrs. Bogardus appeared to see nothing but her own interests in
+the matter. She had made up her mind. And in spite of the conscientious
+scruples on all sides, the hedging and pleading and explaining, all were
+happier in the end for her decision. She herself was softened by it, and
+she yielded one point in return. Paul had steadily opposed his mother's
+plan of housekeeping, alone with one maid and a man who slept at the
+stables. The Dunlops, as it happened, were childless for the winter,
+young Chauncey attending a "commercial college" in a neighboring town.
+After many interviews and a good deal of self-importance on Cerissa's
+part, the pair were persuaded to close the old house and occupy the
+servants' wing on the Hill, as a distinct family, yet at hand in case
+of need. It was late autumn before all these arrangements could be made.
+Paul and Moya, leaving the young scion aged nineteen months in the care
+of his nurse and his grandmother, went down the river to open the New
+York house.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+INDIAN SUMMER
+
+The upper fields of Stone Ridge, so the farmers said, were infested that
+autumn by a shy and solitary vagrant, who never could be met with face
+to face, but numbers of times had been seen across the width of a lot,
+climbing the bars, or closing a gate, or vanishing up some crooked lane
+that quickly shut him from view.
+
+"I would look after that old chap if I was you, Chauncey. He'll be
+smoking in your hay barns, and burn you out some o' these cold nights."
+
+Chauncey took these neighborly warnings with good-humored indifference.
+"I haven't seen no signs of his doin' any harm," he said. "Anybody's at
+liberty to walk in the fields if there ain't a 'No Trespass' posted.
+I rather guess he makes his bed among the corn stouks. I see prints of
+someone's feet, goin' and comin'."
+
+Mrs. Bogardus was more herself in those days than she had been at
+any time since the great North-western wilderness sent her its second
+message of fear. Old memories were losing their sting. She could bear to
+review her decision with a certain shrinking hardihood. Had the choice
+been given her to repeat, her action had been the same. In so far as she
+had perjured herself for the sake of peace in the family, she owned the
+sacrifice was vain; but her own personality was the true reason for what
+she had done. She was free in her unimpeachable widowhood--a mother who
+had never been at heart a wife. She feared no ghosts this keen autumn
+weather, at the summit of her conscious powers. Her dark eye unsheathed
+its glance of authority. It was an eye that went everywhere, and
+everywhere was met with signs that praised its oversight. Here was
+an out-worn inheritance which one woman, in less than a third of her
+lifetime, had developed into a competence for her son. He could afford
+to dream dreams of beneficence with his mother to make them good. Yes,
+he needed her still. His child was in her keeping; and, though brief the
+lease, that trust was no accident. It was the surest proof he could have
+given her of his vital allegiance. In the step which Paul and Moya were
+taking, she saw the first promise of that wisdom she had despaired of in
+her son. In the course of years he would understand her. And Christine?
+She rested bitterly secure in her daughter's inevitable physical need
+of her. Christine was a born parasite. She had no true pride; she was
+capable merely of pique which would wear itself out and pass into other
+forms of selfishness.
+
+This woman had been governed all her life by a habit of decision, and
+a strong personality rooted in the powers of nature. Therefore she
+was seldom mistaken in her conclusions when they dealt with material
+results. Occasionally she left out the spirit; but the spirit leaves out
+no one.
+
+Her long dark skirts were sweeping the autumn grass at sunset as she
+paced back and forth under the red-gold tents of the maples. It was a
+row of young trees she had planted to grace a certain turf walk at the
+top of the low wall that divided, by a drop of a few feet, the west
+lawn at Stone Ridge from the meadow where the beautiful Alderneys were
+pastured. The maples turned purple as the light faded out of their tops
+and struck flat across the meadow, making the grass vivid as in spring.
+Two spots of color moved across it slowly--a young woman capped and
+aproned, urging along a little trotting child. Down the path of their
+united shadows they came, and the shadows had reached already the
+dividing wall. The waiting smile was sweet upon the grandmother's
+features; her face was transformed like the meadow into a memory of
+spring. The child saw her, and waved to her with something scarlet which
+he held in his free hand. She admired the stride of his brown legs above
+their crumpled socks, the imperishable look of health on his broad,
+sweet glowing face. She lifted him high in her embrace and bore him up
+the hill, his dusty shoes dangling against her silk front breadths,
+his knees pressed tight against her waist, and over her shoulder he
+flourished the scarlet cardinal flower.
+
+"Where have you been with him so long?" she asked the nursemaid.
+
+"Only up in the lane, as far as the three gates, ma'am."
+
+"Then where did he get this flower?"
+
+"Oh," said the pretty Irish girl, half scared by her tone, and tempted
+to prevaricate. "Why--he must have picked it, I guess."
+
+"Not in the lane. It's a swamp-flower. It doesn't grow anywhere within
+four miles of the lane!"
+
+"It must have been the old man gev it him then," said the maid. "Is it
+unhealthy, ma'am? I tried to get it from him, but he screamed and fussed
+so."
+
+"What old man do you mean?"
+
+"Why, him that was passin' up the lane. I didn't see him till he was
+clean by--and Middy had the flower. I don't know where in the world he
+could have got it, else, for we wasn't one step out of the lane, was we,
+Middy! That's the very truth."
+
+"But where were you when strangers were giving him flowers?"
+
+"Why, sure, ma'am, I was only just a step away be the fence, having a
+word with one o' the boys. I was lookin' in the field, speakin' to him
+and he was lookin' at me with me back to the lane. 'There's the old man
+again,' he says, shiftin' his eye. I turned me round and there, so he
+was, but he was by and walkin' on up the lane. And Middy had the flower.
+He wouldn't be parted from it and squeezed it so tight I thought the
+juice might be bad on his hands, and he promised he'd not put it to his
+mouth. I kep' my eye on him. Ah, the nasty, na-asty flower! Give it here
+to Katy till I throw it!"
+
+"There's no harm in the flower. But there is harm in strangers making up
+to him when your back is turned. Don't you know the dreadful things we
+read in the papers?"
+
+Mrs. Bogardus said no more. It was Middy's supper-time. But later she
+questioned Katy particularly concerning this old man who was spoken of
+quite as if his appearance were taken for granted in the heart of the
+farm. Katy recalled one other day when she had seen him asleep as she
+thought in a corner of the fence by the big chestnut tree when she and
+the boy were nutting. They had moved away to the other side of the tree,
+but while she was busy hunting for nuts Middy had strayed off a bit and
+foregathered with the old man, who was not asleep at all, but stood with
+his back to her pouring a handful of big fat chestnuts into the child's
+little skirt, which he held up. She called to him and the old man had
+stepped back, and the nuts were spilled. Middy had cried and made her
+pick them up, and when that was done the stranger was gone quite out of
+sight.
+
+Chauncey, too, was questioned, and testified that the old man of the
+fields was no myth. But he deprecated all this exaggerated alarm. The
+stranger was some simple-minded old work-house candidate putting off the
+evil day. In a few weeks he would have to make for shelter in one of the
+neighboring towns. Chauncey could not see what legal hold they had upon
+him even if they could catch him. He hardly came under the vagrancy law,
+since he had neither begged, nor helped himself appreciably to the means
+of subsistence.
+
+"That is just the point," Mrs. Bogardus insisted. "He has the
+means--from somewhere--to lurk around here and make friends with that
+child. There may be a gang of kidnappers behind him. He is the harmless
+looking decoy. I insist that you keep a sharp lookout, Chauncey. There
+shall be a hold upon him, law or no law, if we catch him on our ground."
+
+A cold rain set in. Paul and Moya wrote of delays in the house
+preparations, and hoped the grandmother was not growing tired of her
+charge. On the last of the rainy days, in a burst of dubious sunshine,
+came a young girl on horseback to have tea with Mrs. Bogardus. She was
+one of that lady's discoverers, so she claimed, Miss Sallie Remsen, very
+pretty and full of fantastic little affectations founded on her intense
+appreciation of the picturesque. She called Mrs. Bogardus "Madam," and
+likened her to various female personages in history more celebrated for
+strength of purpose than for the Christian virtues. Mrs. Bogardus, in
+her restful ignorance of such futilities, went no deeper into these
+allusions than their intention, which she took to be complimentary. Miss
+Sallie hugged herself with joy when the rain came down in torrents for
+a clear-up shower. Her groom was sent home with a note to inform her
+mother that Mrs. Bogardus wished to keep her overnight. All the mothers
+were flattered when Mrs. Bogardus took notice of their daughters,--even
+much grander dames than she herself could pretend to be.
+
+They had a charming little dinner by themselves to the tune of the rain
+outside, and were having their coffee by the drawing-room fire; and Miss
+Sallie was thinking by what phrase one could do justice to the massive,
+crass ugliness of that self-satisfied apartment, furnished in the
+hideous sixties, when the word was sent in that Mrs. Dunlop wished to
+speak with Mrs. Bogardus. Something of Cerissa's injured importance
+survived the transmission of the message, causing Mrs. Bogardus to smile
+to herself as she rose. Cerissa was waiting in the dining-room. She kept
+her seat as Mrs. Bogardus entered. Her eyes did not rise higher than the
+lady's dress, which she examined with a fierce intentness of comparison
+while she opened her errand.
+
+"I thought you'd like to know you've got a strange lodger down to the
+old house. I don't seem to ever get moved!" she enlarged. "I'm always
+runnin' down there after first one thing 'n' another we've forgot. This
+morning 't was my stone batter-pot. Chauncey said he thought it was
+getting cold enough for buckwheat cakes. I don't suppose you want to
+have stray tramps in there in the old house, building fires in the
+loom-room, where, if a spark got loose, it would blaze up them draughty
+stairs, and the whole house would go in a minute." Cerissa stopped to
+gain breath.
+
+"Making fires? Are you sure of that? Has any smoke been seen coming out
+of that chimney?"
+
+"Why, it's been raining so! And the trees have got so tall! But I could
+show you the shucks an' shells he's left there. I know how we left it!"
+
+"You had better speak--No; I will see Chauncey in the morning." Mrs.
+Bogardus never, if she could avoid it, gave an order through a third
+person.
+
+"Well, I thought I'd just step in. Chauncey said 't was no use
+disturbing you to-night, but he's just that way--so easy about
+everything! I thought you wouldn't want to be harboring tramps this wet
+weather when most anybody would be tempted to build a fire. I'm more
+concerned about what goes on down there now we're _out_ of the house! I
+seem to have it on my mind the whole time. A house is just like a child:
+the more you don't see it the more you worry about it."
+
+"I'm glad you have such a home feeling about the place," said Mrs.
+Bogardus, avoiding the onset of words. "Well, good-evening, Cerissa.
+Thank you for your trouble. I will see about it in the morning."
+
+Mrs. Bogardus mentioned what she had just heard to Miss Sallie, who
+remarked, with her keen sense of antithesis, what a contrast _that_
+fireside must be to _this_.
+
+"Which fireside?"
+
+"Oh, your lodger upon the cold ground,--making his little bit of a
+stolen blaze in that cavern of a chimney in the midst of the wet trees!
+What a nice thing to have an unwatched place like that where a poor
+bird of passage can creep in and make his nest, and not trouble any one.
+Think what Jean Valjeans one might shelter"--
+
+"Who?"
+
+"What 'angels unawares.'"
+
+"It will be unawares, my dear,--very much unawares,--when I shelter any
+angels of that sort."
+
+"Oh, you wouldn't turn him out, such weather as this?"
+
+"The house is not mine, in the first place," Mrs. Bogardus explained
+as to a child. "I can't entertain tramps or even angels on my son's
+premises, when he's away."
+
+"Oh, he! He would build the fires himself, and make up their beds,"
+laughed Miss Sallie. "If he were here, I believe he would start down
+there now, and stock the place with everything you've got in the house
+to eat."
+
+"I hope he'd leave us a little something for breakfast," said Mrs.
+Bogardus a trifle coldly. But she did not mention the cause of her
+uneasiness about this particular visitor. She never defended herself.
+
+Miss Sallie was delighted with her callousness to the sentimental rebuke
+which had been rather rubbed in. It was so unmodern; one got so weary
+of fashionable philanthropy, women who talked of their social sympathies
+and their principles in life. She almost hoped that Mrs. Bogardus had
+neither. Certainly she never mentioned them.
+
+"What did she say? Did she tell you what I said to her last night?"
+Cerissa questioned her husband feverishly after his interview with Mrs.
+Bogardus.
+
+"She didn't mention your name," Chauncey took some pleasure in stating.
+"If you hadn't told me yourself, I shouldn't have known you'd meddled in
+it at all."
+
+"What's she going to do about it?"
+
+"How crazy you women are! 'Cause some poor old Sooner-die-than-work
+warms his bones by a bit of fire that wouldn't scare a chimbly swaller
+out of its nest! Don't you s'pose if there'd been any fire there to
+speak of, I'd 'a' seen it? What am I here for? Now I've got to drop
+everything, and git a padlock on that door, and lock it up every night,
+and search the whole place from top to bottom for fear there's some one
+in there hidin' in a rathole!"
+
+"Chauncey! If you've got to do that I don't want you to go in there
+alone. You take one of the men with you; and you better have a pistol or
+one of the dogs anyhow. Suppose you was to ketch some one in there, and
+corner him! He might turn on you, and shoot you!"
+
+"I wish you wouldn't work yourself up so about nothin' at all! Want
+me to make a blame jackass of myself raisin' the whole place about a
+potato-peel or a bacon-rind!"
+
+"I think you might have some little regard for my feelings," Cerissa
+whimpered. "If you ain't afraid, I'm afraid for you; and I don't see
+anything to be ashamed of either. I wish you _wouldn't_ go _alone_
+searching through that spooky old place. It just puts me beside myself
+to think of it!"
+
+"Well, well! That's enough about it anyhow. I ain't going to do anything
+foolish, and you needn't think no more about it."
+
+Whether it was the effect of his wife's fears, or his promise to her,
+or the inhospitable nature of his errand founded on suspicion, certainly
+Chauncey showed no spirit of rashness in conducting his search. He
+knocked the mud off his boots loudly on the doorsill before proceeding
+to attach the padlock to the outer door. He searched the loom-room,
+lighting a candle and peering into all its cobwebbed corners. He
+examined the rooms lately inhabited, unlocking and locking doors
+behind him noisily with increasing confidence in the good old house's
+emptiness. Still, in the fireplace in the loom-room there were signs of
+furtive cooking which a housekeeper's eye would infallibly detect.
+He saw that the search must proceed. It was not all a question of his
+wife's fears, as he opened the stair-door cautiously and tramped slowly
+up towards the tower bedroom. He could not remember who had gone out
+last, on the day the old secretary was moved down. There had been
+four men up there, and--yes, the key was still in the lock outside. He
+clutched it and it fell rattling on the steps. He swung the door open
+and stared into the further darkness beyond his range of vision. He
+waved his candle as far as his arm would reach. "Anybody _in_ here?" he
+shouted. The silence made his flesh prick. "I'm goin' to lock up now.
+Better show up. It's the last chance." He waited while one could count
+ten. "Anybody in here that wants to be let free? Nobody's goin' to hurt
+ye."
+
+To his anxious relief there was no reply. But as he listened, he heard
+the loud, measured tick, tick, of the old clock, appalling in the
+darkness, on the silence of that empty room. Chauncey could not have
+told just how he got the door to, nor where he found strength to lock it
+and drag his feet downstairs, but the hand that held the key was moist
+with cold perspiration as he reached the open air.
+
+"Well, if that's rain I'd like to know where it comes from!" He looked
+up at the moon breaking through drifting clouds. The night was keen and
+clear.
+
+"If I was to tell that to Cerissa she'd never go within a mile o' that
+house again! Maybe I was mistaken--but I ain't goin' back to see!"
+
+Next morning on calmer reflection he changed his mind about removing the
+lawn-mower and other hand-tools from the loom-room as he had determined
+overnight should be done. The place continued to be used as a storeroom,
+open by day.
+
+At night it was Chauncey's business to lock it up, and he was careful to
+repeat his search--as far as the stair-door. Never did the silent room
+above give forth a protest, a sound of human restraint or occupation. He
+reported to the mistress that all was snug at the old house, and nobody
+anywhere about the place.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+THE FELL FROST
+
+After the rain came milder days. The still white mornings slowly
+brightened into hazy afternoons. The old moon like a sleep walker stood
+exposed in the morning sky. The roads to Stone Ridge were deep in fallen
+leaves. Soft-tired wheels rustled up the avenue and horses' feet fell
+light, as the last of the summer neighbors came to say good-by.
+
+It was a party of four--Miss Sallie and a good-looking youth of the
+football cult on horseback, her mother and an elder sister, the delicate
+Miss Remsen, in a hired carriage. Their own traps had been sent to town.
+
+Tea was served promptly, as the visitors had a long road home before
+their dinner-hour. In the reduced state of the establishment it was
+Katy who brought the tea while Cerissa looked after her little charge.
+Cerissa sat on the kitchen porch sewing and expanding under the deep
+attention of the cook; they could see Middy a little way off on the
+tennis-court wiping the mud gravely from a truant ball he had found
+among the nasturtiums. All was as peaceful as the time of day and the
+season of the year.
+
+"Yes," said Cerissa solemnly. "Old Abraham Van Elten was too much
+cumbered up with this world to get quit of it as easy as some. If his
+spirit is burdened with a message to anybody it's to _her_. He died
+unreconciled to her, and she inherited all this place in spite of him,
+as you may say. I've come as near believin' in such things since the
+goings on up there in that room"--
+
+"She wants Middy fetched in to see the comp'ny," cried Katy, bursting
+into the sentence. "Where is he, till I clean him? And she wants some
+more bread and butter as quick as ye can spread it."
+
+"Well, Katy!" said Cerissa slowly, with severe emphasis. "When I was a
+girl, my mother used to tell me it wasn't manners to"--
+
+"I haven't got time to hear about yer mother," said Katy rudely. "What
+have ye done with me boy?" The tennis-court lay vacant on the terrace in
+the sun; the steep lawn sloped away and dipped into the trees.
+
+"Don't call," said the cook warily. "It'll only scare her. He was there
+only a minute ago. Run, Katy, and see if he's at the stables."
+
+It was not noticed, except by Mrs. Bogardus, that no Katy, and no boy,
+and no bread and butter, had appeared. Possibly the last deficiency had
+attracted a little playful attention from the young horseback riders,
+who were accusing each other of eating more than their respective
+shares.
+
+At length Miss Sallie perceived there was something on her hostess's
+mind. "Where is John Middleton?" she whispered. "Katy is dressing him
+all over, from head to foot, isn't she? I hope she isn't curling his
+hair. John Middleton has such wonderful hair! I refuse to go back to
+New York till I have introduced you to John Middleton Bogardus," she
+announced to the young man, who laughed at everything she said. Mrs.
+Bogardus smiled vacantly and glanced at the door.
+
+"Let me go find Katy," cried Miss Sally. Katy entered as she spoke,
+and said a few words to the mistress. "Excuse me." Mrs. Bogardus rose
+hastily. She asked Miss Sallie to take her place at the tea-tray.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"The boy--they cannot find him. Don't say anything." She had turned ashy
+white, and Katy's pretty flushed face had a wild expression.
+
+In five minutes the search had begun. Mrs. Bogardus was at the
+telephone, calling up the quarry, for she was short of men. One order
+followed another quickly. Her voice was harsh and deep. She had frankly
+forgotten her guests. Embarrassed by their own uselessness, yet unable
+to take leave, they lingered and discussed the mystery of this sudden,
+acute alarm.
+
+"It is the sore spot," said Miss Sally sentimentally. "You know her
+husband was missing for years before she gave him up; and then that
+dreadful time, three years ago, when they were so frightened about
+Paul."
+
+Having spread the alarm, Mrs. Bogardus took the field in person. Her
+head was bare in the keen, sunset light. She moved with strong, fleet
+steps, but a look of sudden age stamped her face.
+
+"Go back, all of you!" she said to the women, who crowded on her heels.
+"There are plenty of places to look." Her stern eyes resisted their
+frightened sympathy. She was not ready to yield to the consciousness of
+her own fears.
+
+To the old house she went, by some sure instinct that told her the road
+to trouble. But her trouble stood off from her, and spared her for one
+moment of exquisite relief; as if the child of Paul and Moya had no part
+in what was waiting for her. The door at the foot of the stairs stood
+open. She heard a soft, repeated thud. Panting, she climbed the stairs;
+and as she rounded the shoulder of the chimney, there, on the top step
+above her, stood the fair-haired child, making the only light in the
+place. He was knocking, with his foolish ball, on the door of the
+chamber of fear. Three generations of the living and the dead were
+brought together in this coil of fate, and the child, in his happy
+innocence, had joined the knot.
+
+The woman crouching on the stairs could barely whisper, "Middy!" lest
+if she startled him he might turn and fall. He looked down at her,
+unsurprised, and paused in his knocking. "Man--in there--won't 'peak to
+Middy!" he said.
+
+She crept towards him and sat below him, coaxing him into her lap. The
+strange motions of her breast, as she pressed his head against her, kept
+the boy quiet, and in that silence she heard an inner sound--the awful
+pulse of the old clock beating steadily, calling her, demanding the
+evidence of her senses,--she who feared no ghosts,--beating out the
+hours of an agony she was there to witness. And she was yet in time. The
+hapless creature entrapped within that room dragged its weight
+slowly across the floor. The clock, sole witness and companion of its
+sufferings, ticked on impartially. Neither is this any new thing, it
+seemed to say. A life was starved in here before--not for lack of food,
+but love,--love,--love!
+
+She carried the child out into the air, and he ran before her like a
+breeze. The women who met them stared at her sick and desperate face.
+She made herself quickly understood, and as each listener drained her
+meaning the horror spread. There was but one man left on the place,
+within call, he with the boyish face and clean brown hands, who had
+ridden across the fields for an afternoon's idle pleasure. He stepped to
+her side and took the key out of her hand. "You ought not to do this,"
+he said gently, as their eyes met.
+
+"Wednesday, Thursday, Friday," she counted mechanically. "He has been
+in there six days and seven nights by my orders." She looked straight
+before her, seeing no one, as she gave her commands to the women: fire
+and hot water and stimulants, in the kitchen of the old house at once,
+and another man, if one could be found to follow her.
+
+The two figures moving across the grass might have stepped out of an
+illustration in the pages of some current magazine. In their thoughts
+they had already unlocked the door of that living death and were face to
+face with the insupportable facts of nature.
+
+The morbid, sickening, prison odor met them at the door--humanity's
+helpless protest against bolts and bars. Again the young man begged his
+companion not to enter. She took one deep breath of the pure outside
+air and stepped before him. They searched the emptiness of the barely
+furnished room. The clock ticked on to itself. Mrs. Bogardus's companion
+stood irresolute, not knowing the place. The fetid air confused
+his senses. But she went past him through the inner door, guided by
+remembrance of the sounds she had heard.
+
+She had seen it. She approached it cautiously, stooping for a better
+view, and closing in upon it warily, as one cuts off the retreat of a
+creature in the last agonies of flight. Her companion heard her say:
+"Show me your face!--Uncover his face," she repeated, not moving her
+eyes as he stepped behind her. "He will not let me near him. Uncover
+it."
+
+The thing in the corner had some time been a man. There was still enough
+manhood left to feel her eyes and to shrink as an earthworm from the
+spade. He had crawled close to the baseboard of the room. An old man's
+ashen beard straggled through the brown claws wrapped about the face. As
+the dust of the threshing floor to the summer grain, so was his likeness
+to one she remembered.
+
+"I must see that man's face!" she panted. "He will die if I touch him.
+Take away his hands." It was done, with set teeth, and the face of the
+football hero was bathed in sweat. He breathed through tense nostrils,
+and a sickly whiteness spread backward from his lips. Suddenly he loosed
+his burden. It fell, doubling in a ghastly heap, and he rushed for the
+open air.
+
+Mrs. Bogardus groaned. She raised herself up slowly, stretching back her
+head. Her face was like the terrible tortured mask of the Medusa. She
+had but a moment in which to recover herself. Deliberately she spoke
+when her companion returned and stood beside her.
+
+"That was my husband. If he lives I am still his wife. You are not to
+forget this. It is no secret. Are you able to help me now? Get a blanket
+from the women. I hear some one coming."
+
+She waited, with head erect and eyes closed and rigid tortured lips
+apart, till the feet were heard at the door.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+PEACE TO THIS HOUSE
+
+Mrs. Remsen and her delicate daughter had driven away to avoid
+excitement and the night air.
+
+Chauncey hovered round the piazza steps, talking, with but little
+encouragement, to Miss Sallie and the young man who had become the
+centre of all eyes.
+
+"I don't see how anybody on the face of the earth could blame her, nor
+me either!" Chauncey protested. "If the critter wanted to git out, why
+couldn't he say so? I stood there holdin' the door open much as five
+minutes. 'Who's in there?' I says. I called it loud enough to wake the
+dead. 'Nobody wants to hurt ye,' says I. There want nothing to be afraid
+of. He hadn't done nothing anyway. It's the strangest case ever I heard
+tell of. And the doctor don't think he was much crazy either."
+
+"Can he live?" asked Miss Sallie.
+
+"He's alive now, but doctor don't know how long he'll last. There he
+comes now. I must go and git his horse."
+
+The doctor, who seemed nervous,--he was a young local
+practitioner,--asked to speak with Miss Sallie's hero apart.
+
+"Did Mrs. Bogardus say anything when she first saw that man? Did you
+notice what she said?--how she took it?"
+
+The hero, who was also a gentleman, looked at the doctor coolly.
+
+"It was not a nice thing," he said. "I saw just as little as I could."
+
+"You don't understand me," said the doctor. "I want to know if Mrs.
+Bogardus appeared to you to have made any discovery--received any shock
+not to be accounted for by--by what you both saw?"
+
+"I shouldn't attempt to answer such a question," said the youngster
+bluntly. "I never saw Mrs. Bogardus in my life before to-day."
+
+The doctor colored. "Mrs. Bogardus has given me a telegram to send, and
+I don't know whether to send it or not. It's going to make a whole lot
+of talk. I am not much acquainted with Mrs. Bogardus myself, except by
+hearsay. That's partly what surprises me. It looks a little reckless
+to send out such a message as that, by the first hand that comes along.
+Hadn't we better give her time to think it over?" He opened the telegram
+for the other to read. "The man himself can't speak. But he just pants
+for breath every time she comes near him: he tries to hide his face. He
+acts like a criminal afraid of being caught."
+
+"He didn't look that way to me--what was left of him. Not in the least
+like a criminal."
+
+"Well, no; that's a fact, too. Now they've got him laid out clean and
+neat, he looks as if he might have been a very decent sort of man. But
+_that_, you know--that's incredible. If she knows him, why doesn't he
+know her? Why won't he own her? He's afraid of her. His eyes are ready
+to burst out of his head whenever she comes near him."
+
+"Did Mrs. Bogardus write that telegram herself?"
+
+"She did."
+
+"And what did she tell you to do with it?"
+
+"Send it to her son."
+
+"Then why don't you send it?"
+
+This was the disputed message: "Come. Your father has been found. Bring
+Doctor Gainsworth."
+
+In the local man's opinion, the writer of that dispatch was Doctor
+Gainsworth's true patient. What could induce a woman in Mrs. Bogardus's
+position to give such hasty publicity to this shocking disclosure,
+allowing it were true? The more he dwelt on it the less he liked the
+responsibility he was taking. He discussed it openly; and, with the
+best intentions, this much-impressed young man gave out his own
+counter-theory of the case, hoping to forestall whatever mischief might
+have been done. He put himself in the place of Mr. Paul Bogardus, whom
+he liked extremely, and tried to imagine that young gentleman's state
+of mind when he should look upon this new-found parent, and learn the
+manner of his resurrection.
+
+This was the explanation he boldly set forth in behalf of those most
+nearly concerned. [He was getting up his diagnosis for an interesting
+half hour with the great doctor who had been called in consultation.]
+The shock of that awful discovery in the locked chamber, he attested,
+had put Mrs. Bogardus temporarily beside herself. Outwardly composed,
+her nerves were ripped and torn by the terrible sight that met her
+eyes. She was the prey of an hallucination founded on memories of former
+suffering, which had worn a channel for every fresh fear to seek. There
+was something truly noble and loyal and pathetic in the nature of her
+possession. It threw a softened light upon her past. How must she have
+brooded, all these years, for that one thought to have ploughed so deep!
+It was quite commonly known in the neighborhood that she had come back
+from the West years ago without her husband, yet with no proof of his
+death. But who could have believed she would cling for half a lifetime
+to this forlorn expectancy, depicting her own loss in every sad hulk of
+humanity cast upon her prosperous shores!
+
+Every one believed she was deceiving herself, but great honor was hers
+among the neighbors for the plain truth and courage of her astonishing
+avowal. They had thought her proud, exclusive, hard in the security
+of wealth. Here she stood by a pauper's bed in the name of simple
+constancy, stripping herself of all earthly surplusage, exposing her
+deepest wound, proclaiming the bond--herself its only witness--between
+her and this speechless wreck, drifting out on the tide of death. She
+had but to let him go. It was the wild word she had spoken in the name
+of truth and deathless love that fired the imagination of that slow
+countryside. It was the touch beyond nature that appeals to the higher
+sense of a community, and there is no community without a soul.
+
+The straight demands of justice are frequently hard to meet, but its
+ironies are crushing. Mrs. Bogardus had fallen back on the line of a
+mother's duty since that moment of personal accountability. She read
+the unspoken reverence in the eyes of all around her, but she put in
+no disclaimer. Her past was not her own. She could not sin alone. Only
+those who have been honest are privileged under all conditions to remain
+so.
+
+On his arrival with the doctor, Paul endeavored first to see his
+mother alone. For some reason she would not have it so. She took the
+unspeakable situation as it came. He was shown into the room where she
+sat, and by her orders Doctor Gainsworth was with him.
+
+She rose quietly and came to meet them. Placing her hand in her son's
+arm, and looking towards the bed, she said:--
+
+"Doctor--my husband."
+
+"Madam!" said Doctor Gainsworth. He had been Mrs. Bogardus's family
+physician for many years.
+
+"My husband," she repeated.
+
+The doctor appeared to accept the statement. As the three approached the
+bed Mrs. Bogardus leaned heavily upon her son. Paul released his arm and
+placed it firmly around her. He felt her shudder. "Mother," he said to
+her with an indescribable accent that tore her heart.
+
+The doctor began his examination. He addressed his patient as "Mr.
+Bogardus."
+
+"Mistake," said a low, husky voice from the bed. "This ain't the man."
+
+Doctor Gainsworth pursued his investigations. "What is your name?" he
+asked the patient suddenly.
+
+The hunted eyes turned with ghastly appeal upon the faces around him.
+
+"Paul, speak to him! Own your father," Mrs. Bogardus whispered
+passionately.
+
+"It is for him to speak now," said Paul. "When he is well, Doctor," he
+added aloud, "he will know his own name."
+
+"This man will never be well," the doctor answered. "If there is
+anything to prove, for or against the identity you claim for him, it
+will have to be done within a very few days."
+
+Doctor Gainsworth rose and held out his hand. He was a man of delicate
+perceptions. His respect at that moment for Mrs. Bogardus, though
+founded on blindest conjecture, was an emotion which the mask of his
+professional manner could barely conceal. "As a friend, Mrs. Bogardus, I
+hope you will command me--but you need no doctor here."
+
+"As a friend I ask you to believe me," she said. "This man _is_ my
+husband. He came back here because this was his home. I cannot tell you
+any more, but this we expect you and every one who knows"--
+
+The dissenting voice from the bed closed her assertion with a hoarse
+"No! Not the man."
+
+"Good-by, Mrs. Bogardus," said the doctor. "Don't trouble to explain.
+You and I have lived too long and seen too much of life not to recognize
+its fatalities: the mysterious trend in the actions of men and women
+that cannot be comprised in--in the locking of a door."
+
+"It is of little consequence--what was done, compared to what was not
+done." This was all the room for truth she could give herself to turn
+in. The doctor did not try to understand her: yet she had snatched a
+little comfort from merely uttering the words.
+
+Paul and the doctor dined together, Mrs. Bogardus excusing herself.
+
+"There seems to be an impression here," said the doctor, examining
+the initials on his fish-fork, "that your mother is indulging an
+overstrained fancy in this melancholy resemblance she has traced.
+It does not appear to have made much headway as a fact, which rather
+surprises me in a country neighborhood. Possibly your doctor here, who
+seems a very good fellow, has wished to spare the family any unnecessary
+explanations. If you'll let me advise you, Paul, I would leave it as
+it is,--open to conjecture. But, in whatever shape this impression
+may reach you from outside, I hope you won't let it disturb you in the
+least, so far as it describes your mother's condition. She is one of the
+few well-balanced women I have had the honor to know."
+
+Paul did not take advantage of the doctor's period. He went on.
+
+"Not that I do know her. Possibly you may not yourself feel that you
+altogether understand your mother? She has had many demands upon her
+powers of adaptation. I should imagine her not one who would adapt
+herself easily, yet, once she had recognized a necessity of that sort,
+I believe she would fit herself to its conditions with an exacting
+thoroughness which in time would become almost, one might say, a second,
+an external self. The 'lendings' we must all of us wear."
+
+"There will be no explanations," said Paul, not coldly, but helplessly.
+
+"Much the best way," said the doctor relieved, and glad to be done with
+a difficult undertaking. "If we are ever understood in this world, it
+is not through our own explanations, but in spite of them. My daughters
+hope to see a good deal of your charming wife this winter. I hear great
+pleasure expressed at your coming back to town."
+
+"Thank you, Doctor. She will be up this evening. We shall stay here
+with my mother for a time. It will be her desire to carry out
+this--recognition--to the end. We must honor her wishes in the matter."
+
+The talk then fell upon the patient's condition. The doctor left certain
+directions and took shelter in professional platitudes, but his eyes
+rested with candid kindness upon the young man, and his farewell
+hand-clasp was a second prolonged.
+
+He went away in a state of simple wonderment, deeply marveling at Paul's
+serenity.
+
+"Extraordinary poise! Where does it come from? No: the boy is happy! He
+hides it; but it is the one change in him. He has experienced a great
+relief. Is it possible"--
+
+On his way down the river the doctor continued to muse upon the dignity,
+the amazingly beautiful behavior of this rising family in whose somewhat
+commonplace city fortunes he had taken a friendly interest for years. He
+owned that he had sounded them with too short a line.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Watching with the dying man hours when she was with him alone, Emily
+Bogardus continued to test his resolution. He never retracted by a
+look--faithful to the word she had spoken which made them strangers.
+
+It was the slightest shell of mortality that ever detained a soul on
+earth. The face, small like the face of an old, old child, waxed finer
+and more spiritual, yet ever more startlingly did it bear the stamp of
+that individuality which the spirit had held so cheap--the earthly
+so impenetrated with the spiritual part that the face had become a
+sublimation. As one sees a sheet of paper covered with writing wither
+in flame and become a quivering ash, yet to the last attenuation of
+its fibre the human characters will stand forth, till all is blown up
+chimney to the stars.
+
+Still, peaceful, implacable in its peace, settling down for the silence
+of eternity. Still no sign.
+
+The younger ones came and went. The little boy stole in alone and pushed
+against his grandmother's knee,--she seated always by the bed,--gazed,
+puzzled, at the strange, still face, and whispered obediently,
+"Gran'faver." There was no response. Once she took the boy and drew him
+close and placed his little tender hand within the dry, crumpled husk
+extended on the bedclothes. The eyes unclosed and rested long and
+earnestly on the face of the child, who yawned as if hypnotized and
+flung his head back on the grandmother's breast. She bent suddenly and
+laid her own hand where the child's had been. The eyes turned inward
+and shut again, but a sigh, so deep it seemed that another breath might
+never come, was all her answer.
+
+Past midnight of the fourth night's watch Paul was awakened by a light
+in his room. His mother stood beside him, white and worn. "He is
+going," she said. It was the final rally of the body's resistance. A
+few moments' expenditure, and that stubborn vitality would loose its
+hold.--The strength of the soil!
+
+The wife stood aside and gave up her place to the children. Her
+expression was noble, like a queen rebuked before her people. There was
+comfort in that, too. A great, solemn, mutual understanding drew this
+death-bed group together. Within the sickle's compass so they stood:
+the woman God gave this man to found a home; the son who inherited
+his father's gentleness and purity of purpose; the fair flower of the
+generations that father's sacrifice had helped him win; the bud of
+promise on the topmost bough. Those astonished eyes shed their last
+earthly light on this human group, turned and rested in the eyes of
+the woman, faded, and the light went out. He died, blessing her in one
+whispered word. Her name.
+
+Before daybreak on the morning of the funeral, Paul awoke under pressure
+of disturbing dreams. There were sounds of hushed movements in the
+house. He traced them to the door of the room below stairs where his
+father lay. Some one had softly unlocked that door, and entered. He knew
+who that one must be. His place was there alone with his mother, before
+they were called together as a family, and the mask of decency resumed
+for those ironic rites in the presence of the unaccusing dead.
+
+The windows had been lowered behind closed curtains, and the air of the
+death chamber, as he entered, was like the touch of chilled iron to the
+warm pulse of sleep. Without, a still dark night of November had frosted
+the dead grass.
+
+The unappeasable curiosity of the living concerning the Great
+Transition, for the moment appeared to have swept all that was personal
+out of the watcher's gaze, as she bent above the straightened body.
+And something of the peace there dawning on the cold, still face was
+reflected in her own.
+
+"You have never seen your father before. There he is." She drew a
+deep sigh, as if she had been too intent to breathe naturally. All her
+self-consciousness suddenly was gone. And Paul remembered his dream,
+that had goaded him out of sleep, and vanished with the shock of waking.
+It gave him the key to this long-expected moment of confidence.
+
+"The old likeness has come back," his mother repeated, with that new
+quietness which restored her to herself.
+
+"I dreamed of that likeness," said Paul, "only it was much
+stronger--startling--so that the room was full of whispers and
+exclamations as the neighbors--there were hundreds of them--filed past.
+And you stood there, mother, flushed, and talking to each person who
+passed and looked at him and then at you; you said--you"--
+
+Mrs. Bogardus raised her head. "I know! I have been thinking all night.
+Am I to do that? Is that what you wish me to do? Don't hesitate--to
+spare me."
+
+"Mother! I could not imagine you doing such a thing. It was like
+insanity. I wanted to tell you how horrible, how unseemly it was,
+because I was sure you had been dwelling on some form--some outward"--
+
+"No," she said. "I know how I should face this if it were left to me.
+But you are my only earthly judge, my son. Judge now between us two. Ask
+of me anything you think is due to him. As to outsiders, what do they
+matter! I will do anything you say."
+
+"_I_ say! Oh, mother! Every hand he loved was against him--bruising his
+gentle will. Each one of us has cast a stone upon his grave. But you
+took the brunt of it. You spoke out plain the denial that was in my
+coward's heart from the first. And I judged you! I--who uncovered
+my father's soul to ease my own conscience, and put him to shame and
+torture, and you to a trial worse than death. Now let us think of the
+whole of his life. I have much to tell you. You could not listen before;
+but now he is listening. I speak for him. This is how he loved us!"
+
+In hard, brief words Paul told the story of his father's sin and
+self-judgment; his abdication in the flesh; what he esteemed the rights
+to be of a woman placed as he had placed his wife; how carefully he had
+guarded her in those rights, and perjured himself at the last to
+leave her free in peace and honor with her children. She listened, not
+weeping, but with her great eyes shining in her pallid face.
+
+"All that came after," said Paul, taking her cold hands in his--"after
+his last solemn recantation does not touch the true spirit of his
+sacrifice. It was finished. My father died to us then as he meant to
+die. The body remained--to serve out its time, as he said. But his brain
+was tired. I do not think he connected the past very clearly with the
+present. I think you should forget what has happened here. It was a
+hideous net of circumstance that did it."
+
+"There is no such thing as circumstance," said Mrs. Bogardus with
+loftiness. Her face was calm and sweet in its exaltation. "I cannot
+say things as you can, but this is what I mean. I was the wife of his
+body--sworn flesh of his flesh. In the flesh that made us one I denied
+him, and caused his death. And if I could believe as I used to about
+punishment, I would lock myself in that room, and for every hour he
+suffered there, I would suffer two. And no one should prevent me,
+or hasten the end. And the feet of the young men that carried out my
+husband who lied to save me, should wait there for me who lied to save
+myself. All lies are death. But what is a made-up punishment to me! I
+shall take it as it comes--drop by drop--slowly."
+
+"Mother--my mother! The fashion of this world does not last; but one
+thing does. Is it nothing to you, mother?"
+
+"Have I my son--after all?" she said as one dreaming.
+
+The night lamp expired in smoke that tainted the cold air. Paul drew
+back the curtains one by one, and let in the new-born day.
+
+"'Peace to this house,'" he said; "'not as the world giveth,'" his
+thought concluded.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Desert and The Sown, by Mary Hallock Foote
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