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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Night-Born, by Jack London
+
+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 Night-Born
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Last Updated: January 3, 2009
+Posting Date: August 2, 2008 [EBook #1029]
+Last Updated: March 3, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NIGHT-BORN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by J.R. Wright
+
+
+
+
+
+THE NIGHT-BORN
+
+By Jack London
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+     THE NIGHT-BORN
+     THE MADNESS OF JOHN HARNED
+     WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
+     THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
+     WINGED BLACKMAIL
+     BUNCHES OF KNUCKLES
+     WAR
+     UNDER THE DECK AWNINGS
+     TO KILL A MAN
+     THE MEXICAN
+
+
+
+
+THE NIGHT-BORN
+
+It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club--a warm night for San Francisco--and
+through the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the streets.
+The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs
+that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque
+sordidness and rottenness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the name
+of O'Brien was mentioned--O'Brien, the promising young pugilist who
+had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once the air
+had seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a clean-living young man with
+ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and his had been the body
+of a beautiful young god. He had even carried his prayer-book to the
+ringside. They found it in his coat pocket in the dressing-room...
+afterward.
+
+Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied--the thing of glory and
+wonder for men to conjure with..... after it has been lost to them and
+they have turned middle-aged. And so well did we conjure, that Romance
+came and for an hour led us far from the man-city and its snarling roar.
+Bardwell, in a way, started it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was old
+Trefethan, bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and for
+the hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we wondered how many
+Scotches he had consumed since dinner, but very soon all that was
+forgotten.
+
+“It was in 1898--I was thirty-five then,” he said. “Yes, I know you are
+adding it up. You're right. I'm forty-seven now; look ten years more;
+and the doctors say--damn the doctors anyway!”
+
+He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to soothe away
+his irritation.
+
+“But I was young... once. I was young twelve years ago, and I had
+hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a runner's, and the
+longest day was none too long for me. I was a husky back there in '98.
+You remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit of
+all right?”
+
+Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining engineer
+who had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.
+
+“You certainly were, old man,” Milner said. “I'll never forget when
+you cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. & M. that night that
+little newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in the country at
+the time,”--this to us--“and his manager wanted to get up a match with
+Trefethan.”
+
+“Well, look at me now,” Trefethan commanded angrily. “That's what the
+Goldstead did to me--God knows how many millions, but nothing left in my
+soul..... nor in my veins. The good red blood is gone. I am a jellyfish,
+a huge, gross mass of oscillating protoplasm, a--a...”
+
+But language failed him, and he drew solace from the long glass.
+
+“Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a second time.
+Strange that I never married. But the girl. That's what I started to
+tell you about. I met her a thousand miles from anywhere, and then some.
+And she quoted to me those very words of Thoreau that Bardwell quoted a
+moment ago--the ones about the day-born gods and the night-born.”
+
+“It was after I had made my locations on Goldstead--and didn't know what
+a treasure-pot that that trip creek was going to prove--that I made that
+trip east over the Rockies, angling across to the Great Up North there
+the Rockies are something more than a back-bone. They are a boundary,
+a dividing line, a wall impregnable and unscalable. There is no
+intercourse across them, though, on occasion, from the early days,
+wandering trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the way
+than ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled the job. It
+was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am prouder of it right
+now than anything else I have ever done.
+
+“It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been explored.
+There are big valleys there where the white man has never set foot, and
+Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand years... almost, for they
+have had some contact with the whites. Parties of them come out once in
+a while to trade, and that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to
+find them and farm them.
+
+“And now the girl. I was coming up a stream--you'd call it a river in
+California--uncharted--and unnamed. It was a noble valley, now shut in
+by high canyon walls, and again opening out into beautiful stretches,
+wide and long, with pasture shoulder-high in the bottoms, meadows dotted
+with flowers, and with clumps of timberspruce--virgin and magnificent.
+The dogs were packing on their backs, and were sore-footed and played
+out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds and
+drivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late fall, but
+the way those flowers persisted surprised me. I was supposed to be in
+sub-arctic America, and high up among the buttresses of the Rockies,
+and yet there was that everlasting spread of flowers. Some day the white
+settlers will be in there and growing wheat down all that valley.
+
+“And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the dogs--Indian
+dogs--and came into camp. There must have been five hundred of them,
+proper Indians at that, and I could see by the jerking-frames that the
+fall hunting had been good. And then I met her--Lucy. That was her name.
+Sign language--that was all we could talk with, till they led me to a
+big fly--you know, half a tent, open on the one side where a campfire
+burned. It was all of moose-skins, this fly--moose-skins, smoke-cured,
+hand-rubbed, and golden-brown. Under it everything was neat and orderly
+as no Indian camp ever was. The bed was laid on fresh spruce boughs.
+There were furs galore, and on top of all was a robe of swanskins--white
+swan-skins--I have never seen anything like that robe. And on top of it,
+sitting cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I have called her a
+girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, an Amazon, a
+full-blooded, full-bodied woman, and royal ripe. And her eyes were blue.
+
+“That's what took me off my feet--her eyes--blue, not China blue, but
+deep blue, like the sea and sky all melted into one, and very wise. More
+than that, they had laughter in them--warm laughter, sun-warm and human,
+very human, and... shall I say feminine? They were. They were a woman's
+eyes, a proper woman's eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more?
+Also, in those blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild unrest, a
+wistful yearning, and a repose, an absolute repose, a sort of all-wise
+and philosophical calm.”
+
+Trefethan broke off abruptly.
+
+“You fellows think I am screwed. I'm not. This is only my fifth since
+dinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I sit here now side by side with
+my sacred youth. It is not I--'old' Trefethan--that talks; it is my
+youth, and it is my youth that says those were the most wonderful eyes
+I have ever seen--so very calm, so very restless; so very wise, so very
+curious; so very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet yearning so
+wistfully. Boys, I can't describe them. When I have told you about her,
+you may know better for yourselves.”
+
+“She did not stand up. But she put out her hand.”
+
+“'Stranger,' she said, 'I'm real glad to see you.'
+
+“I leave it to you--that sharp, frontier, Western tang of speech.
+Picture my sensations. It was a woman, a white woman, but that tang!
+It was amazing that it should be a white woman, here, beyond the last
+boundary of the world--but the tang. I tell you, it hurt. It was like
+the stab of a flatted note. And yet, let me tell you, that woman was a
+poet. You shall see.”
+
+“She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took her
+orders and followed her blind. She was hi-yu skookam chief. She told the
+bucks to make a camp for me and to take care of my dogs. And they
+did, too. And they knew enough not to get away with as much as a
+moccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regular She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,
+and I want to tell you it chilled me to the marrow, sent those little
+thrills Marathoning up and down my spinal column, meeting a white woman
+out there at the head of a tribe of savages a thousand miles the other
+side of No Man's Land.
+
+“'Stranger,” she said, 'I reckon you're sure the first white that ever
+set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a spell, and then we'll have
+a bite to eat. Which way might you be comin'?'
+
+“There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the yarn I
+want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting there on the edge
+of that swan-skin robe and listening and looking at the most wonderful
+woman that ever stepped out of the pages of Thoreau or of any other
+man's book.
+
+“I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She promised to fit
+me out with dogs and sleds and with Indians that would put me across
+the best pass of the Rockies in five hundred miles. Her fly was pitched
+apart from the others, on the high bank by the river, and a couple of
+Indian girls did her cooking for her and the camp work. And so we talked
+and talked, while the first snow fell and continued to fall and make a
+surface for my sleds. And this was her story.
+
+“She was frontier-born, of poor settlers, and you know what that
+means--work, work, always work, work in plenty and without end.
+
+“'I never seen the glory of the world,' she said. 'I had no time. I knew
+it was right out there, anywhere, all around the cabin, but there was
+always the bread to set, the scrubbin' and the washin' and the work that
+was never done. I used to be plumb sick at times, jes' to get out into
+it all, especially in the spring when the songs of the birds drove me
+most clean crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass,
+wetting my legs with the dew of it, and to climb the rail fence, and
+keep on through the timber and up and up over the divide so as to get a
+look around. Oh, I had all kinds of hankerings--to follow up the
+canyon beds and slosh around from pool to pool, making friends with
+the water-dogs and the speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watch the
+squirrels and rabbits and small furry things and see what they was doing
+and learn the secrets of their ways. Seemed to me, if I had time, I
+could crawl among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet, catch them
+whispering with themselves, telling all kinds of wise things that mere
+humans never know.'”
+
+Trefethan paused to see that his glass had been refilled.
+
+“Another time she said: 'I wanted to run nights like a wild thing, just
+to run through the moonshine and under the stars, to run white and naked
+in the darkness that I knew must feel like cool velvet, and to run and
+run and keep on running. One evening, plumb tuckered out--it had been a
+dreadful hard hot day, and the bread wouldn't raise and the churning had
+gone wrong, and I was all irritated and jerky--well, that evening I
+made mention to dad of this wanting to run of mine. He looked at me
+curious-some and a bit scared. And then he gave me two pills to take.
+Said to go to bed and get a good sleep and I'd be all hunky-dory in
+the morning. So I never mentioned my hankerings to him, or any one any
+more.'
+
+“The mountain home broke up--starved out, I imagine--and the family came
+to Seattle to live. There she worked in a factory--long hours, you
+know, and all the rest, deadly work. And after a year of that she became
+waitress in a cheap restaurant--hash-slinger, she called it. She said
+to me once, 'Romance I guess was what I wanted. But there wan't no
+romance floating around in dishpans and washtubs, or in factories and
+hash-joints.'
+
+“When she was eighteen she married--a man who was going up to Juneau to
+start a restaurant. He had a few dollars saved, and appeared prosperous.
+She didn't love him--she was emphatic about that, but she was all tired
+out, and she wanted to get away from the unending drudgery. Besides,
+Juneau was in Alaska, and her yearning took the form of a desire to see
+that wonderland. But little she saw of it. He started the restaurant,
+a little cheap one, and she quickly learned what he had married her
+for..... to save paying wages. She came pretty close to running the
+joint and doing all the work from waiting to dishwashing. She cooked
+most of the time as well. And she had four years of it.
+
+“Can't you picture her, this wild woods creature, quick with every old
+primitive instinct, yearning for the free open, and mowed up in a vile
+little hash-joint and toiling and moiling for four mortal years?
+
+“'There was no meaning in anything,' she said. 'What was it all about!
+Why was I born! Was that all the meaning of life--just to work and work
+and be always tired!--to go to bed tired and to wake up tired, with
+every day like every other day unless it was harder?' She had heard talk
+of immortal life from the gospel sharps, she said, but she could
+not reckon that what she was doin' was a likely preparation for her
+immortality.
+
+“But she still had her dreams, though more rarely. She had read a few
+books--what, it is pretty hard to imagine, Seaside Library novels most
+likely; yet they had been food for fancy. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'when
+I was that dizzy from the heat of the cooking that if I didn't take
+a breath of fresh air I'd faint, I'd stick my head out of the kitchen
+window, and close my eyes and see most wonderful things. All of a sudden
+I'd be traveling down a country road, and everything clean and quiet,
+no dust, no dirt; just streams ripplin' down sweet meadows, and lambs
+playing, breezes blowing the breath of flowers, and soft sunshine over
+everything; and lovely cows lazying knee-deep in quiet pools, and young
+girls bathing in a curve of stream all white and slim and natural--and
+I'd know I was in Arcady. I'd read about that country once, in a book.
+And maybe knights, all flashing in the sun, would come riding around a
+bend in the road, or a lady on a milk-white mare, and in the distance
+I could see the towers of a castle rising, or I just knew, on the next
+turn, that I'd come upon some palace, all white and airy and fairy-like,
+with fountains playing, and flowers all over everything, and peacocks
+on the lawn..... and then I'd open my eyes, and the heat of the
+cooking range would strike on me, and I'd hear Jake sayin'--he was my
+husband--I'd hear Jake sayin', “Why ain't you served them beans? Think I
+can wait here all day!” Romance!--I reckon the nearest I ever come to
+it was when a drunken Armenian cook got the snakes and tried to cut my
+throat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the stove before I
+could lay him out with the potato stomper.
+
+“'I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all that; but
+it just seemed I had no luck nohow and was only and expressly born for
+cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild crowd in Juneau them days, but
+I looked at the other women, and their way of life didn't excite me.
+I reckon I wanted to be clean. I don't know why; I just wanted to, I
+guess; and I reckoned I might as well die dishwashing as die their way.”
+
+Trefethan halted in his tale for a moment, completing to himself some
+thread of thought.
+
+“And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, running a tribe of
+wild Indians and a few thousand square miles of hunting territory. And
+it happened, simply enough, though, for that matter, she might have
+lived and died among the pots and pans. But 'Came the whisper, came the
+vision.' That was all she needed, and she got it.
+
+“'I woke up one day,' she said. 'Just happened on it in a scrap of
+newspaper. I remember every word of it, and I can give it to you.' And
+then she quoted Thoreau's Cry of the Human:
+
+“'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to year are
+to me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is
+not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness
+of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods
+and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with
+nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons
+are strangers. The steady illumination of his qenius, dim only because
+distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared
+with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. The
+Society Islanders had their day-born gods, but they were not supposed to
+be of equal antiquity with the..... night-born gods.'
+
+“That's what she did, repeated it word for word, and I forgot the tang,
+for it was solemn, a declaration of religion--pagan, if you will; and
+clothed in the living garmenture of herself.
+
+“'And the rest of it was torn away,' she added, a great emptiness in her
+voice. 'It was only a scrap of newspaper. But that Thoreau was a wise
+man. I wish I knew more about him.' She stopped a moment, and I swear
+her face was ineffably holy as she said, 'I could have made him a good
+wife.'
+
+“And then she went on. 'I knew right away, as soon as I read that, what
+was the matter with me. I was a night-born. I, who had lived all my
+life with the day-born, was a night-born. That was why I had never been
+satisfied with cooking and dishwashing; that was why I had hankered to
+run naked in the moonlight. And I knew that this dirty little Juneau
+hash-joint was no place for me. And right there and then I said, “I
+quit.” I packed up my few rags of clothes, and started. Jake saw me and
+tried to stop me.
+
+“'What you doing?” he says.
+
+“'Divorcin' you and me,' I says. 'I'm headin' for tall timber and where
+I belong.'”
+
+“'No you don't,' he says, reaching for me to stop me. 'The cooking has
+got on your head. You listen to me talk before you up and do anything
+brash.'
+
+“But I pulled a gun-a little Colt's forty-four--and says, 'This does my
+talkin' for me.'
+
+“And I left.”
+
+Trefethan emptied his glass and called for another.
+
+“Boys, do you know what that girl did? She was twenty-two. She had spent
+her life over the dish-pan and she knew no more about the world than I
+do of the fourth dimension, or the fifth. All roads led to her desire.
+No; she didn't head for the dance-halls. On the Alaskan Pan-handle it
+is preferable to travel by water. She went down to the beach. An Indian
+canoe was starting for Dyea--you know the kind, carved out of a single
+tree, narrow and deep and sixty feet long. She gave them a couple of
+dollars and got on board.
+
+“'Romance?' she told me. 'It was Romance from the jump. There were three
+families altogether in that canoe, and that crowded there wasn't room to
+turn around, with dogs and Indian babies sprawling over everything, and
+everybody dipping a paddle and making that canoe go.' And all around the
+great solemn mountains, and tangled drifts of clouds and sunshine. And
+oh, the silence! the great wonderful silence! And, once, the smoke of
+a hunter's camp, away off in the distance, trailing among the trees.
+It was like a picnic, a grand picnic, and I could see my dreams coming
+true, and I was ready for something to happen 'most any time. And it
+did.
+
+“'And that first camp, on the island! And the boys spearing fish in the
+mouth of the creek, and the big deer one of the bucks shot just around
+the point. And there were flowers everywhere, and in back from the beach
+the grass was thick and lush and neck-high. And some of the girls went
+through this with me, and we climbed the hillside behind and picked
+berries and roots that tasted sour and were good to eat. And we came
+upon a big bear in the berries making his supper, and he said “Oof!” and
+ran away as scared as we were. And then the camp, and the camp smoke,
+and the smell of fresh venison cooking. It was beautiful. I was with the
+night-born at last, and I knew that was where I belonged. And for the
+first time in my life, it seemed to me, I went to bed happy that night,
+looking out under a corner of the canvas at the stars cut off black by a
+big shoulder of mountain, and listening to the night-noises, and knowing
+that the same thing would go on next day and forever and ever, for I
+wasn't going back. And I never did go back.'
+
+“'Romance! I got it next day. We had to cross a big arm of the
+ocean--twelve or fifteen miles, at least; and it came on to blow when we
+were in the middle. That night I was along on shore, with one wolf-dog,
+and I was the only one left alive.'
+
+“Picture it yourself,” Trefethan broke off to say. “The canoe was
+wrecked and lost, and everybody pounded to death on the rocks except
+her. She went ashore hanging on to a dog's tail, escaping the rocks and
+washing up on a tiny beach, the only one in miles.
+
+“'Lucky for me it was the mainland,' she said. 'So I headed right away
+back, through the woods and over the mountains and straight on anywhere.
+Seemed I was looking for something and knew I'd find it. I wasn't
+afraid. I was night-born, and the big timber couldn't kill me. And on
+the second day I found it. I came upon a small clearing and a tumbledown
+cabin. Nobody had been there for years and years. The roof had fallen
+in. Rotted blankets lay in the bunks, and pots and pans were on the
+stove. But that was not the most curious thing. Outside, along the
+edge of the trees, you can't guess what I found. The skeletons of eight
+horses, each tied to a tree. They had starved to death, I reckon, and
+left only little piles of bones scattered some here and there. And each
+horse had had a load on its back. There the loads lay, in among the
+bones--painted canvas sacks, and inside moosehide sacks, and inside the
+moosehide sacks--what do you think?'”
+
+She stopped, reached under a corner of the bed among the spruce boughs,
+and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and ran out into my
+hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seen--coarse gold, placer
+gold, some large dust, but mostly nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough
+that it scarcely showed signs of water-wash.
+
+“'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know this
+country. Can you name a pay-creek that has the color of that gold!'
+
+“I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver. It was almost pure, and I
+told her so.
+
+“'You bet,' she said. 'I sell that for nineteen dollars an ounce. You
+can't get over seventeen for Eldorado gold, and Minook gold don't fetch
+quite eighteen. Well, that was what I found among the bones--eight
+horse-loads of it, one hundred and fifty pounds to the load.'
+
+“'A quarter of a million dollars!' I cried out.
+
+“'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered. 'Talk about Romance!
+And me a slaving the way I had all the years, when as soon as I ventured
+out, inside three days, this was what happened. And what became of the
+men that mined all that gold? Often and often I wonder about it. They
+left their horses, loaded and tied, and just disappeared off the face of
+the earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them. I never heard tell
+of them. Nobody knows anything about them. Well, being the night-born, I
+reckon I was their rightful heir.'”
+
+Trefethan stopped to light a cigar.
+
+“Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving out thirty
+pounds, which she carried back to the coast. Then she signaled a passing
+canoe, made her way to Pat Healy's trading post at Dyea, outfitted,
+and went over Chilcoot Pass. That was in '88--eight years before the
+Klondike strike, and the Yukon was a howling wilderness. She was afraid
+of the bucks, but she took two young squaws with her, crossed the lakes,
+and went down the river and to all the early camps on the Lower Yukon.
+She wandered several years over that country and then on in to where I
+met her. Liked the looks of it, she said, seeing, in her own words, 'a
+big bull caribou knee-deep in purple iris on the valley-bottom.' She
+hooked up with the Indians, doctored them, gained their confidence, and
+gradually took them in charge. She had only left that country once, and
+then, with a bunch of the young bucks, she went over Chilcoot, cleaned
+up her gold-cache, and brought it back with her.
+
+“'And here I be, stranger,' she concluded her yarn, 'and here's the most
+precious thing I own.'
+
+“She pulled out a little pouch of buckskin, worn on her neck like a
+locket, and opened it. And inside, wrapped in oiled silk, yellowed with
+age and worn and thumbed, was the original scrap of newspaper containing
+the quotation from Thoreau.
+
+“'And are you happy... satisfied?' I asked her. 'With a quarter of a
+million you wouldn't have to work down in the States. You must miss a
+lot.'
+
+“'Not much,' she answered. 'I wouldn't swop places with any woman down
+in the States. These are my people; this is where I belong. But there
+are times--and in her eyes smoldered up that hungry yearning I've
+mentioned--'there are times when I wish most awful bad for that Thoreau
+man to happen along.'
+
+“'Why?' I asked.
+
+“'So as I could marry him. I do get mighty lonesome at spells. I'm just
+a woman--a real woman. I've heard tell of the other kind of women that
+gallivanted off like me and did queer things--the sort that become
+soldiers in armies, and sailors on ships. But those women are queer
+themselves. They're more like men than women; they look like men and
+they don't have ordinary women's needs. They don't want love, nor little
+children in their arms and around their knees. I'm not that sort. I
+leave it to you, stranger. Do I look like a man?'
+
+“She didn't. She was a woman, a beautiful, nut-brown woman, with a
+sturdy, health-rounded woman's body and with wonderful deep-blue woman's
+eyes.
+
+“'Ain't I woman?' she demanded. 'I am. I'm 'most all woman, and then
+some. And the funny thing is, though I'm night-born in everything else,
+I'm not when it comes to mating. I reckon that kind likes its own kind
+best. That's the way it is with me, anyway, and has been all these
+years.'
+
+“'You mean to tell me--' I began.
+
+“'Never,' she said, and her eyes looked into mine with the straightness
+of truth. 'I had one husband, only--him I call the Ox; and I reckon he's
+still down in Juneau running the hash-joint. Look him up, if you ever
+get back, and you'll find he's rightly named.'
+
+“And look him up I did, two years afterward. He was all she said--solid
+and stolid, the Ox--shuffling around and waiting on the tables.
+
+“'You need a wife to help you,' I said.
+
+“'I had one once,' was his answer.
+
+“'Widower?'
+
+“'Yep. She went loco. She always said the heat of the cooking would
+get her, and it did. Pulled a gun on me one day and ran away with some
+Siwashes in a canoe. Caught a blow up the coast and all hands drowned.'”
+
+Trefethan devoted himself to his glass and remained silent.
+
+“But the girl?” Milner reminded him.
+
+“You left your story just as it was getting interesting, tender. Did
+it?”
+
+“It did,” Trefethan replied. “As she said herself, she was savage in
+everything except mating, and then she wanted her own kind. She was very
+nice about it, but she was straight to the point. She wanted to marry
+me.
+
+“'Stranger,' she said, 'I want you bad. You like this sort of life or
+you wouldn't be here trying to cross the Rockies in fall weather. It's
+a likely spot. You'll find few likelier. Why not settle down! I'll make
+you a good wife.'
+
+“And then it was up to me. And she waited. I don't mind confessing that
+I was sorely tempted. I was half in love with her as it was. You know I
+have never married. And I don't mind adding, looking back over my life,
+that she is the only woman that ever affected me that way. But it was
+too preposterous, the whole thing, and I lied like a gentleman. I told
+her I was already married.
+
+“'Is your wife waiting for you?' she asked.
+
+“I said yes.
+
+“'And she loves you?'
+
+“I said yes.
+
+“And that was all. She never pressed her point... except once, and then
+she showed a bit of fire.
+
+“'All I've got to do,' she said, 'is to give the word, and you don't get
+away from here. If I give the word, you stay on... But I ain't going to
+give it. I wouldn't want you if you didn't want to be wanted... and if
+you didn't want me.'
+
+“She went ahead and outfitted me and started me on my way.
+
+“'It's a darned shame, stranger,” she said, at parting. 'I like your
+looks, and I like you. If you ever change your mind, come back.'
+
+“Now there was one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kiss her
+good-bye, but I didn't know how to go about it nor how she would take
+it.--I tell you I was half in love with her. But she settled it herself.
+
+“'Kiss me,' she said. 'Just something to go on and remember.'
+
+“And we kissed, there in the snow, in that valley by the Rockies, and
+I left her standing by the trail and went on after my dogs. I was six
+weeks in crossing over the pass and coming down to the first post on
+Great Slave Lake.”
+
+The brawl of the streets came up to us like a distant surf. A
+steward, moving noiselessly, brought fresh siphons. And in the silence
+Trefethan's voice fell like a funeral bell:
+
+“It would have been better had I stayed. Look at me.”
+
+We saw his grizzled mustache, the bald spot on his head, the puff-sacks
+under his eyes, the sagging cheeks, the heavy dewlap, the general
+tiredness and staleness and fatness, all the collapse and ruin of a man
+who had once been strong but who had lived too easily and too well.
+
+“It's not too late, old man,” Bardwell said, almost in a whisper.
+
+“By God! I wish I weren't a coward!” was Trefethan's answering cry. “I
+could go back to her. She's there, now. I could shape up and live many a
+long year... with her... up there. To remain here is to commit suicide.
+But I am an old man--forty-seven--look at me. The trouble is,” he lifted
+his glass and glanced at it, “the trouble is that suicide of this sort
+is so easy. I am soft and tender. The thought of the long day's travel
+with the dogs appalls me; the thought of the keen frost in the morning
+and of the frozen sled-lashings frightens me--”
+
+Automatically the glass was creeping toward his lips. With a swift
+surge of anger he made as if to crash it down upon the floor. Next came
+hesitancy and second thought. The glass moved upward to his lips and
+paused. He laughed harshly and bitterly, but his words were solemn:
+
+“Well, here's to the Night-Born. She WAS a wonder.”
+
+
+
+
+THE MADNESS OF JOHN HARNED
+
+I TELL this for a fact. It happened in the bull-ring at Quito. I sat
+in the box with John Harned, and with Maria Valenzuela, and with Luis
+Cervallos. I saw it happen. I saw it all from first to last. I was on
+the steamer Ecuadore from Panama to Guayaquil. Maria Valenzuela is
+my cousin. I have known her always. She is very beautiful. I am a
+Spaniard--an Ecuadoriano, true, but I am descended from Pedro Patino,
+who was one of Pizarro's captains. They were brave men. They were
+heroes. Did not Pizarro lead three hundred and fifty Spanish cavaliers
+and four thousand Indians into the far Cordilleras in search of
+treasure? And did not all the four thousand Indians and three hundred
+of the brave cavaliers die on that vain quest? But Pedro Patino did
+not die. He it was that lived to found the family of the Patino. I am
+Ecuadoriano, true, but I am Spanish. I am Manuel de Jesus Patino. I own
+many haciendas, and ten thousand Indians are my slaves, though the law
+says they are free men who work by freedom of contract. The law is a
+funny thing. We Ecuadorianos laugh at it. It is our law. We make it for
+ourselves. I am Manuel de Jesus Patino. Remember that name. It will be
+written some day in history. There are revolutions in Ecuador. We call
+them elections. It is a good joke is it not?--what you call a pun?
+
+John Harned was an American. I met him first at the Tivoli hotel in
+Panama. He had much money--this I have heard. He was going to Lima,
+but he met Maria Valenzuela in the Tivoli hotel. Maria Valenzuela is
+my cousin, and she is beautiful. It is true, she is the most beautiful
+woman in Ecuador. But also is she most beautiful in every country--in
+Paris, in Madrid, in New York, in Vienna. Always do all men look at her,
+and John Harned looked long at her at Panama. He loved her, that I know
+for a fact. She was Ecuadoriano, true--but she was of all countries; she
+was of all the world. She spoke many languages. She sang--ah! like an
+artiste. Her smile--wonderful, divine. Her eyes--ah! have I not seen
+men look in her eyes? They were what you English call amazing. They were
+promises of paradise. Men drowned themselves in her eyes.
+
+Maria Valenzuela was rich--richer than I, who am accounted very rich in
+Ecuador. But John Harned did not care for her money. He had a heart--a
+funny heart. He was a fool. He did not go to Lima. He left the steamer
+at Guayaquil and followed her to Quito. She was coming home from Europe
+and other places. I do not see what she found in him, but she liked him.
+This I know for a fact, else he would not have followed her to Quito.
+She asked him to come. Well do I remember the occasion. She said:
+
+“Come to Quito and I will show you the bullfight--brave, clever,
+magnificent!”
+
+But he said: “I go to Lima, not Quito. Such is my passage engaged on the
+steamer.”
+
+“You travel for pleasure--no?” said Maria Valenzuela; and she looked at
+him as only Maria Valenzuela could look, her eyes warm with the promise.
+
+And he came. No; he did not come for the bull-fight. He came because of
+what he had seen in her eyes. Women like Maria Valenzuela are born once
+in a hundred years. They are of no country and no time. They are what
+you call goddesses. Men fall down at their feet. They play with men and
+run them through their pretty fingers like sand. Cleopatra was such a
+woman they say; and so was Circe. She turned men into swine. Ha! ha! It
+is true--no?
+
+It all came about because Maria Valenzuela said:
+
+“You English people are--what shall I say?--savage--no? You prize-fight.
+Two men each hit the other with their fists till their eyes are blinded
+and their noses are broken. Hideous! And the other men who look on cry
+out loudly and are made glad. It is barbarous--no?”
+
+“But they are men,” said John Harned; “and they prize-fight out of
+desire. No one makes them prize-fight. They do it because they desire it
+more than anything else in the world.”
+
+Maria Valenzuela--there was scorn in her smile as she said: “They kill
+each other often--is it not so? I have read it in the papers.”
+
+“But the bull,” said John Harned.
+
+“The bull is killed many times in the bull-fight, and the bull does not
+come into the the ring out of desire. It is not fair to the bull. He
+is compelled to fight. But the man in the prize-fight--no; he is not
+compelled.”
+
+“He is the more brute therefore,” said Maria Valenzuela.
+
+“He is savage. He is primitive. He is animal. He strikes with his paws
+like a bear from a cave, and he is ferocious. But the bull-fight--ah!
+You have not seen the bullfight--no? The toreador is clever. He must
+have skill. He is modern. He is romantic. He is only a man, soft and
+tender, and he faces the wild bull in conflict. And he kills with a
+sword, a slender sword, with one thrust, so, to the heart of the great
+beast. It is delicious. It makes the heart beat to behold--the small
+man, the great beast, the wide level sand, the thousands that look on
+without breath; the great beast rushes to the attack, the small man
+stands like a statue; he does not move, he is unafraid, and in his hand
+is the slender sword flashing like silver in the sun; nearer and nearer
+rushes the great beast with its sharp horns, the man does not move, and
+then--so--the sword flashes, the thrust is made, to the heart, to the
+hilt, the bull falls to the sand and is dead, and the man is unhurt. It
+is brave. It is magnificent! Ah!--I could love the toreador. But the
+man of the prize-fight--he is the brute, the human beast, the savage
+primitive, the maniac that receives many blows in his stupid face and
+rejoices. Come to Quito and I will show you the brave sport of men, the
+toreador and the bull.”
+
+But John Harned did not go to Quito for the bull-fight. He went because
+of Maria Valenzuela. He was a large man, more broad of shoulder than
+we Ecuadorianos, more tall, more heavy of limb and bone. True, he was
+larger of his own race. His eyes were blue, though I have seen them
+gray, and, sometimes, like cold steel. His features were large, too--not
+delicate like ours, and his jaw was very strong to look at. Also, his
+face was smooth-shaven like a priest's. Why should a man feel shame for
+the hair on his face? Did not God put it there? Yes, I believe in God--I
+am not a pagan like many of you English. God is good. He made me an
+Ecuadoriano with ten thousand slaves. And when I die I shall go to God.
+Yes, the priests are right.
+
+But John Harned. He was a quiet man. He talked always in a low voice,
+and he never moved his hands when he talked. One would have thought his
+heart was a piece of ice; yet did he have a streak of warm in his blood,
+for he followed Maria Valenzuela to Quito. Also, and for all that he
+talked low without moving his hands, he was an animal, as you shall
+see--the beast primitive, the stupid, ferocious savage of the long ago
+that dressed in wild skins and lived in the caves along with the bears
+and wolves.
+
+Luis Cervallos is my friend, the best of Ecuadorianos. He owns three
+cacao plantations at Naranjito and Chobo. At Milagro is his big sugar
+plantation. He has large haciendas at Ambato and Latacunga, and down
+the coast is he interested in oil-wells. Also has he spent much money
+in planting rubber along the Guayas. He is modern, like the Yankee; and,
+like the Yankee, full of business. He has much money, but it is in many
+ventures, and ever he needs more money for new ventures and for the old
+ones. He has been everywhere and seen everything. When he was a very
+young man he was in the Yankee military academy what you call West
+Point. There was trouble. He was made to resign. He does not like
+Americans. But he did like Maria Valenzuela, who was of his own country.
+Also, he needed her money for his ventures and for his gold mine in
+Eastern Ecuador where the painted Indians live. I was his friend. It
+was my desire that he should marry Maria Valenzuela. Further, much of my
+money had I invested in his ventures, more so in his gold mine which was
+very rich but which first required the expense of much money before it
+would yield forth its riches. If Luis Cervallos married Maria Valenzuela
+I should have more money very immediately.
+
+But John Harned followed Maria Valenzuela to Quito, and it was quickly
+clear to us--to Luis Cervallos and me that she looked upon John Harned
+with great kindness. It is said that a woman will have her will, but
+this is a case not in point, for Maria Valenzuela did not have her
+will--at least not with John Harned. Perhaps it would all have happened
+as it did, even if Luis Cervallos and I had not sat in the box that day
+at the bull-ring in Quito. But this I know: we DID sit in the box that
+day. And I shall tell you what happened.
+
+The four of us were in the one box, guests of Luis Cervallos. I was next
+to the Presidente's box. On the other side was the box of General Jose
+Eliceo Salazar. With him were Joaquin Endara and Urcisino Castillo,
+both generals, and Colonel Jacinto Fierro and Captain Baltazar de
+Echeverria. Only Luis Cervallos had the position and the influence
+to get that box next to the Presidente. I know for a fact that the
+Presidente himself expressed the desire to the management that Luis
+Cervallos should have that box.
+
+The band finished playing the national hymn of Ecuador. The procession
+of the toreadors was over. The Presidente nodded to begin. The bugles
+blew, and the bull dashed in--you know the way, excited, bewildered, the
+darts in its shoulder burning like fire, itself seeking madly whatever
+enemy to destroy. The toreadors hid behind their shelters and waited.
+Suddenly they appeared forth, the capadores, five of them, from every
+side, their colored capes flinging wide. The bull paused at sight of
+such a generosity of enemies, unable in his own mind to know which to
+attack. Then advanced one of the capadors alone to meet the bull. The
+bull was very angry. With its fore-legs it pawed the sand of the arena
+till the dust rose all about it. Then it charged, with lowered head,
+straight for the lone capador.
+
+It is always of interest, the first charge of the first bull. After a
+time it is natural that one should grow tired, trifle, that the keenness
+should lose its edge. But that first charge of the first bull! John
+Harned was seeing it for the first time, and he could not escape the
+excitement--the sight of the man, armed only with a piece of cloth,
+and of the bull rushing upon him across the sand with sharp horns,
+widespreading.
+
+“See!” cried Maria Valenzuela. “Is it not superb?”
+
+John Harned nodded, but did not look at her. His eyes were sparkling,
+and they were only for the bull-ring. The capador stepped to the side,
+with a twirl of the cape eluding the bull and spreading the cape on his
+own shoulders.
+
+“What do you think?” asked Maria Venzuela. “Is it not
+a--what-you-call--sporting proposition--no?”
+
+“It is certainly,” said John Harned. “It is very clever.”
+
+She clapped her hands with delight. They were little hands. The audience
+applauded. The bull turned and came back. Again the capadore eluded him,
+throwing the cape on his shoulders, and again the audience applauded.
+Three times did this happen. The capadore was very excellent. Then he
+retired, and the other capadore played with the bull. After that they
+placed the banderillos in the bull, in the shoulders, on each side of
+the back-bone, two at a time. Then stepped forward Ordonez, the chief
+matador, with the long sword and the scarlet cape. The bugles blew for
+the death. He is not so good as Matestini. Still he is good, and with
+one thrust he drove the sword to the heart, and the bull doubled his
+legs under him and lay down and died. It was a pretty thrust, clean and
+sure; and there was much applause, and many of the common people threw
+their hats into the ring. Maria Valenzuela clapped her hands with the
+rest, and John Harned, whose cold heart was not touched by the event,
+looked at her with curiosity.
+
+“You like it?” he asked.
+
+“Always,” she said, still clapping her hands.
+
+“From a little girl,” said Luis Cervallos. “I remember her first fight.
+She was four years old. She sat with her mother, and just like now she
+clapped her hands. She is a proper Spanish woman.
+
+“You have seen it,” said Maria Valenzuela to John Harned, as they
+fastened the mules to the dead bull and dragged it out. “You have seen
+the bull-fight and you like it--no? What do you think?
+
+“I think the bull had no chance,” he said. “The bull was doomed from
+the first. The issue was not in doubt. Every one knew, before the bull
+entered the ring, that it was to die. To be a sporting proposition, the
+issue must be in doubt. It was one stupid bull who had never fought
+a man against five wise men who had fought many bulls. It would be
+possibly a little bit fair if it were one man against one bull.”
+
+“Or one man against five bulls,” said Maria Valenzuela; and we all
+laughed, and Luis Ceryallos laughed loudest.
+
+“Yes,” said John Harned, “against five bulls, and the man, like the
+bulls, never in the bull ring before--a man like yourself, Senor
+Crevallos.”
+
+“Yet we Spanish like the bull-fight,” said Luis Cervallos; and I swear
+the devil was whispering then in his ear, telling him to do that which I
+shall relate.
+
+“Then must it be a cultivated taste,” John Harned made answer. “We kill
+bulls by the thousand every day in Chicago, yet no one cares to pay
+admittance to see.”
+
+“That is butchery,” said I; “but this--ah, this is an art. It is
+delicate. It is fine. It is rare.”
+
+“Not always,” said Luis Cervallos. “I have seen clumsy matadors, and I
+tell you it is not nice.”
+
+He shuddered, and his face betrayed such what-you-call disgust, that I
+knew, then, that the devil was whispering and that he was beginning to
+play a part.
+
+“Senor Harned may be right,” said Luis Cervallos. “It may not be fair
+to the bull. For is it not known to all of us that for twenty-four hours
+the bull is given no water, and that immediately before the fight he is
+permitted to drink his fill?”
+
+“And he comes into the ring heavy with water?” said John Harned quickly;
+and I saw that his eyes were very gray and very sharp and very cold.
+
+“It is necessary for the sport,” said Luis Cervallos. “Would you have
+the bull so strong that he would kill the toreadors?”
+
+“I would that he had a fighting chance,” said John Harned, facing the
+ring to see the second bull come in.
+
+It was not a good bull. It was frightened. It ran around the ring in
+search of a way to get out. The capadors stepped forth and flared their
+capes, but he refused to charge upon them.
+
+“It is a stupid bull,” said Maria Valenzuela.
+
+“I beg pardon,” said John Harned; “but it would seem to me a wise bull.
+He knows he must not fight man. See! He smells death there in the ring.”
+
+True. The bull, pausing where the last one had died, was smelling the
+wet sand and snorting. Again he ran around the ring, with raised head,
+looking at the faces of the thousands that hissed him, that threw
+orange-peel at him and called him names. But the smell of blood decided
+him, and he charged a capador, so without warning that the man just
+escaped. He dropped his cape and dodged into the shelter. The bull
+struck the wall of the ring with a crash. And John Harned said, in a
+quiet voice, as though he talked to himself:
+
+“I will give one thousand sucres to the lazar-house of Quito if a bull
+kills a man this day.”
+
+“You like bulls?” said Maria Valenzuela with a smile.
+
+“I like such men less,” said John Harned. “A toreador is not a brave
+man. He surely cannot be a brave man. See, the bull's tongue is already
+out. He is tired and he has not yet begun.”
+
+“It is the water,” said Luis Cervallos.
+
+“Yes, it is the water,” said John Harned. “Would it not be safer to
+hamstring the bull before he comes on?”
+
+Maria Valenzuela was made angry by this sneer in John Harned's words.
+But Luis Cervallos smiled so that only I could see him, and then it
+broke upon my mind surely the game he was playing. He and I were to be
+banderilleros. The big American bull was there in the box with us. We
+were to stick the darts in him till he became angry, and then there
+might be no marriage with Maria Valenzuela. It was a good sport. And the
+spirit of bull-fighters was in our blood.
+
+The bull was now angry and excited. The capadors had great game with
+him. He was very quick, and sometimes he turned with such sharpness
+that his hind legs lost their footing and he plowed the sand with his
+quarter. But he charged always the flung capes and committed no harm.
+
+“He has no chance,” said John Harned. “He is fighting wind.”
+
+“He thinks the cape is his enemy,” explained Maria Valenzuela. “See how
+cleverly the capador deceives him.”
+
+“It is his nature to be deceived,” said John Harned. “Wherefore he is
+doomed to fight wind. The toreadors know it, you know it, I know it--we
+all know from the first that he will fight wind. He only does not know
+it. It is his stupid beast-nature. He has no chance.”
+
+“It is very simple,” said Luis Cervallos. “The bull shuts his eyes when
+he charges. Therefore--”
+
+“The man steps, out of the way and the bull rushes by,” Harned
+interrupted.
+
+“Yes,” said Luis Cervallos; “that is it. The bull shuts his eyes, and
+the man knows it.”
+
+“But cows do not shut their eyes,” said John Harned. “I know a cow at
+home that is a Jersey and gives milk, that would whip the whole gang of
+them.”
+
+“But the toreadors do not fight cows,” said I.
+
+“They are afraid to fight cows,” said John Harned.
+
+“Yes,” said Luis Cervallos, “they are afraid to fight cows. There would
+be no sport in killing toreadors.”
+
+“There would be some sport,” said John Harned, “if a toreador were
+killed once in a while. When I become an old man, and mayhap a cripple,
+and should I need to make a living and be unable to do hard work,
+then would I become a bull-fighter. It is a light vocation for elderly
+gentlemen and pensioners.”
+
+“But see!” said Maria Valenzuela, as the bull charged bravely and the
+capador eluded it with a fling of his cape. “It requires skill so to
+avoid the beast.”
+
+“True,” said John Harned. “But believe me, it requires a thousand times
+more skill to avoid the many and quick punches of a prize-fighter who
+keeps his eyes open and strikes with intelligence. Furthermore, this
+bull does not want to fight. Behold, he runs away.”
+
+It was not a good bull, for again it ran around the ring, seeking to
+find a way out.
+
+“Yet these bulls are sometimes the most dangerous,” said Luis Cervallos.
+“It can never be known what they will do next. They are wise. They are
+half cow. The bull-fighters never like them.--See! He has turned!”
+
+Once again, baffled and made angry by the walls of the ring that would
+not let him out, the bull was attacking his enemies valiantly.
+
+“His tongue is hanging out,” said John Harned. “First, they fill him
+with water. Then they tire him out, one man and then another, persuading
+him to exhaust himself by fighting wind. While some tire him, others
+rest. But the bull they never let rest. Afterward, when he is quite
+tired and no longer quick, the matador sticks the sword into him.”
+
+The time had now come for the banderillos. Three times one of the
+fighters endeavored to place the darts, and three times did he fail.
+He but stung the bull and maddened it. The banderillos must go in, you
+know, two at a time, into the shoulders, on each side the backbone and
+close to it. If but one be placed, it is a failure. The crowd hissed and
+called for Ordonez. And then Ordonez did a great thing. Four times
+he stood forth, and four times, at the first attempt, he stuck in the
+banderillos, so that eight of them, well placed, stood out of the back
+of the bull at one time. The crowd went mad, and a rain of hats and
+money fell on the sand of the ring.
+
+And just then the bull charged unexpectedly one of the capadors. The man
+slipped and lost his head. The bull caught him--fortunately, between his
+wide horns. And while the audience watched, breathless and silent, John
+Harned stood up and yelled with gladness. Alone, in that hush of all of
+us, John Harned yelled. And he yelled for the bull. As you see yourself,
+John Harned wanted the man killed. His was a brutal heart. This bad
+conduct made those angry that sat in the box of General Salazar, and
+they cried out against John Harned. And Urcisino Castillo told him to
+his face that he was a dog of a Gringo and other things. Only it was
+in Spanish, and John Harned did not understand. He stood and yelled,
+perhaps for the time of ten seconds, when the bull was enticed into
+charging the other capadors and the man arose unhurt.
+
+“The bull has no chance,” John Harned said with sadness as he sat down.
+“The man was uninjured. They fooled the bull away from him.” Then he
+turned to Maria Valenzuela and said: “I beg your pardon. I was excited.”
+
+She smiled and in reproof tapped his arm with her fan.
+
+“It is your first bull-fight,” she said. “After you have seen more you
+will not cry for the death of the man. You Americans, you see, are more
+brutal than we. It is because of your prize-fighting. We come only to
+see the bull killed.”
+
+“But I would the bull had some chance,” he answered. “Doubtless, in
+time, I shall cease to be annoyed by the men who take advantage of the
+bull.”
+
+The bugles blew for the death of the bull. Ordonez stood forth with the
+sword and the scarlet cloth. But the bull had changed again, and did not
+want to fight. Ordonez stamped his foot in the sand, and cried out, and
+waved the scarlet cloth. Then the bull charged, but without heart. There
+was no weight to the charge. It was a poor thrust. The sword struck
+a bone and bent. Ordonez took a fresh sword. The bull, again stung to
+fight, charged once more. Five times Ordonez essayed the thrust, and
+each time the sword went but part way in or struck bone. The sixth time,
+the sword went in to the hilt. But it was a bad thrust. The sword missed
+the heart and stuck out half a yard through the ribs on the opposite
+side. The audience hissed the matador. I glanced at John Harned. He sat
+silent, without movement; but I could see his teeth were set, and his
+hands were clenched tight on the railing of the box.
+
+All fight was now out of the bull, and, though it was no vital thrust,
+he trotted lamely what of the sword that stuck through him, in one side
+and out the other. He ran away from the matador and the capadors, and
+circled the edge of the ring, looking up at the many faces.
+
+“He is saying: 'For God's sake let me out of this; I don't want to
+fight,'” said John Harned.
+
+That was all. He said no more, but sat and watched, though sometimes
+he looked sideways at Maria Valenzuela to see how she took it. She was
+angry with the matador. He was awkward, and she had desired a clever
+exhibition.
+
+The bull was now very tired, and weak from loss of blood, though far
+from dying. He walked slowly around the wall of the ring, seeking a
+way out. He would not charge. He had had enough. But he must be killed.
+There is a place, in the neck of a bull behind the horns, where the
+cord of the spine is unprotected and where a short stab will immediately
+kill. Ordonez stepped in front of the bull and lowered his scarlet cloth
+to the ground. The bull would not charge. He stood still and smelled the
+cloth, lowering his head to do so. Ordonez stabbed between the horns at
+the spot in the neck. The bull jerked his head up. The stab had missed.
+Then the bull watched the sword. When Ordonez moved the cloth on the
+ground, the bull forgot the sword and lowered his head to smell the
+cloth. Again Ordonez stabbed, and again he failed. He tried many times.
+It was stupid. And John Harned said nothing. At last a stab went home,
+and the bull fell to the sand, dead immediately, and the mules were made
+fast and he was dragged out.
+
+“The Gringos say it is a cruel sport--no?” said Luis Cervallos. “That it
+is not humane. That it is bad for the bull. No?”
+
+“No,” said John Harned. “The bull does not count for much. It is bad for
+those that look on. It is degrading to those that look on. It teaches
+them to delight in animal suffering. It is cowardly for five men to
+fight one stupid bull. Therefore those that look on learn to be cowards.
+The bull dies, but those that look on live and the lesson is learned.
+The bravery of men is not nourished by scenes of cowardice.”
+
+Maria Valenzuela said nothing. Neither did she look at him. But she
+heard every word and her cheeks were white with anger. She looked out
+across the ring and fanned herself, but I saw that her hand trembled.
+Nor did John Harned look at her. He went on as though she were not
+there. He, too, was angry, coldly angry.
+
+“It is the cowardly sport of a cowardly people,” he said.
+
+“Ah,” said Luis Cervallos softly, “you think you understand us.”
+
+“I understand now the Spanish Inquisition,” said John Harned. “It must
+have been more delightful than bull-fighting.”
+
+Luis Cervallos smiled but said nothing. He glanced at Maria Valenzuela,
+and knew that the bull-fight in the box was won. Never would she have
+further to do with the Gringo who spoke such words. But neither Luis
+Cervallos nor I was prepared for the outcome of the day. I fear we do
+not understand the Gringos. How were we to know that John Harned, who
+was so coldly angry, should go suddenly mad! But mad he did go, as you
+shall see. The bull did not count for much--he said so himself. Then why
+should the horse count for so much? That I cannot understand. The mind
+of John Harned lacked logic. That is the only explanation.
+
+“It is not usual to have horses in the bull-ring at Quito,” said Luis
+Cervallos, looking up from the program. “In Spain they always have them.
+But to-day, by special permission we shall have them. When the next bull
+comes on there will be horses and picadors-you know, the men who carry
+lances and ride the horses.”
+
+“The bull is doomed from the first,” said John Harned. “Are the horses
+then likewise doomed!”
+
+“They are blindfolded so that they may not see the bull,” said Luis
+Cervallos. “I have seen many horses killed. It is a brave sight.”
+
+“I have seen the bull slaughtered,” said John Harned “I will now see the
+horse slaughtered, so that I may understand more fully the fine points
+of this noble sport.”
+
+“They are old horses,” said Luis Cervallos, “that are not good for
+anything else.”
+
+“I see,” said John Harned.
+
+The third bull came on, and soon against it were both capadors and
+picadors. One picador took his stand directly below us. I agree, it was
+a thin and aged horse he rode, a bag of bones covered with mangy hide.
+
+“It is a marvel that the poor brute can hold up the weight of the
+rider,” said John Harned. “And now that the horse fights the bull, what
+weapons has it?”
+
+“The horse does not fight the bull,” said Luis Cervallos.
+
+“Oh,” said John Harned, “then is the horse there to be gored? That must
+be why it is blindfolded, so that it shall not see the bull coming to
+gore it.”
+
+“Not quite so,” said I. “The lance of the picador is to keep the bull
+from goring the horse.”
+
+“Then are horses rarely gored?” asked John Harned.
+
+“No,” said Luis Cervallos. “I have seen, at Seville, eighteen horses
+killed in one day, and the people clamored for more horses.”
+
+“Were they blindfolded like this horse?” asked John Harned.
+
+“Yes,” said Luis Cervallos.
+
+After that we talked no more, but watched the fight. And John Harned was
+going mad all the time, and we did not know. The bull refused to charge
+the horse. And the horse stood still, and because it could not see it
+did not know that the capadors were trying to make the bull charge upon
+it. The capadors teased the bull their capes, and when it charged them
+they ran toward the horse and into their shelters. At last the bull was
+angry, and it saw the horse before it.
+
+“The horse does not know, the horse does not know,” John Harned
+whispered to himself, unaware that he voiced his thought aloud.
+
+The bull charged, and of course the horse knew nothing till the picador
+failed and the horse found himself impaled on the bull's horns from
+beneath. The bull was magnificently strong. The sight of its strength
+was splendid to see. It lifted the horse clear into the air; and as the
+horse fell to its side on on the ground the picador landed on his feet
+and escaped, while the capadors lured the bull away. The horse was
+emptied of its essential organs. Yet did it rise to its feet screaming.
+It was the scream of the horse that did it, that made John Harned
+completely mad; for he, too, started to rise to his feet, I heard
+him curse low and deep. He never took his eyes from the horse, which,
+screaming, strove to run, but fell down instead and rolled on its back
+so that all its four legs were kicking in the air. Then the bull charged
+it and gored it again and again until it was dead.
+
+John Harned was now on his feet. His eyes were no longer cold like
+steel. They were blue flames. He looked at Maria Valenzuela, and she
+looked at him, and in his face was a great loathing. The moment of his
+madness was upon him. Everybody was looking, now that the horse was
+dead; and John Harned was a large man and easy to be seen.
+
+“Sit down,” said Luis Cervallos, “or you will make a fool of yourself.”
+
+John Harned replied nothing. He struck out his fist. He smote Luis
+Cervallos in the face so that he fell like a dead man across the chairs
+and did not rise again. He saw nothing of what followed. But I saw much.
+Urcisino Castillo, leaning forward from the next box, with his cane
+struck John Harned full across the face. And John Harned smote him with
+his fist so that in falling he overthrew General Salazar. John Harned
+was now in what-you-call Berserker rage--no? The beast primitive in him
+was loose and roaring--the beast primitive of the holes and caves of the
+long ago.
+
+“You came for a bull-fight,” I heard him say, “And by God I'll show you
+a man-fight!”
+
+It was a fight. The soldiers guarding the Presidente's box leaped
+across, but from one of them he took a rifle and beat them on their
+heads with it. From the other box Colonel Jacinto Fierro was shooting at
+him with a revolver. The first shot killed a soldier. This I know for
+a fact. I saw it. But the second shot struck John Harned in the side.
+Whereupon he swore, and with a lunge drove the bayonet of his rifle into
+Colonel Jacinto Fierro's body. It was horrible to behold. The Americans
+and the English are a brutal race. They sneer at our bull-fighting, yet
+do they delight in the shedding of blood. More men were killed that day
+because of John Harned than were ever killed in all the history of the
+bull-ring of Quito, yes, and of Guayaquil and all Ecuador.
+
+It was the scream of the horse that did it, yet why did not John Harned
+go mad when the bull was killed? A beast is a beast, be it bull or
+horse. John Harned was mad. There is no other explanation. He was
+blood-mad, a beast himself. I leave it to your judgment. Which is
+worse--the goring of the horse by the bull, or the goring of Colonel
+Jacinto Fierro by the bayonet in the hands of John Harned! And John
+Harned gored others with that bayonet. He was full of devils. He fought
+with many bullets in him, and he was hard to kill. And Maria Valenzuela
+was a brave woman. Unlike the other women, she did not cry out nor
+faint. She sat still in her box, gazing out across the bull-ring. Her
+face was white and she fanned herself, but she never looked around.
+
+From all sides came the soldiers and officers and the common people
+bravely to subdue the mad Gringo. It is true--the cry went up from
+the crowd to kill all the Gringos. It is an old cry in Latin-American
+countries, what of the dislike for the Gringos and their uncouth ways.
+It is true, the cry went up. But the brave Ecuadorianos killed only
+John Harned, and first he killed seven of them. Besides, there were many
+hurt. I have seen many bull-fights, but never have I seen anything so
+abominable as the scene in the boxes when the fight was over. It was
+like a field of battle. The dead lay around everywhere, while the
+wounded sobbed and groaned and some of them died. One man, whom John
+Harned had thrust through the belly with the bayonet, clutched at
+himself with both his hands and screamed. I tell you for a fact it was
+more terrible than the screaming of a thousand horses.
+
+No, Maria Valenzuela did not marry Luis Cervallos. I am sorry for that.
+He was my friend, and much of my money was invested in his ventures. It
+was five weeks before the surgeons took the bandages from his face. And
+there is a scar there to this day, on the cheek, under the eye. Yet
+John Harned struck him but once and struck him only with his naked
+fist. Maria Valenzuela is in Austria now. It is said she is to marry an
+Arch-Duke or some high nobleman. I do not know. I think she liked John
+Harned before he followed her to Quito to see the bull-fight. But why
+the horse? That is what I desire to know. Why should he watch the bull
+and say that it did not count, and then go immediately and most horribly
+mad because a horse screamed? There is no understanding the Gringos.
+They are barbarians.
+
+
+
+
+WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
+
+HE was a very quiet, self-possessed sort of man, sitting a moment on top
+of the wall to sound the damp darkness for warnings of the dangers it
+might conceal. But the plummet of his hearing brought nothing to him
+save the moaning of wind through invisible trees and the rustling of
+leaves on swaying branches. A heavy fog drifted and drove before the
+wind, and though he could not see this fog, the wet of it blew upon his
+face, and the wall on which he sat was wet.
+
+Without noise he had climbed to the top of the wall from the outside,
+and without noise he dropped to the ground on the inside. From his
+pocket he drew an electric night-stick, but he did not use it. Dark as
+the way was, he was not anxious for light. Carrying the night-stick in
+his hand, his finger on the button, he advanced through the darkness.
+The ground was velvety and springy to his feet, being carpeted with dead
+pine-needles and leaves and mold which evidently had been undisturbed
+for years. Leaves and branches brushed against his body, but so dark was
+it that he could not avoid them. Soon he walked with his hand stretched
+out gropingly before him, and more than once the hand fetched up against
+the solid trunks of massive trees. All about him he knew were these
+trees; he sensed the loom of them everywhere; and he experienced a
+strange feeling of microscopic smallness in the midst of great bulks
+leaning toward him to crush him. Beyond, he knew, was the house, and he
+expected to find some trail or winding path that would lead easily to
+it.
+
+Once, he found himself trapped. On every side he groped against trees
+and branches, or blundered into thickets of underbrush, until there
+seemed no way out. Then he turned on his light, circumspectly, directing
+its rays to the ground at his feet. Slowly and carefully he moved
+it about him, the white brightness showing in sharp detail all the
+obstacles to his progress. He saw, an opening between huge-trunked
+trees, and advanced through it, putting out the light and treading
+on dry footing as yet protected from the drip of the fog by the dense
+foliage overhead. His sense of direction was good, and he knew he was
+going toward the house.
+
+And then the thing happened--the thing unthinkable and unexpected. His
+descending foot came down upon something that was soft and alive, and
+that arose with a snort under the weight of his body. He sprang clear,
+and crouched for another spring, anywhere, tense and expectant, keyed
+for the onslaught of the unknown. He waited a moment, wondering what
+manner of animal it was that had arisen from under his foot and that now
+made no sound nor movement and that must be crouching and waiting just
+as tensely and expectantly as he. The strain became unbearable. Holding
+the night-stick before him, he pressed the button, saw, and screamed
+aloud in terror. He was prepared for anything, from a frightened calf or
+fawn to a belligerent lion, but he was not prepared for what he saw. In
+that instant his tiny searchlight, sharp and white, had shown him what a
+thousand years would not enable him to forget--a man, huge and blond,
+yellow-haired and yellow-bearded, naked except for soft-tanned moccasins
+and what seemed a goat-skin about his middle. Arms and legs were bare,
+as were his shoulders and most of his chest. The skin was smooth and
+hairless, but browned by sun and wind, while under it heavy muscles were
+knotted like fat snakes. Still, this alone, unexpected as it well was,
+was not what had made the man scream out. What had caused his terror was
+the unspeakable ferocity of the face, the wild-animal glare of the blue
+eyes scarcely dazzled by the light, the pine-needles matted and clinging
+in the beard and hair, and the whole formidable body crouched and in the
+act of springing at him. Practically in the instant he saw all this, and
+while his scream still rang, the thing leaped, he flung his night-stick
+full at it, and threw himself to the ground. He felt its feet and shins
+strike against his ribs, and he bounded up and away while the thing
+itself hurled onward in a heavy crashing fall into the underbrush.
+
+As the noise of the fall ceased, the man stopped and on hands and knees
+waited. He could hear the thing moving about, searching for him, and he
+was afraid to advertise his location by attempting further flight. He
+knew that inevitably he would crackle the underbrush and be pursued.
+Once he drew out his revolver, then changed his mind. He had recovered
+his composure and hoped to get away without noise. Several times he
+heard the thing beating up the thickets for him, and there were moments
+when it, too, remained still and listened. This gave an idea to the man.
+One of his hands was resting on a chunk of dead wood. Carefully, first
+feeling about him in the darkness to know that the full swing of his arm
+was clear, he raised the chunk of wood and threw it. It was not a large
+piece, and it went far, landing noisily in a bush. He heard the thing
+bound into the bush, and at the same time himself crawled steadily away.
+And on hands and knees, slowly and cautiously, he crawled on, till his
+knees were wet on the soggy mold, When he listened he heard naught but
+the moaning wind and the drip-drip of the fog from the branches. Never
+abating his caution, he stood erect and went on to the stone wall, over
+which he climbed and dropped down to the road outside.
+
+Feeling his way in a clump of bushes, he drew out a bicycle and prepared
+to mount. He was in the act of driving the gear around with his foot for
+the purpose of getting the opposite pedal in position, when he heard the
+thud of a heavy body that landed lightly and evidently on its feet.
+He did not wait for more, but ran, with hands on the handles of his
+bicycle, until he was able to vault astride the saddle, catch the
+pedals, and start a spurt. Behind he could hear the quick thud-thud
+of feet on the dust of the road, but he drew away from it and lost it.
+Unfortunately, he had started away from the direction of town and was
+heading higher up into the hills. He knew that on this particular road
+there were no cross roads. The only way back was past that terror,
+and he could not steel himself to face it. At the end of half an hour,
+finding himself on an ever increasing grade, he dismounted. For still
+greater safety, leaving the wheel by the roadside, he climbed through a
+fence into what he decided was a hillside pasture, spread a newspaper on
+the ground, and sat down.
+
+“Gosh!” he said aloud, mopping the sweat and fog from his face.
+
+And “Gosh!” he said once again, while rolling a cigarette and as he
+pondered the problem of getting back.
+
+But he made no attempt to go back. He was resolved not to face that
+road in the dark, and with head bowed on knees, he dozed, waiting for
+daylight.
+
+How long afterward he did not know, he was awakened by the yapping bark
+of a young coyote. As he looked about and located it on the brow of the
+hill behind him, he noted the change that had come over the face of the
+night. The fog was gone; the stars and moon were out; even the wind had
+died down. It had transformed into a balmy California summer night.
+He tried to doze again, but the yap of the coyote disturbed him. Half
+asleep, he heard a wild and eery chant. Looking about him, he noticed
+that the coyote had ceased its noise and was running away along the
+crest of the hill, and behind it, in full pursuit, no longer chanting,
+ran the naked creature he had encountered in the garden. It was a young
+coyote, and it was being overtaken when the chase passed from view. The
+man trembled as with a chill as he started to his feet, clambered over
+the fence, and mounted his wheel. But it was his chance and he knew it.
+The terror was no longer between him and Mill Valley.
+
+He sped at a breakneck rate down the hill, but in the turn at the
+bottom, in the deep shadows, he encountered a chuck-hole and pitched
+headlong over the handle bar.
+
+“It's sure not my night,” he muttered, as he examined the broken fork of
+the machine.
+
+Shouldering the useless wheel, he trudged on. In time he came to the
+stone wall, and, half disbelieving his experience, he sought in the road
+for tracks, and found them--moccasin tracks, large ones, deep-bitten
+into the dust at the toes. It was while bending over them, examining,
+that again he heard the eery chant. He had seen the thing pursue the
+coyote, and he knew he had no chance on a straight run. He did not
+attempt it, contenting himself with hiding in the shadows on the off
+side of the road.
+
+And again he saw the thing that was like a naked man, running swiftly
+and lightly and singing as it ran. Opposite him it paused, and his heart
+stood still. But instead of coming toward his hiding-place, it leaped
+into the air, caught the branch of a roadside tree, and swung swiftly
+upward, from limb to limb, like an ape. It swung across the wall, and a
+dozen feet above the top, into the branches of another tree, and dropped
+out of sight to the ground. The man waited a few wondering minutes, then
+started on.
+
+II
+
+Dave Slotter leaned belligerently against the desk that barred the way
+to the private office of James Ward, senior partner of the firm of Ward,
+Knowles & Co. Dave was angry. Every one in the outer office had looked
+him over suspiciously, and the man who faced him was excessively
+suspicious.
+
+“You just tell Mr. Ward it's important,” he urged.
+
+“I tell you he is dictating and cannot be disturbed,” was the answer.
+“Come to-morrow.”
+
+“To-morrow will be too late. You just trot along and tell Mr. Ward it's
+a matter of life and death.”
+
+The secretary hesitated and Dave seized the advantage.
+
+“You just tell him I was across the bay in Mill Valley last night, and
+that I want to put him wise to something.”
+
+“What name?” was the query.
+
+“Never mind the name. He don't know me.”
+
+When Dave was shown into the private office, he was still in the
+belligerent frame of mind, but when he saw a large fair man whirl in
+a revolving chair from dictating to a stenographer to face him, Dave's
+demeanor abruptly changed. He did not know why it changed, and he was
+secretly angry with himself.
+
+“You are Mr. Ward?” Dave asked with a fatuousness that still further
+irritated him. He had never intended it at all.
+
+“Yes,” came the answer.
+
+“And who are you?”
+
+“Harry Bancroft,” Dave lied. “You don't know me, and my name don't
+matter.”
+
+“You sent in word that you were in Mill Valley last night?”
+
+“You live there, don't you?” Dave countered, looking suspiciously at the
+stenographer.
+
+“Yes. What do you mean to see me about? I am very busy.”
+
+“I'd like to see you alone, sir.”
+
+Mr. Ward gave him a quick, penetrating look, hesitated, then made up his
+mind.
+
+“That will do for a few minutes, Miss Potter.”
+
+The girl arose, gathered her notes together, and passed out. Dave looked
+at Mr. James Ward wonderingly, until that gentleman broke his train of
+inchoate thought.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“I was over in Mill Valley last night,” Dave began confusedly.
+
+“I've heard that before. What do you want?”
+
+And Dave proceeded in the face of a growing conviction that was
+unbelievable. “I was at your house, or in the grounds, I mean.”
+
+“What were you doing there?”
+
+“I came to break in,” Dave answered in all frankness.
+
+“I heard you lived all alone with a Chinaman for cook, and it looked
+good to me. Only I didn't break in. Something happened that prevented.
+That's why I'm here. I come to warn you. I found a wild man loose in
+your grounds--a regular devil. He could pull a guy like me to pieces.
+He gave me the run of my life. He don't wear any clothes to speak of, he
+climbs trees like a monkey, and he runs like a deer. I saw him chasing a
+coyote, and the last I saw of it, by God, he was gaining on it.”
+
+Dave paused and looked for the effect that would follow his words. But
+no effect came. James Ward was quietly curious, and that was all.
+
+“Very remarkable, very remarkable,” he murmured. “A wild man, you say.
+Why have you come to tell me?”
+
+“To warn you of your danger. I'm something of a hard proposition myself,
+but I don't believe in killing people... that is, unnecessarily. I
+realized that you was in danger. I thought I'd warn you. Honest, that's
+the game. Of course, if you wanted to give me anything for my trouble,
+I'd take it. That was in my mind, too. But I don't care whether you give
+me anything or not. I've warned you any way, and done my duty.”
+
+Mr. Ward meditated and drummed on the surface of his desk. Dave noticed
+they were large, powerful hands, withal well-cared for despite their
+dark sunburn. Also, he noted what had already caught his eye before--a
+tiny strip of flesh-colored courtplaster on the forehead over one eye.
+And still the thought that forced itself into his mind was unbelievable.
+
+Mr. Ward took a wallet from his inside coat pocket, drew out a
+greenback, and passed it to Dave, who noted as he pocketed it that it
+was for twenty dollars.
+
+“Thank you,” said Mr. Ward, indicating that the interview was at an end.
+
+“I shall have the matter investigated. A wild man running loose IS
+dangerous.”
+
+But so quiet a man was Mr. Ward, that Dave's courage returned. Besides,
+a new theory had suggested itself. The wild man was evidently Mr. Ward's
+brother, a lunatic privately confined. Dave had heard of such things.
+Perhaps Mr. Ward wanted it kept quiet. That was why he had given him the
+twenty dollars.
+
+“Say,” Dave began, “now I come to think of it that wild man looked a lot
+like you--”
+
+That was as far as Dave got, for at that moment he witnessed a
+transformation and found himself gazing into the same unspeakably
+ferocious blue eyes of the night before, at the same clutching
+talon-like hands, and at the same formidable bulk in the act of
+springing upon him. But this time Dave had no night-stick to throw, and
+he was caught by the biceps of both arms in a grip so terrific that it
+made him groan with pain. He saw the large white teeth exposed, for all
+the world as a dog's about to bite. Mr. Ward's beard brushed his face
+as the teeth went in for the grip on his throat. But the bite was not
+given. Instead, Dave felt the other's body stiffen as with an iron
+restraint, and then he was flung aside, without effort but with such
+force that only the wall stopped his momentum and dropped him gasping to
+the floor.
+
+“What do you mean by coming here and trying to blackmail me?” Mr. Ward
+was snarling at him. “Here, give me back that money.”
+
+Dave passed the bill back without a word.
+
+“I thought you came here with good intentions. I know you now. Let me
+see and hear no more of you, or I'll put you in prison where you belong.
+Do you understand?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” Dave gasped.
+
+“Then go.”
+
+And Dave went, without further word, both his biceps aching intolerably
+from the bruise of that tremendous grip. As his hand rested on the door
+knob, he was stopped.
+
+“You were lucky,” Mr. Ward was saying, and Dave noted that his face and
+eyes were cruel and gloating and proud.
+
+“You were lucky. Had I wanted, I could have torn your muscles out of
+your arms and thrown them in the waste basket there.”
+
+“Yes, sir,” said Dave; and absolute conviction vibrated in his voice.
+
+He opened the door and passed out. The secretary looked at him
+interrogatively.
+
+“Gosh!” was all Dave vouchsafed, and with this utterance passed out of
+the offices and the story.
+
+III
+
+James G. Ward was forty years of age, a successful business man, and
+very unhappy. For forty years he had vainly tried to solve a problem
+that was really himself and that with increasing years became more
+and more a woeful affliction. In himself he was two men, and,
+chronologically speaking, these men were several thousand years or so
+apart. He had studied the question of dual personality probably more
+profoundly than any half dozen of the leading specialists in that
+intricate and mysterious psychological field. In himself he was a
+different case from any that had been recorded. Even the most fanciful
+flights of the fiction-writers had not quite hit upon him. He was not
+a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, nor was he like the unfortunate young man in
+Kipling's “Greatest Story in the World.” His two personalities were so
+mixed that they were practically aware of themselves and of each other
+all the time.
+
+His other self he had located as a savage and a barbarian living under
+the primitive conditions of several thousand years before. But which
+self was he, and which was the other, he could never tell. For he was
+both selves, and both selves all the time. Very rarely indeed did it
+happen that one self did not know what the other was doing. Another
+thing was that he had no visions nor memories of the past in which that
+early self had lived. That early self lived in the present; but while
+it lived in the present, it was under the compulsion to live the way of
+life that must have been in that distant past.
+
+In his childhood he had been a problem to his father and mother, and to
+the family doctors, though never had they come within a thousand miles
+of hitting upon the clue to his erratic, conduct. Thus, they could not
+understand his excessive somnolence in the forenoon, nor his excessive
+activity at night. When they found him wandering along the hallways
+at night, or climbing over giddy roofs, or running in the hills, they
+decided he was a somnambulist. In reality he was wide-eyed awake and
+merely under the nightroaming compulsion of his early self. Questioned
+by an obtuse medico, he once told the truth and suffered the ignominy of
+having the revelation contemptuously labeled and dismissed as “dreams.”
+
+The point was, that as twilight and evening came on he became wakeful.
+The four walls of a room were an irk and a restraint. He heard a
+thousand voices whispering to him through the darkness. The night
+called to him, for he was, for that period of the twenty-four hours,
+essentially a night-prowler. But nobody understood, and never again did
+he attempt to explain. They classified him as a sleep-walker and took
+precautions accordingly--precautions that very often were futile. As his
+childhood advanced, he grew more cunning, so that the major portion of
+all his nights were spent in the open at realizing his other self. As
+a result, he slept in the forenoons. Morning studies and schools were
+impossible, and it was discovered that only in the afternoons, under
+private teachers, could he be taught anything. Thus was his modern self
+educated and developed.
+
+But a problem, as a child, he ever remained. He was known as a little
+demon, of insensate cruelty and viciousness. The family medicos
+privately adjudged him a mental monstrosity and degenerate. Such few
+boy companions as he had, hailed him as a wonder, though they were all
+afraid of him. He could outclimb, outswim, outrun, outdevil any of
+them; while none dared fight with him. He was too terribly strong, madly
+furious.
+
+When nine years of age he ran away to the hills, where he flourished,
+night-prowling, for seven weeks before he was discovered and brought
+home. The marvel was how he had managed to subsist and keep in condition
+during that time. They did not know, and he never told them, of the
+rabbits he had killed, of the quail, young and old, he had captured
+and devoured, of the farmers' chicken-roosts he had raided, nor of the
+cave-lair he had made and carpeted with dry leaves and grasses and in
+which he had slept in warmth and comfort through the forenoons of many
+days.
+
+At college he was notorious for his sleepiness and stupidity during the
+morning lectures and for his brilliance in the afternoon. By collateral
+reading and by borrowing the notebook of his fellow students he managed
+to scrape through the detestable morning courses, while his afternoon
+courses were triumphs. In football he proved a giant and a terror, and,
+in almost every form of track athletics, save for strange Berserker
+rages that were sometimes displayed, he could be depended upon to win.
+But his fellows were afraid to box with him, and he signalized his last
+wrestling bout by sinking his teeth into the shoulder of his opponent.
+
+After college, his father, in despair, sent him among the cow-punchers
+of a Wyoming ranch. Three months later the doughty cowmen confessed he
+was too much for them and telegraphed his father to come and take the
+wild man away. Also, when the father arrived to take him away, the
+cowmen allowed that they would vastly prefer chumming with howling
+cannibals, gibbering lunatics, cavorting gorillas, grizzly bears, and
+man-eating tigers than with this particular Young college product with
+hair parted in the middle.
+
+There was one exception to the lack of memory of the life of his early
+self, and that was language. By some quirk of atavism, a certain portion
+of that early self's language had come down to him as a racial memory.
+In moments of happiness, exaltation, or battle, he was prone to burst
+out in wild barbaric songs or chants. It was by this means that he
+located in time and space that strayed half of him who should have been
+dead and dust for thousands of years. He sang, once, and deliberately,
+several of the ancient chants in the presence of Professor Wertz, who
+gave courses in old Saxon and who was a philogist of repute and passion.
+At the first one, the professor pricked up his ears and demanded to
+know what mongrel tongue or hog-German it was. When the second chant was
+rendered, the professor was highly excited. James Ward then concluded
+the performance by giving a song that always irresistibly rushed to his
+lips when he was engaged in fierce struggling or fighting. Then it was
+that Professor Wertz proclaimed it no hog-German, but early German, or
+early Teuton, of a date that must far precede anything that had ever
+been discovered and handed down by the scholars. So early was it that
+it was beyond him; yet it was filled with haunting reminiscences of
+word-forms he knew and which his trained intuition told him were true
+and real. He demanded the source of the songs, and asked to borrow the
+precious book that contained them. Also, he demanded to know why
+young Ward had always posed as being profoundly ignorant of the German
+language. And Ward could neither explain his ignorance nor lend the
+book. Whereupon, after pleadings and entreaties that extended through
+weeks, Professor Wert took a dislike to the young man, believed him
+a liar, and classified him as a man of monstrous selfishness for not
+giving him a glimpse of this wonderful screed that was older than the
+oldest any philologist had ever known or dreamed.
+
+But little good did it do this much-mixed young man to know that half of
+him was late American and the other half early Teuton. Nevertheless, the
+late American in him was no weakling, and he (if he were a he and had
+a shred of existence outside of these two) compelled an adjustment or
+compromise between his one self that was a nightprowling savage that
+kept his other self sleepy of mornings, and that other self that was
+cultured and refined and that wanted to be normal and live and love and
+prosecute business like other people. The afternoons and early evenings
+he gave to the one, the nights to the other; the forenoons and parts of
+the nights were devoted to sleep for the twain. But in the mornings he
+slept in bed like a civilized man. In the night time he slept like a
+wild animal, as he had slept Dave Slotter stepped on him in the woods.
+
+Persuading his father to advance the capital, he went into business
+and keen and successful business he made of it, devoting his afternoons
+whole-souled to it, while his partner devoted the mornings. The early
+evenings he spent socially, but, as the hour grew to nine or ten, an
+irresistible restlessness overcame him and he disappeared from the
+haunts of men until the next afternoon. Friends and acquaintances
+thought that he spent much of his time in sport. And they were right,
+though they never would have dreamed of the nature of the sport, even if
+they had seen him running coyotes in night-chases over the hills of Mill
+Valley. Neither were the schooner captains believed when they reported
+seeing, on cold winter mornings, a man swimming in the tide-rips of
+Raccoon Straits or in the swift currents between Goat island and Angel
+Island miles from shore.
+
+In the bungalow at Mill Valley he lived alone, save for Lee Sing, the
+Chinese cook and factotum, who knew much about the strangeness of his
+master, who was paid well for saying nothing, and who never did say
+anything. After the satisfaction of his nights, a morning's sleep, and a
+breakfast of Lee Sing's, James Ward crossed the bay to San Francisco on
+a midday ferryboat and went to the club and on to his office, as normal
+and conventional a man of business as could be found in the city. But as
+the evening lengthened, the night called to him. There came a quickening
+of all his perceptions and a restlessness. His hearing was suddenly
+acute; the myriad night-noises told him a luring and familiar story;
+and, if alone, he would begin to pace up and down the narrow room like
+any caged animal from the wild.
+
+Once, he ventured to fall in love. He never permitted himself that
+diversion again. He was afraid. And for many a day the young lady,
+scared at least out of a portion of her young ladyhood, bore on her
+arms and shoulders and wrists divers black-and-blue bruises--tokens of
+caresses which he had bestowed in all fond gentleness but too late
+at night. There was the mistake. Had he ventured love-making in the
+afternoon, all would have been well, for it would have been as the quiet
+gentleman that he would have made love--but at night it was the uncouth,
+wife-stealing savage of the dark German forests. Out of his wisdom, he
+decided that afternoon love-making could be prosecuted successfully; but
+out of the same wisdom he was convinced that marriage as would prove
+a ghastly failure. He found it appalling to imagine being married and
+encountering his wife after dark.
+
+So he had eschewed all love-making, regulated his dual life, cleaned up
+a million in business, fought shy of match-making mamas and bright-eyed
+and eager young ladies of various ages, met Lilian Gersdale and made
+it a rigid observance never to see her later than eight o'clock in the
+evening, run of nights after his coyotes, and slept in forest lairs--and
+through it all had kept his secret safe save Lee Sing... and now,
+Dave Slotter. It was the latter's discovery of both his selves that
+frightened him. In spite of the counter fright he had given the burglar,
+the latter might talk. And even if he did not, sooner or later he would
+be found out by some one else.
+
+Thus it was that James Ward made a fresh and heroic effort to control
+the Teutonic barbarian that was half of him. So well did he make it
+a point to see Lilian in the afternoons, that the time came when
+she accepted him for better or worse, and when he prayed privily and
+fervently that it was not for worse. During this period no prize-fighter
+ever trained more harshly and faithfully for a contest than he trained
+to subdue the wild savage in him. Among other things, he strove to
+exhaust himself during the day, so that sleep would render him deaf to
+the call of the night. He took a vacation from the office and went on
+long hunting trips, following the deer through the most inaccessible and
+rugged country he could find--and always in the daytime. Night found him
+indoors and tired. At home he installed a score of exercise machines,
+and where other men might go through a particular movement ten times, he
+went hundreds. Also, as a compromise, he built a sleeping porch on the
+second story. Here he at least breathed the blessed night air. Double
+screens prevented him from escaping into the woods, and each night Lee
+Sing locked him in and each morning let him out.
+
+The time came, in the month of August, when he engaged additional
+servants to assist Lee Sing and dared a house party in his Mill Valley
+bungalow. Lilian, her mother and brother, and half a dozen mutual
+friends, were the guests. For two days and nights all went well. And on
+the third night, playing bridge till eleven o'clock, he had reason to be
+proud of himself. His restlessness fully hid, but as luck would have it,
+Lilian Gersdale was his opponent on his right. She was a frail delicate
+flower of a woman, and in his night-mood her very frailty incensed
+him. Not that he loved her less, but that he felt almost irresistibly
+impelled to reach out and paw and maul her. Especially was this true
+when she was engaged in playing a winning hand against him.
+
+He had one of the deer-hounds brought in and, when it seemed he must fly
+to pieces with the tension, a caressing hand laid on the animal brought
+him relief. These contacts with the hairy coat gave him instant easement
+and enabled him to play out the evening. Nor did anyone guess the
+while terrible struggle their host was making, the while he laughed so
+carelessly and played so keenly and deliberately.
+
+When they separated for the night, he saw to it that he parted from
+Lilian in the presence or the others. Once on his sleeping porch
+and safely locked in, he doubled and tripled and even quadrupled his
+exercises until, exhausted, he lay down on the couch to woo sleep and to
+ponder two problems that especially troubled him. One was this matter
+of exercise. It was a paradox. The more he exercised in this excessive
+fashion, the stronger he became. While it was true that he thus quite
+tired out his night-running Teutonic self, it seemed that he was merely
+setting back the fatal day when his strength would be too much for him
+and overpower him, and then it would be a strength more terrible than
+he had yet known. The other problem was that of his marriage and of the
+stratagems he must employ in order to avoid his wife after dark. And
+thus, fruitlessly pondering, he fell asleep.
+
+Now, where the huge grizzly bear came from that night was long a
+mystery, while the people of the Springs Brothers' Circus, showing at
+Sausalito, searched long and vainly for “Big Ben, the Biggest Grizzly
+in Captivity.” But Big Ben escaped, and, out of the mazes of half a
+thousand bungalows and country estates, selected the grounds of James J.
+Ward for visitation. The self first Mr. Ward knew was when he found him
+on his feet, quivering and tense, a surge of battle in his breast and
+on his lips the old war-chant. From without came a wild baying and
+bellowing of the hounds. And sharp as a knife-thrust through the
+pandemonium came the agony of a stricken dog--his dog, he knew.
+
+Not stopping for slippers, pajama-clad, he burst through the door Lee
+Sing had so carefully locked, and sped down the stairs and out into
+the night. As his naked feet struck the graveled driveway, he stopped
+abruptly, reached under the steps to a hiding-place he knew well, and
+pulled forth a huge knotty club--his old companion on many a mad night
+adventure on the hills. The frantic hullabaloo of the dogs was coming
+nearer, and, swinging the club, he sprang straight into the thickets to
+meet it.
+
+The aroused household assembled on the wide veranda. Somebody turned
+on the electric lights, but they could see nothing but one another's
+frightened faces. Beyond the brightly illuminated driveway the trees
+formed a wall of impenetrable blackness. Yet somewhere in that blackness
+a terrible struggle was going on. There was an infernal outcry of
+animals, a great snarling and growling, the sound of blows being struck
+and a smashing and crashing of underbrush by heavy bodies.
+
+The tide of battle swept out from among the trees and upon the driveway
+just beneath the onlookers. Then they saw. Mrs. Gersdale cried out
+and clung fainting to her son. Lilian, clutching the railing so
+spasmodically that a bruising hurt was left in her finger-ends for
+days, gazed horror-stricken at a yellow-haired, wild-eyed giant whom she
+recognized as the man who was to be her husband. He was swinging a great
+club, and fighting furiously and calmly with a shaggy monster that was
+bigger than any bear she had ever seen. One rip of the beast's claws had
+dragged away Ward's pajama-coat and streaked his flesh with blood.
+
+While most of Lilian Gersdale's fright was for the man beloved, there
+was a large portion of it due to the man himself. Never had she dreamed
+so formidable and magnificent a savage lurked under the starched shirt
+and conventional garb of her betrothed. And never had she had any
+conception of how a man battled. Such a battle was certainly not modern;
+nor was she there beholding a modern man, though she did not know it.
+For this was not Mr. James J. Ward, the San Francisco business man, but
+one, unnamed and unknown, a crude, rude savage creature who, by some
+freak of chance, lived again after thrice a thousand years.
+
+The hounds, ever maintaining their mad uproar, circled about the fight,
+or dashed in and out, distracting the bear. When the animal turned to
+meet such flanking assaults, the man leaped in and the club came down.
+Angered afresh by every such blow, the bear would rush, and the man,
+leaping and skipping, avoiding the dogs, went backwards or circled
+to one side or the other. Whereupon the dogs, taking advantage of the
+opening, would again spring in and draw the animal's wrath to them.
+
+The end came suddenly. Whirling, the grizzly caught a hound with a
+wide sweeping cuff that sent the brute, its ribs caved in and its back
+broken, hurtling twenty feet. Then the human brute went mad. A foaming
+rage flecked the lips that parted with a wild inarticulate cry, as it
+sprang in, swung the club mightily in both hands, and brought it down
+full on the head of the uprearing grizzly. Not even the skull of a
+grizzly could withstand the crushing force of such a blow, and the
+animal went down to meet the worrying of the hounds. And through their
+scurrying leaped the man, squarely upon the body, where, in the white
+electric light, resting on his club, he chanted a triumph in an unknown
+tongue--a song so ancient that Professor Wertz would have given ten
+years of his life for it.
+
+His guests rushed to possess him and acclaim him, but James Ward,
+suddenly looking out of the eyes of the early Teuton, saw the fair frail
+Twentieth Century girl he loved, and felt something snap in his brain.
+He staggered weakly toward her, dropped the club, and nearly fell.
+Something had gone wrong with him. Inside his brain was an intolerable
+agony. It seemed as if the soul of him were flying asunder. Following
+the excited gaze of the others, he glanced back and saw the carcass of
+the bear. The sight filled him with fear. He uttered a cry and would
+have fled, had they not restrained him and led him into the bungalow.
+
+*****
+
+James J. Ward is still at the head of the firm of Ward, Knowles & Co.
+But he no longer lives in the country; nor does he run of nights after
+the coyotes under the moon. The early Teuton in him died the night of
+the Mill Valley fight with the bear. James J. Ward is now wholly
+James J. Ward, and he shares no part of his being with any vagabond
+anachronism from the younger world. And so wholly is James J. Ward
+modern, that he knows in all its bitter fullness the curse of civilized
+fear. He is now afraid of the dark, and night in the forest is to him a
+thing of abysmal terror. His city house is of the spick and span order,
+and he evinces a great interest in burglarproof devices. His home is
+a tangle of electric wires, and after bed-time a guest can scarcely
+breathe without setting off an alarm. Also, he had invented a
+combination keyless door-lock that travelers may carry in their vest
+pockets and apply immediately and successfully under all circumstances.
+But his wife does not deem him a coward. She knows better. And, like
+any hero, he is content to rest on his laurels. His bravery is never
+questioned by those friends who are aware of the Mill Valley episode.
+
+
+
+
+THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
+
+CARTER WATSON, a current magazine under his arm, strolled slowly along,
+gazing about him curiously. Twenty years had elapsed since he had been
+on this particular street, and the changes were great and stupefying.
+This Western city of three hundred thousand souls had contained but
+thirty thousand, when, as a boy, he had been wont to ramble along
+its streets. In those days the street he was now on had been a quiet
+residence street in the respectable workingclass quarter. On this late
+afternoon he found that it had been submerged by a vast and vicious
+tenderloin. Chinese and Japanese shops and dens abounded, all confusedly
+intermingled with low white resorts and boozing dens. This quiet street
+of his youth had become the toughest quarter of the city.
+
+He looked at his watch. It was half-past five. It was the slack time of
+the day in such a region, as he well knew, yet he was curious to see. In
+all his score of years of wandering and studying social conditions over
+the world, he had carried with him the memory of his old town as a sweet
+and wholesome place. The metamorphosis he now beheld was startling. He
+certainly must continue his stroll and glimpse the infamy to which his
+town had descended.
+
+Another thing: Carter Watson had a keen social and civic consciousness.
+Independently wealthy, he had been loath to dissipate his energies
+in the pink teas and freak dinners of society, while actresses,
+race-horses, and kindred diversions had left him cold. He had the
+ethical bee in his bonnet and was a reformer of no mean pretension,
+though his work had been mainly in the line of contributions to the
+heavier reviews and quarterlies and to the publication over his name
+of brightly, cleverly written books on the working classes and the
+slum-dwellers. Among the twenty-seven to his credit occurred titles such
+as, “If Christ Came to New Orleans,” “The Worked-out Worker,” “Tenement
+Reform in Berlin,” “The Rural Slums of England,” “The people of the East
+Side,” “Reform Versus Revolution,” “The University Settlement as a Hot
+Bed of Radicalism” and “The Cave Man of Civilization.”
+
+But Carter Watson was neither morbid nor fanatic. He did not lose his
+head over the horrors he encountered, studied, and exposed. No hair
+brained enthusiasm branded him. His humor saved him, as did his wide
+experience and his conservative philosophic temperament. Nor did he
+have any patience with lightning change reform theories. As he saw it,
+society would grow better only through the painfully slow and arduously
+painful processes of evolution. There were no short cuts, no sudden
+regenerations. The betterment of mankind must be worked out in agony and
+misery just as all past social betterments had been worked out.
+
+But on this late summer afternoon, Carter Watson was curious. As he
+moved along he paused before a gaudy drinking place. The sign above
+read, “The Vendome.” There were two entrances. One evidently led to the
+bar. This he did not explore. The other was a narrow hallway.
+Passing through this he found himself in a huge room, filled with
+chair-encircled tables and quite deserted. In the dim light he made out
+a piano in the distance. Making a mental note that he would come back
+some time and study the class of persons that must sit and drink at
+those multitudinous tables, he proceeded to circumnavigate the room.
+
+Now, at the rear, a short hallway led off to a small kitchen, and here,
+at a table, alone, sat Patsy Horan, proprietor of the Vendome, consuming
+a hasty supper ere the evening rush of business. Also, Patsy Horan
+was angry with the world. He had got out of the wrong side of bed that
+morning, and nothing had gone right all day. Had his barkeepers been
+asked, they would have described his mental condition as a grouch. But
+Carter Watson did not know this. As he passed the little hallway, Patsy
+Horan's sullen eyes lighted on the magazine he carried under his arm.
+Patsy did not know Carter Watson, nor did he know that what he carried
+under his arm was a magazine. Patsy, out of the depths of his grouch,
+decided that this stranger was one of those pests who marred and scarred
+the walls of his back rooms by tacking up or pasting up advertisements.
+The color on the front cover of the magazine convinced him that it was
+such an advertisement. Thus the trouble began. Knife and fork in hand,
+Patsy leaped for Carter Watson.
+
+“Out wid yeh!” Patsy bellowed. “I know yer game!”
+
+Carter Watson was startled. The man had come upon him like the eruption
+of a jack-in-the-box.
+
+“A defacin' me walls,” cried Patsy, at the same time emitting a string
+of vivid and vile, rather than virile, epithets of opprobrium.
+
+“If I have given any offense I did not mean to--”
+
+But that was as far as the visitor got. Patsy interrupted.
+
+“Get out wid yeh; yeh talk too much wid yer mouth,” quoted Patsy,
+emphasizing his remarks with flourishes of the knife and fork.
+
+Carter Watson caught a quick vision of that eating-fork inserted
+uncomfortably between his ribs, knew that it would be rash to talk
+further with his mouth, and promptly turned to go. The sight of his
+meekly retreating back must have further enraged Patsy Horan, for that
+worthy, dropping the table implements, sprang upon him.
+
+Patsy weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. So did Watson. In this they
+were equal. But Patsy was a rushing, rough-and-tumble saloon-fighter,
+while Watson was a boxer. In this the latter had the advantage, for
+Patsy came in wide open, swinging his right in a perilous sweep. All
+Watson had to do was to straight-left him and escape. But Watson had
+another advantage. His boxing, and his experience in the slums and
+ghettos of the world, had taught him restraint.
+
+He pivoted on his feet, and, instead of striking, ducked the other's
+swinging blow and went into a clinch. But Patsy, charging like a bull,
+had the momentum of his rush, while Watson, whirling to meet him, had no
+momentum. As a result, the pair of them went down, with all their three
+hundred and sixty pounds of weight, in a long crashing fall, Watson
+underneath. He lay with his head touching the rear wall of the large
+room. The street was a hundred and fifty feet away, and he did some
+quick thinking. His first thought was to avoid trouble. He had no wish
+to get into the papers of this, his childhood town, where many of his
+relatives and family friends still lived.
+
+So it was that he locked his arms around the man on top of him, held him
+close, and waited for the help to come that must come in response to the
+crash of the fall. The help came--that is, six men ran in from the bar
+and formed about in a semi-circle.
+
+“Take him off, fellows,” Watson said. “I haven't struck him, and I don't
+want any fight.”
+
+But the semi-circle remained silent. Watson held on and waited. Patsy,
+after various vain efforts to inflict damage, made an overture.
+
+“Leggo o' me an' I'll get off o' yeh,” said he.
+
+Watson let go, but when Patsy scrambled to his feet he stood over his
+recumbent foe, ready to strike.
+
+“Get up,” Patsy commanded.
+
+His voice was stern and implacable, like the voice of God calling to
+judgment, and Watson knew there was no mercy there.
+
+“Stand back and I'll get up,” he countered.
+
+“If yer a gentleman, get up,” quoth Patsy, his pale blue eyes aflame
+with wrath, his fist ready for a crushing blow.
+
+At the same moment he drew his foot back to kick the other in the face.
+Watson blocked the kick with his crossed arms and sprang to his feet so
+quickly that he was in a clinch with his antagonist before the latter
+could strike. Holding him, Watson spoke to the onlookers:
+
+“Take him away from me, fellows. You see I am not striking him. I don't
+want to fight. I want to get out of here.”
+
+The circle did not move nor speak. Its silence was ominous and sent a
+chill to Watson's heart.
+
+Patsy made an effort to throw him, which culminated in his putting Patsy
+on his back. Tearing loose from him, Watson sprang to his feet and made
+for the door. But the circle of men was interposed a wall. He noticed
+the white, pasty faces, the kind that never see the sun, and knew that
+the men who barred his way were the nightprowlers and preying beasts
+of the city jungle. By them he was thrust back upon the pursuing,
+bull-rushing Patsy.
+
+Again it was a clinch, in which, in momentary safety, Watson appealed
+to the gang. And again his words fell on deaf ears. Then it was that
+he knew of many similar knew fear. For he had known of many similar
+situations, in low dens like this, when solitary men were man-handled,
+their ribs and features caved in, themselves beaten and kicked to death.
+And he knew, further, that if he were to escape he must neither strike
+his assailant nor any of the men who opposed him.
+
+Yet in him was righteous indignation. Under no circumstances could
+seven to one be fair. Also, he was angry, and there stirred in him
+the fighting beast that is in all men. But he remembered his wife and
+children, his unfinished book, the ten thousand rolling acres of the
+up-country ranch he loved so well. He even saw in flashing visions the
+blue of the sky, the golden sun pouring down on his flower-spangled
+meadows, the lazy cattle knee-deep in the brooks, and the flash of trout
+in the riffles. Life was good-too good for him to risk it for a moment's
+sway of the beast. In short, Carter Watson was cool and scared.
+
+His opponent, locked by his masterly clinch, was striving to throw him.
+Again Watson put him on the floor, broke away, and was thrust back by
+the pasty-faced circle to duck Patsy's swinging right and effect another
+clinch. This happened many times. And Watson grew even cooler, while
+the baffled Patsy, unable to inflict punishment, raged wildly and more
+wildly. He took to batting with his head in the clinches. The first
+time, he landed his forehead flush on Watson's nose. After that, the
+latter, in the clinches, buried his face in Patsy's breast. But the
+enraged Patsy batted on, striking his own eye and nose and cheek on the
+top of the other's head. The more he was thus injured, the more and the
+harder did Patsy bat.
+
+This one-sided contest continued for twelve or fifteen minutes. Watson
+never struck a blow, and strove only to escape. Sometimes, in the free
+moments, circling about among the tables as he tried to win the door,
+the pasty-faced men gripped his coat-tails and flung him back at the
+swinging right of the on-rushing Patsy. Time upon time, and times
+without end, he clinched and put Patsy on his back, each time first
+whirling him around and putting him down in the direction of the door
+and gaining toward that goal by the length of the fall.
+
+In the end, hatless, disheveled, with streaming nose and one eye closed,
+Watson won to the sidewalk and into the arms of a policeman.
+
+“Arrest that man,” Watson panted.
+
+“Hello, Patsy,” said the policeman. “What's the mix-up?”
+
+“Hello, Charley,” was the answer. “This guy comes in--”
+
+“Arrest that man, officer,” Watson repeated.
+
+“G'wan! Beat it!” said Patsy.
+
+“Beat it!” added the policeman. “If you don't, I'll pull you in.”
+
+“Not unless you arrest that man. He has committed a violent and
+unprovoked assault on me.”
+
+“Is it so, Patsy?” was the officer's query.
+
+“Nah. Lemme tell you, Charley, an' I got the witnesses to prove it, so
+help me God. I was settin' in me kitchen eatin' a bowl of soup, when
+this guy comes in an' gets gay wid me. I never seen him in me born days
+before. He was drunk--”
+
+“Look at me, officer,” protested the indignant sociologist. “Am I
+drunk?”
+
+The officer looked at him with sullen, menacing eyes and nodded to Patsy
+to continue.
+
+“This guy gets gay wid me. 'I'm Tim McGrath,' says he, 'an' I can do the
+like to you,' says he. 'Put up yer hands.' I smiles, an' wid that, biff
+biff, he lands me twice an' spills me soup. Look at me eye. I'm fair
+murdered.”
+
+“What are you going to do, officer?” Watson demanded.
+
+“Go on, beat it,” was the answer, “or I'll pull you sure.”
+
+The civic righteousness of Carter Watson flamed up.
+
+“Mr. Officer, I protest--”
+
+But at that moment the policeman grabbed his arm with a savage jerk that
+nearly overthrew him.
+
+“Come on, you're pulled.”
+
+“Arrest him, too,” Watson demanded.
+
+“Nix on that play,” was the reply.
+
+“What did you assault him for, him a peacefully eatin' his soup?”
+
+II
+
+Carter Watson was genuinely angry. Not only had he been wantonly
+assaulted, badly battered, and arrested, but the morning papers without
+exception came out with lurid accounts of his drunken brawl with the
+proprietor of the notorious Vendome. Not one accurate or truthful line
+was published. Patsy Horan and his satellites described the battle in
+detail. The one incontestable thing was that Carter Watson had been
+drunk. Thrice he had been thrown out of the place and into the gutter,
+and thrice he had come back, breathing blood and fire and announcing
+that he was going to clean out the place. “EMINENT SOCIOLOGIST JAGGED
+AND JUGGED,” was the first head-line he read, on the front page,
+accompanied by a large portrait of himself. Other headlines were:
+“CARTER WATSON ASPIRED TO CHAMPIONSHIP HONORS”; “CARTER WATSON GETS
+HIS”; “NOTED SOCIOLOGIST ATTEMPTS TO CLEAN OUT A TENDERLOIN CAFE”; and
+“CARTER WATSON KNOCKED OUT BY PATSY HORAN IN THREE ROUNDS.”
+
+At the police court, next morning, under bail, appeared Carter Watson
+to answer the complaint of the People Versus Carter Watson, for
+the latter's assault and battery on one Patsy Horan. But first, the
+Prosecuting Attorney, who was paid to prosecute all offenders against
+the People, drew him aside and talked with him privately.
+
+“Why not let it drop!” said the Prosecuting Attorney. “I tell you what
+you do, Mr. Watson: Shake hands with Mr. Horan and make it up, and we'll
+drop the case right here. A word to the Judge, and the case against you
+will be dismissed.”
+
+“But I don't want it dismissed,” was the answer. “Your office being what
+it is, you should be prosecuting me instead of asking me to make up with
+this--this fellow.”
+
+“Oh, I'll prosecute you all right,” retorted the Prosecuting Attorney.
+
+“Also you will have to prosecute this Patsy Horan,” Watson advised; “for
+I shall now have him arrested for assault and battery.”
+
+“You'd better shake and make up,” the Prosecuting Attorney repeated, and
+this time there was almost a threat in his voice.
+
+The trials of both men were set for a week later, on the same morning,
+in Police Judge Witberg's court.
+
+“You have no chance,” Watson was told by an old friend of his boyhood,
+the retired manager of the biggest paper in the city. “Everybody knows
+you were beaten up by this man. His reputation is most unsavory. But it
+won't help you in the least. Both cases will be dismissed. This will be
+because you are you. Any ordinary man would be convicted.”
+
+“But I do not understand,” objected the perplexed sociologist. “Without
+warning I was attacked by this man; and badly beaten. I did not strike a
+blow. I--”
+
+“That has nothing to do with it,” the other cut him off.
+
+“Then what is there that has anything to do with it?”
+
+“I'll tell you. You are now up against the local police and political
+machine. Who are you? You are not even a legal resident in this town.
+You live up in the country. You haven't a vote of your own here. Much
+less do you swing any votes. This dive proprietor swings a string of
+votes in his precincts--a mighty long string.”
+
+“Do you mean to tell me that this Judge Witberg will violate the
+sacredness of his office and oath by letting this brute off?” Watson
+demanded.
+
+“Watch him,” was the grim reply. “Oh, he'll do it nicely enough. He will
+give an extra-legal, extra-judicial decision, abounding in every word in
+the dictionary that stands for fairness and right.”
+
+“But there are the newspapers,” Watson cried.
+
+“They are not fighting the administration at present. They'll give it to
+you hard. You see what they have already done to you.”
+
+“Then these snips of boys on the police detail won't write the truth?”
+
+“They will write something so near like the truth that the public will
+believe it. They write their stories under instruction, you know. They
+have their orders to twist and color, and there won't be much left of
+you when they get done. Better drop the whole thing right now. You are
+in bad.”
+
+“But the trials are set.”
+
+“Give the word and they'll drop them now. A man can't fight a machine
+unless he has a machine behind him.”
+
+III
+
+But Carter Watson was stubborn. He was convinced that the machine would
+beat him, but all his days he had sought social experience, and this was
+certainly something new.
+
+The morning of the trial the Prosecuting Attorney made another attempt
+to patch up the affair.
+
+“If you feel that way, I should like to get a lawyer to prosecute the
+case,” said Watson.
+
+“No, you don't,” said the Prosecuting Attorney. “I am paid by the People
+to prosecute, and prosecute I will. But let me tell you. You have no
+chance. We shall lump both cases into one, and you watch out.”
+
+Judge Witberg looked good to Watson. A fairly young man, short,
+comfortably stout, smooth-shaven and with an intelligent face, he seemed
+a very nice man indeed. This good impression was added to by the smiling
+lips and the wrinkles of laughter in the corners of his black eyes.
+Looking at him and studying him, Watson felt almost sure that his old
+friend's prognostication was wrong.
+
+But Watson was soon to learn. Patsy Horan and two of his satellites
+testified to a most colossal aggregation of perjuries. Watson could not
+have believed it possible without having experienced it. They denied
+the existence of the other four men. And of the two that testified, one
+claimed to have been in the kitchen, a witness to Watson's unprovoked
+assault on Patsy, while the other, remaining in the bar, had witnessed
+Watson's second and third rushes into the place as he attempted to
+annihilate the unoffending Patsy. The vile language ascribed to Watson
+was so voluminously and unspeakably vile, that he felt they were
+injuring their own case. It was so impossible that he should utter such
+things. But when they described the brutal blows he had rained on poor
+Patsy's face, and the chair he demolished when he vainly attempted to
+kick Patsy, Watson waxed secretly hilarious and at the same time sad.
+The trial was a farce, but such lowness of life was depressing to
+contemplate when he considered the long upward climb humanity must make.
+
+Watson could not recognize himself, nor could his worst enemy have
+recognized him, in the swashbuckling, rough-housing picture that was
+painted of him. But, as in all cases of complicated perjury, rifts and
+contradictions in the various stories appeared. The Judge somehow failed
+to notice them, while the Prosecuting Attorney and Patsy's attorney
+shied off from them gracefully. Watson had not bothered to get a lawyer
+for himself, and he was now glad that he had not.
+
+Still, he retained a semblance of faith in Judge Witberg when he went
+himself on the stand and started to tell his story.
+
+“I was strolling casually along the street, your Honor,” Watson began,
+but was interrupted by the Judge.
+
+“We are not here to consider your previous actions,” bellowed Judge
+Witberg. “Who struck the first blow?”
+
+“Your Honor,” Watson pleaded, “I have no witnesses of the actual fray,
+and the truth of my story can only be brought out by telling the story
+fully--”
+
+Again he was interrupted.
+
+“We do not care to publish any magazines here,” Judge Witberg roared,
+looking at him so fiercely and malevolently that Watson could scarcely
+bring himself to believe that this was same man he had studied a few
+minutes previously.
+
+“Who struck the first blow?” Patsy's attorney asked.
+
+The Prosecuting Attorney interposed, demanding to know which of the two
+cases lumped together was, and by what right Patsy's lawyer, at that
+stage of the proceedings, should take the witness. Patsy's attorney
+fought back. Judge Witberg interfered, professing no knowledge of any
+two cases being lumped together. All this had to be explained. Battle
+royal raged, terminating in both attorneys apologizing to the Court and
+to each other. And so it went, and to Watson it had the seeming of a
+group of pickpockets ruffling and bustling an honest man as they took
+his purse. The machine was working, that was all.
+
+“Why did you enter this place of unsavory reputations?” was asked him.
+
+“It has been my custom for many years, as a student of economics and
+sociology, to acquaint myself--”
+
+But this was as far as Watson got.
+
+“We want none of your ologies here,” snarled Judge Witberg. “It is a
+plain question. Answer it plainly. Is it true or not true that you were
+drunk? That is the gist of the question.”
+
+When Watson attempted to tell how Patsy had injured his face in his
+attempts to bat with his head, Watson was openly scouted and flouted,
+and Judge Witberg again took him in hand.
+
+“Are you aware of the solemnity of the oath you took to testify to
+nothing but the truth on this witness stand?” the Judge demanded. “This
+is a fairy story you are telling. It is not reasonable that a man would
+so injure himself, and continue to injure himself, by striking the soft
+and sensitive parts of his face against your head. You are a sensible
+man. It is unreasonable, is it not?”
+
+“Men are unreasonable when they are angry,” Watson answered meekly.
+
+Then it was that Judge Witberg was deeply outraged and righteously
+wrathful.
+
+“What right have you to say that?” he cried. “It is gratuitous. It has
+no bearing on the case. You are here as a witness, sir, of events that
+have transpired. The Court does not wish to hear any expressions of
+opinion from you at all.”
+
+“I but answered your question, your Honor,” Watson protested humbly.
+
+“You did nothing of the sort,” was the next blast. “And let me warn you,
+sir, let me warn you, that you are laying yourself liable to contempt by
+such insolence. And I will have you know that we know how to observe the
+law and the rules of courtesy down here in this little courtroom. I am
+ashamed of you.”
+
+And, while the next punctilious legal wrangle between the attorneys
+interrupted his tale of what happened in the Vendome, Carter Watson,
+without bitterness, amused and at the same time sad, saw rise before him
+the machine, large and small, that dominated his country, the unpunished
+and shameless grafts of a thousand cities perpetrated by the spidery
+and vermin-like creatures of the machines. Here it was before him, a
+courtroom and a judge, bowed down in subservience by the machine to a
+dive-keeper who swung a string of votes. Petty and sordid as it was, it
+was one face of the many-faced machine that loomed colossally, in every
+city and state, in a thousand guises overshadowing the land.
+
+A familiar phrase rang in his ears: “It is to laugh.” At the height of
+the wrangle, he giggled, once, aloud, and earned a sullen frown from
+Judge Witberg. Worse, a myriad times, he decided, were these bullying
+lawyers and this bullying judge then the bucko mates in first quality
+hell-ships, who not only did their own bullying but protected themselves
+as well. These petty rapscallions, on the other hand, sought protection
+behind the majesty of the law. They struck, but no one was permitted to
+strike back, for behind them were the prison cells and the clubs of the
+stupid policemen--paid and professional fighters and beaters-up of
+men. Yet he was not bitter. The grossness and the sliminess of it was
+forgotten in the simple grotesqueness of it, and he had the saving sense
+of humor.
+
+Nevertheless, hectored and heckled though he was, he managed in the end
+to give a simple, straightforward version of the affair, and, despite
+a belligerent cross-examination, his story was not shaken in any
+particular. Quite different it was from the perjuries that had shouted
+aloud from the perjuries of Patsy and his two witnesses.
+
+Both Patsy's attorney and the Prosecuting Attorney rested their
+cases, letting everything go before the Court without argument. Watson
+protested against this, but was silenced when the Prosecuting Attorney
+told him that Public Prosecutor and knew his business.
+
+“Patrick Horan has testified that he was in danger of his life and that
+he was compelled to defend himself,” Judge Witberg's verdict began. “Mr.
+Watson has testified to the same thing. Each has sworn that the other
+struck the first blow; each has sworn that the other made an unprovoked
+assault on him. It is an axiom of the law that the defendant should
+be given the benefit of the doubt. A very reasonable doubt exists.
+Therefore, in the case of the People Versus Carter Watson the benefit
+of the doubt is given to said Carter Watson and he is herewith ordered
+discharged from custody. The same reasoning applies to the case of the
+People Versus Patrick Horan. He is given the benefit of the doubt and
+discharged from custody. My recommendation is that both defendants shake
+hands and make up.”
+
+In the afternoon papers the first headline that caught Watson's eye was:
+“CARTER WATSON ACQUITTED.” In the second paper it was: “CARTER WATSON
+ESCAPES A FINE.” But what capped everything was the one beginning:
+“CARTER WATSON A GOOD FELLOW.” In the text he read how Judge Witberg had
+advised both fighters to shake hands, which they promptly did. Further,
+he read:
+
+“'Let's have a nip on it,' said Patsy Horan.
+
+“'Sure,' said Carter Watson.
+
+“And, arm in arm, they ambled for the nearest saloon.”
+
+IV
+
+Now, from the whole adventure, Watson carried away no bitterness. It was
+a social experience of a new order, and it led to the writing of another
+book, which he entitled, “POLICE COURT PROCEDURE: A Tentative Analysis.”
+
+One summer morning a year later, on his ranch, he left his horse and
+himself clambered on through a miniature canyon to inspect some rock
+ferns he had planted the previous winter. Emerging from the upper end
+of the canyon, he came out on one of his flower-spangled meadows, a
+delightful isolated spot, screened from the world by low hills and
+clumps of trees. And here he found a man, evidently on a stroll from the
+summer hotel down at the little town a mile away. They met face to face
+and the recognition was mutual. It was Judge Witberg. Also, it was
+a clear case of trespass, for Watson had trespass signs upon his
+boundaries, though he never enforced them.
+
+Judge Witberg held out his hand, which Watson refused to see.
+
+“Politics is a dirty trade, isn't it, Judge?” he remarked. “Oh, yes,
+I see your hand, but I don't care to take it. The papers said I shook
+hands with Patsy Horan after the trial. You know I did not, but let me
+tell you that I'd a thousand times rather shake hands with him and his
+vile following of curs, than with you.”
+
+Judge Witberg was painfully flustered, and as he hemmed and hawed and
+essayed to speak, Watson, looking at him, was struck by a sudden whim,
+and he determined on a grim and facetious antic.
+
+“I should scarcely expect any animus from a man of your acquirements and
+knowledge of the world,” the Judge was saying.
+
+“Animus?” Watson replied. “Certainly not. I haven't such a thing in my
+nature. And to prove it, let me show you something curious, something
+you have never seen before.” Casting about him, Watson picked up a rough
+stone the size of his fist. “See this. Watch me.”
+
+So saying, Carter Watson tapped himself a sharp blow on the cheek. The
+stone laid the flesh open to the bone and the blood spurted forth.
+
+“The stone was too sharp,” he announced to the astounded police judge,
+who thought he had gone mad.
+
+“I must bruise it a trifle. There is nothing like being realistic in
+such matters.”
+
+Whereupon Carter Watson found a smooth stone and with it pounded his
+cheek nicely several times.
+
+“Ah,” he cooed. “That will turn beautifully green and black in a few
+hours. It will be most convincing.”
+
+“You are insane,” Judge Witberg quavered.
+
+“Don't use such vile language to me,” said Watson. “You see my bruised
+and bleeding face? You did that, with that right hand of yours. You hit
+me twice--biff, biff. It is a brutal and unprovoked assault. I am in
+danger of my life. I must protect myself.”
+
+Judge Witberg backed away in alarm before the menacing fists of the
+other.
+
+“If you strike me I'll have you arrested,” Judge Witberg threatened.
+
+“That is what I told Patsy,” was the answer. “And do you know what he
+did when I told him that?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“That!”
+
+And at the same moment Watson's right fist landed flush on Judge
+Witberg's nose, putting that legal gentleman over on his back on the
+grass.
+
+“Get up!” commanded Watson. “If you are a gentleman, get up--that's what
+Patsy told me, you know.”
+
+Judge Witberg declined to rise, and was dragged to his feet by the
+coat-collar, only to have one eye blacked and be put on his back again.
+After that it was a red Indian massacre. Judge Witberg was humanely and
+scientifically beaten up. His checks were boxed, his cars cuffed, and
+his face was rubbed in the turf. And all the time Watson exposited
+the way Patsy Horan had done it. Occasionally, and very carefully, the
+facetious sociologist administered a real bruising blow. Once, dragging
+the poor Judge to his feet, he deliberately bumped his own nose on the
+gentleman's head. The nose promptly bled.
+
+“See that!” cried Watson, stepping back and deftly shedding his blood
+all down his own shirt front. “You did it. With your fist you did it. It
+is awful. I am fair murdered. I must again defend myself.”
+
+And once more Judge Witberg impacted his features on a fist and was sent
+to grass.
+
+“I will have you arrested,” he sobbed as he lay.
+
+“That's what Patsy said.”
+
+“A brutal---sniff, sniff,--and unprovoked--sniff, sniff--assault.”
+
+“That's what Patsy said.”
+
+“I will surely have you arrested.”
+
+“Speaking slangily, not if I can beat you to it.”
+
+And with that, Carter Watson departed down the canyon, mounted his
+horse, and rode to town.
+
+An hour later, as Judge Witberg limped up the grounds to his hotel, he
+was arrested by a village constable on a charge of assault and battery
+preferred by Carter Watson.
+
+V
+
+“Your Honor,” Watson said next day to the village Justice, a well to
+do farmer and graduate, thirty years before, from a cow college, “since
+this Sol Witberg has seen fit to charge me with battery, following upon
+my charge of battery against him, I would suggest that both cases
+be lumped together. The testimony and the facts are the same in both
+cases.”
+
+To this the Justice agreed, and the double case proceeded. Watson, as
+prosecuting witness, first took the stand and told his story.
+
+“I was picking flowers,” he testified. “Picking flowers on my own land,
+never dreaming of danger. Suddenly this man rushed upon me from behind
+the trees. 'I am the Dodo,' he says, 'and I can do you to a frazzle.
+Put up your hands.' I smiled, but with that, biff, biff, he struck
+me, knocking me down and spilling my flowers. The language he used was
+frightful. It was an unprovoked and brutal assault. Look at my cheek.
+Look at my nose--I could not understand it. He must have been drunk.
+Before I recovered from my surprise he had administered this beating.
+I was in danger of my life and was compelled to defend himself. That
+is all, Your Honor, though I must say, in conclusion, that I cannot
+get over my perplexity. Why did he say he was the Dodo? Why did he so
+wantonly attack me?”
+
+And thus was Sol Witberg given a liberal education in the art of
+perjury. Often, from his high seat, he had listened indulgently to
+police court perjuries in cooked-up cases; but for the first time
+perjury was directed against him, and he no longer sat above the court,
+with the bailiffs, the Policemen's clubs, and the prison cells behind
+him.
+
+“Your Honor,” he cried, “never have I heard such a pack of lies told by
+so bare-faced a liar--!”
+
+Watson here sprang to his feet.
+
+“Your Honor, I protest. It is for your Honor to decide truth or
+falsehood. The witness is on the stand to testify to actual events that
+have transpired. His personal opinion upon things in general, and upon
+me, has no bearing on the case whatever.”
+
+The Justice scratched his head and waxed phlegmatically indignant.
+
+“The point is well taken,” he decided. “I am surprised at you, Mr.
+Witberg, claiming to be a judge and skilled in the practice of the law,
+and yet being guilty of such unlawyerlike conduct. Your manner, sir, and
+your methods, remind me of a shyster. This is a simple case of assault
+and battery. We are here to determine who struck the first blow, and we
+are not interested in your estimates of Mr. Watson's personal character.
+Proceed with your story.”
+
+Sol Witberg would have bitten his bruised and swollen lip in chagrin,
+had it not hurt so much. But he contained himself and told a simple,
+straightforward, truthful story.
+
+“Your Honor,” Watson said, “I would suggest that you ask him what he was
+doing on my premises.”
+
+“A very good question. What were you doing, sir, on Mr. Watson's
+premises?”
+
+“I did not know they were his premises.”
+
+“It was a trespass, your Honor,” Watson cried. “The warnings are posted
+conspicuously.”
+
+“I saw no warnings,” said Sol Witberg.
+
+“I have seen them myself,” snapped the Justice. “They are very
+conspicuous. And I would warn you, sir, that if you palter with
+the truth in such little matters you may darken your more important
+statements with suspicion. Why did you strike Mr. Watson?”
+
+“Your Honor, as I have testified, I did not strike a blow.”
+
+The Justice looked at Carter Watson's bruised and swollen visage, and
+turned to glare at Sol Witberg.
+
+“Look at that man's cheek!” he thundered. “If you did not strike a blow
+how comes it that he is so disfigured and injured?”
+
+“As I testified--”
+
+“Be careful,” the Justice warned.
+
+“I will be careful, sir. I will say nothing but the truth. He struck
+himself with a rock. He struck himself with two different rocks.”
+
+“Does it stand to reason that a man, any man not a lunatic, would so
+injure himself, and continue to injure himself, by striking the soft and
+sensitive parts of his face with a stone?” Carter Watson demanded
+
+“It sounds like a fairy story,” was the Justice's comment.
+
+“Mr. Witberg, had you been drinking?”
+
+“No, sir.”
+
+“Do you never drink?”
+
+“On occasion.”
+
+The Justice meditated on this answer with an air of astute profundity.
+
+Watson took advantage of the opportunity to wink at Sol Witberg, but
+that much-abused gentleman saw nothing humorous in the situation.
+
+“A very peculiar case, a very peculiar case,” the Justice announced,
+as he began his verdict. “The evidence of the two parties is flatly
+contradictory. There are no witnesses outside the two principals. Each
+claims the other committed the assault, and I have no legal way of
+determining the truth. But I have my private opinion, Mr. Witberg, and
+I would recommend that henceforth you keep off of Mr. Watson's premises
+and keep away from this section of the country--”
+
+“This is an outrage!” Sol Witberg blurted out.
+
+“Sit down, sir!” was the Justice's thundered command. “If you interrupt
+the Court in this manner again, I shall fine you for contempt. And I
+warn you I shall fine you heavily--you, a judge yourself, who should be
+conversant with the courtesy and dignity of courts. I shall now give my
+verdict:
+
+“It is a rule of law that the defendant shall be given the benefit of
+the doubt. As I have said, and I repeat, there is no legal way for me
+to determine who struck the first blow. Therefore, and much to my
+regret,”--here he paused and glared at Sol Witberg--“in each of these
+cases I am compelled to give the defendant the benefit of the doubt.
+Gentlemen, you are both dismissed.”
+
+“Let us have a nip on it,” Watson said to Witberg, as they left the
+courtroom; but that outraged person refused to lock arms and amble to
+the nearest saloon.
+
+
+
+
+WINGED BLACKMAIL
+
+PETER WINN lay back comfortably in a library chair, with closed eyes,
+deep in the cogitation of a scheme of campaign destined in the near
+future to make a certain coterie of hostile financiers sit up. The
+central idea had come to him the night before, and he was now reveling
+in the planning of the remoter, minor details. By obtaining control of a
+certain up-country bank, two general stores, and several logging camps,
+he could come into control of a certain dinky jerkwater line which shall
+here be nameless, but which, in his hands, would prove the key to a
+vastly larger situation involving more main-line mileage almost than
+there were spikes in the aforesaid dinky jerkwater. It was so simple
+that he had almost laughed aloud when it came to him. No wonder those
+astute and ancient enemies of his had passed it by.
+
+The library door opened, and a slender, middle-aged man, weak-eyed and
+eye glassed, entered. In his hands was an envelope and an open letter.
+As Peter Winn's secretary it was his task to weed out, sort, and
+classify his employer's mail.
+
+“This came in the morning post,” he ventured apologetically and with
+the hint of a titter. “Of course it doesn't amount to anything, but I
+thought you would like to see it.”
+
+“Read it,” Peter Winn commanded, without opening his eyes.
+
+The secretary cleared his throat.
+
+“It is dated July seventeenth, but is without address. Postmark San
+Francisco. It is also quite illiterate. The spelling is atrocious. Here
+it is:
+
+“Mr. Peter Winn, SIR: I send you respectfully by express a pigeon worth
+good money. She's a loo-loo--”
+
+“What is a loo-loo?” Peter Winn interrupted.
+
+The secretary tittered.
+
+“I'm sure I don't know, except that it must be a superlative of some
+sort. The letter continues:
+
+“Please freight it with a couple of thousand-dollar bills and let it go.
+If you do I wont never annoy you no more. If you dont you will be sorry.
+
+“That is all. It is unsigned. I thought it would amuse you.”
+
+“Has the pigeon come?” Peter Winn demanded.
+
+“I'm sure I never thought to enquire.”
+
+“Then do so.”
+
+In five minutes the secretary was back.
+
+“Yes, sir. It came this morning.”
+
+“Then bring it in.”
+
+The secretary was inclined to take the affair as a practical joke, but
+Peter Winn, after an examination of the pigeon, thought otherwise.
+
+“Look at it,” he said, stroking and handling it. “See the length of the
+body and that elongated neck. A proper carrier. I doubt if I've ever
+seen a finer specimen. Powerfully winged and muscled. As our unknown
+correspondent remarked, she is a loo-loo. It's a temptation to keep
+her.”
+
+The secretary tittered.
+
+“Why not? Surely you will not let it go back to the writer of that
+letter.”
+
+Peter Winn shook his head.
+
+“I'll answer. No man can threaten me, even anonymously or in foolery.”
+
+On a slip of paper he wrote the succinct message, “Go to hell,” signed
+it, and placed it in the carrying apparatus with which the bird had been
+thoughtfully supplied.
+
+“Now we'll let her loose. Where's my son? I'd like him to see the
+flight.”
+
+“He's down in the workshop. He slept there last night, and had his
+breakfast sent down this morning.”
+
+“He'll break his neck yet,” Peter Winn remarked, half-fiercely,
+half-proudly, as he led the way to the veranda.
+
+Standing at the head of the broad steps, he tossed the pretty creature
+outward and upward. She caught herself with a quick beat of wings,
+fluttered about undecidedly for a space, then rose in the air.
+
+Again, high up, there seemed indecision; then, apparently getting her
+bearings, she headed east, over the oak-trees that dotted the park-like
+grounds.
+
+“Beautiful, beautiful,” Peter Winn murmured. “I almost wish I had her
+back.”
+
+But Peter Winn was a very busy man, with such large plans in his head
+and with so many reins in his hands that he quickly forgot the incident.
+Three nights later the left wing of his country house was blown up. It
+was not a heavy explosion, and nobody was hurt, though the wing itself
+was ruined. Most of the windows of the rest of the house were broken,
+and there was a deal of general damage. By the first ferry boat of the
+morning half a dozen San Francisco detectives arrived, and several hours
+later the secretary, in high excitement, erupted on Peter Winn.
+
+“It's come!” the secretary gasped, the sweat beading his forehead and
+his eyes bulging behind their glasses.
+
+“What has come?” Peter demanded. “It--the--the loo-loo bird.”
+
+Then the financier understood.
+
+“Have you gone over the mail yet?”
+
+“I was just going over it, sir.”
+
+“Then continue, and see if you can find another letter from our
+mysterious friend, the pigeon fancier.”
+
+The letter came to light. It read:
+
+Mr. Peter Winn, HONORABLE SIR: Now dont be a fool. If youd came through,
+your shack would not have blew up--I beg to inform you respectfully,
+am sending same pigeon. Take good care of same, thank you. Put five one
+thousand dollar bills on her and let her go. Dont feed her. Dont try to
+follow bird. She is wise to the way now and makes better time. If you
+dont come through, watch out.
+
+Peter Winn was genuinely angry. This time he indited no message for the
+pigeon to carry. Instead, he called in the detectives, and, under their
+advice, weighted the pigeon heavily with shot. Her previous flight
+having been eastward toward the bay, the fastest motor-boat in Tiburon
+was commissioned to take up the chase if it led out over the water.
+
+But too much shot had been put on the carrier, and she was exhausted
+before the shore was reached. Then the mistake was made of putting too
+little shot on her, and she rose high in the air, got her bearings and
+started eastward across San Francisco Bay. She flew straight over Angel
+Island, and here the motor-boat lost her, for it had to go around the
+island.
+
+That night, armed guards patrolled the grounds. But there was no
+explosion. Yet, in the early morning Peter Winn learned by telephone
+that his sister's home in Alameda had been burned to the ground.
+
+Two days later the pigeon was back again, coming this time by freight in
+what had seemed a barrel of potatoes. Also came another letter:
+
+Mr. Peter Winn, RESPECTABLE SIR: It was me that fixed yr sisters house.
+You have raised hell, aint you. Send ten thousand now. Going up all the
+time. Dont put any more handicap weights on that bird. You sure cant
+follow her, and its cruelty to animals.
+
+Peter Winn was ready to acknowledge himself beaten. The detectives
+were powerless, and Peter did not know where next the man would
+strike--perhaps at the lives of those near and dear to him. He even
+telephoned to San Francisco for ten thousand dollars in bills of large
+denomination. But Peter had a son, Peter Winn, Junior, with the
+same firm-set jaw as his fathers, and the same knitted, brooding
+determination in his eyes. He was only twenty-six, but he was all man, a
+secret terror and delight to the financier, who alternated between pride
+in his son's aeroplane feats and fear for an untimely and terrible end.
+
+“Hold on, father, don't send that money,” said Peter Winn, Junior.
+“Number Eight is ready, and I know I've at last got that reefing down
+fine. It will work, and it will revolutionize flying. Speed--that's
+what's needed, and so are the large sustaining surfaces for getting
+started and for altitude. I've got them both. Once I'm up I reef down.
+There it is. The smaller the sustaining surface, the higher the speed.
+That was the law discovered by Langley. And I've applied it. I can rise
+when the air is calm and full of holes, and I can rise when its boiling,
+and by my control of my plane areas I can come pretty close to making
+any speed I want. Especially with that new Sangster-Endholm engine.”
+
+“You'll come pretty close to breaking your neck one of these days,” was
+his father's encouraging remark.
+
+“Dad, I'll tell you what I'll come pretty close to-ninety miles an
+hour--Yes, and a hundred. Now listen! I was going to make a trial
+tomorrow. But it won't take two hours to start today. I'll tackle it
+this afternoon. Keep that money. Give me the pigeon and I'll follow her
+to her loft where ever it is. Hold on, let me talk to the mechanics.”
+
+He called up the workshop, and in crisp, terse sentences gave his orders
+in a way that went to the older man's heart. Truly, his one son was a
+chip off the old block, and Peter Winn had no meek notions concerning
+the intrinsic value of said old block.
+
+Timed to the minute, the young man, two hours later, was ready for the
+start. In a holster at his hip, for instant use, cocked and with the
+safety on, was a large-caliber automatic pistol. With a final inspection
+and overhauling he took his seat in the aeroplane. He started the
+engine, and with a wild burr of gas explosions the beautiful fabric
+darted down the launching ways and lifted into the air. Circling, as he
+rose, to the west, he wheeled about and jockeyed and maneuvered for the
+real start of the race.
+
+This start depended on the pigeon. Peter Winn held it. Nor was it
+weighted with shot this time. Instead, half a yard of bright ribbon was
+firmly attached to its leg--this the more easily to enable its flight
+being followed. Peter Winn released it, and it arose easily enough
+despite the slight drag of the ribbon. There was no uncertainty about
+its movements. This was the third time it had made particular homing
+passage, and it knew the course.
+
+At an altitude of several hundred feet it straightened out and went due
+east. The aeroplane swerved into a straight course from its last curve
+and followed. The race was on. Peter Winn, looking up, saw that the
+pigeon was outdistancing the machine. Then he saw something else. The
+aeroplane suddenly and instantly became smaller. It had reefed. Its
+high-speed plane-design was now revealed. Instead of the generous
+spread of surface with which it had taken the air, it was now a lean and
+hawklike monoplane balanced on long and exceedingly narrow wings.
+
+*****
+
+When young Winn reefed down so suddenly, he received a surprise. It
+was his first trial of the new device, and while he was prepared for
+increased speed he was not prepared for such an astonishing increase. It
+was better than he dreamed, and, before he knew it, he was hard upon
+the pigeon. That little creature, frightened by this, the most monstrous
+hawk it had ever seen, immediately darted upward, after the manner of
+pigeons that strive always to rise above a hawk.
+
+In great curves the monoplane followed upward, higher and higher into
+the blue. It was difficult, from underneath to see the pigeon, and young
+Winn dared not lose it from his sight. He even shook out his reefs in
+order to rise more quickly. Up, up they went, until the pigeon, true
+to its instinct, dropped and struck at what it thought to be the back of
+its pursuing enemy. Once was enough, for, evidently finding no life in
+the smooth cloth surface of the machine, it ceased soaring and
+straightened out on its eastward course.
+
+A carrier pigeon on a passage can achieve a high rate of speed, and
+Winn reefed again. And again, to his satisfaction, he found that he was
+beating the pigeon. But this time he quickly shook out a portion of his
+reefed sustaining surface and slowed down in time. From then on he knew
+he had the chase safely in hand, and from then on a chant rose to his
+lips which he continued to sing at intervals, and unconsciously, for the
+rest of the passage. It was: “Going some; going some; what did I tell
+you!--going some.”
+
+Even so, it was not all plain sailing. The air is an unstable medium at
+best, and quite without warning, at an acute angle, he entered an aerial
+tide which he recognized as the gulf stream of wind that poured through
+the drafty-mouthed Golden Gate. His right wing caught it first--a
+sudden, sharp puff that lifted and tilted the monoplane and threatened
+to capsize it. But he rode with a sensitive “loose curb,” and quickly,
+but not too quickly, he shifted the angles of his wing-tips, depressed
+the front horizontal rudder, and swung over the rear vertical rudder to
+meet the tilting thrust of the wind. As the machine came back to an even
+keel, and he knew that he was now wholly in the invisible stream, he
+readjusted the wing-tips, rapidly away from him during the several
+moments of his discomfiture.
+
+The pigeon drove straight on for the Alameda County shore, and it
+was near this shore that Winn had another experience. He fell into an
+air-hole. He had fallen into air-holes before, in previous flights, but
+this was a far larger one than he had ever encountered. With his eyes
+strained on the ribbon attached to the pigeon, by that fluttering bit of
+color he marked his fall. Down he went, at the pit of his stomach that
+old sink sensation which he had known as a boy he first negotiated
+quick-starting elevators. But Winn, among other secrets of aviation, had
+learned that to go up it was sometimes necessary first to go down.
+The air had refused to hold him. Instead of struggling futilely and
+perilously against this lack of sustension, he yielded to it. With
+steady head and hand, he depressed the forward horizontal rudder--just
+recklessly enough and not a fraction more--and the monoplane dived head
+foremost and sharply down the void. It was falling with the keenness of
+a knife-blade. Every instant the speed accelerated frightfully. Thus
+he accumulated the momentum that would save him. But few instants were
+required, when, abruptly shifting the double horizontal rudders forward
+and astern, he shot upward on the tense and straining plane and out of
+the pit.
+
+At an altitude of five hundred feet, the pigeon drove on over the town
+of Berkeley and lifted its flight to the Contra Costa hills. Young Winn
+noted the campus and buildings of the University of California--his
+university--as he rose after the pigeon.
+
+Once more, on these Contra Costa hills, he early came to grief. The
+pigeon was now flying low, and where a grove of eucalyptus presented a
+solid front to the wind, the bird was suddenly sent fluttering wildly
+upward for a distance of a hundred feet. Winn knew what it meant. It had
+been caught in an air-surf that beat upward hundreds of feet where
+the fresh west wind smote the upstanding wall of the grove. He reefed
+hastily to the uttermost, and at the same time depressed the angle of
+his flight to meet that upward surge. Nevertheless, the monoplane was
+tossed fully three hundred feet before the danger was left astern.
+
+Two or more ranges of hills the pigeon crossed, and then Winn saw it
+dropping down to a landing where a small cabin stood in a hillside
+clearing. He blessed that clearing. Not only was it good for alighting,
+but, on account of the steepness of the slope, it was just the thing for
+rising again into the air.
+
+A man, reading a newspaper, had just started up at the sight of the
+returning pigeon, when he heard the burr of Winn's engine and saw the
+huge monoplane, with all surfaces set, drop down upon him, stop suddenly
+on an air-cushion manufactured on the spur of the moment by a shift of
+the horizontal rudders, glide a few yards, strike ground, and come to
+rest not a score of feet away from him. But when he saw a young man,
+calmly sitting in the machine and leveling a pistol at him, the man
+turned to run. Before he could make the corner of the cabin, a bullet
+through the leg brought him down in a sprawling fall.
+
+“What do you want!” he demanded sullenly, as the other stood over him.
+
+“I want to take you for a ride in my new machine,” Winn answered.
+“Believe me, she is a loo-loo.”
+
+The man did not argue long, for this strange visitor had most convincing
+ways. Under Winn's instructions, covered all the time by the pistol,
+the man improvised a tourniquet and applied it to his wounded leg. Winn
+helped him to a seat in the machine, then went to the pigeon-loft and
+took possession of the bird with the ribbon still fast to its leg.
+
+A very tractable prisoner, the man proved. Once up in the air, he sat
+close, in an ecstasy of fear. An adept at winged blackmail, he had no
+aptitude for wings himself, and when he gazed down at the flying land
+and water far beneath him, he did not feel moved to attack his captor,
+now defenseless, both hands occupied with flight.
+
+Instead, the only way the man felt moved was to sit closer.
+
+*****
+
+Peter Winn, Senior, scanning the heavens with powerful glasses, saw
+the monoplane leap into view and grow large over the rugged backbone
+of Angel Island. Several minutes later he cried out to the waiting
+detectives that the machine carried a passenger. Dropping swiftly and
+piling up an abrupt air-cushion, the monoplane landed.
+
+“That reefing device is a winner!” young Winn cried, as he climbed out.
+“Did you see me at the start? I almost ran over the pigeon. Going some,
+dad! Going some! What did I tell you? Going some!”
+
+“But who is that with you?” his father demanded.
+
+The young man looked back at his prisoner and remembered.
+
+“Why, that's the pigeon-fancier,” he said. “I guess the officers can
+take care of him.”
+
+Peter Winn gripped his son's hand in grim silence, and fondled the
+pigeon which his son had passed to him. Again he fondled the pretty
+creature. Then he spoke.
+
+“Exhibit A, for the People,” he said.
+
+
+
+
+BUNCHES OF KNUCKLES
+
+ARRANGEMENTS quite extensive had been made for the celebration of
+Christmas on the yacht Samoset. Not having been in any civilized port
+for months, the stock of provisions boasted few delicacies; yet Minnie
+Duncan had managed to devise real feasts for cabin and forecastle.
+
+“Listen, Boyd,” she told her husband. “Here are the menus. For the cabin,
+raw bonita native style, turtle soup, omelette a la Samoset--”
+
+“What the dickens?” Boyd Duncan interrupted.
+
+“Well, if you must know, I found a tin of mushrooms and a package of
+egg-powder which had fallen down behind the locker, and there are other
+things as well that will go into it. But don't interrupt. Boiled yam,
+fried taro, alligator pear salad--there, you've got me all mixed, Then
+I found a last delectable half-pound of dried squid. There will be baked
+beans Mexican, if I can hammer it into Toyama's head; also, baked papaia
+with Marquesan honey, and, lastly, a wonderful pie the secret of which
+Toyama refuses to divulge.”
+
+“I wonder if it is possible to concoct a punch or a cocktail out of
+trade rum?” Duncan muttered gloomily.
+
+“Oh! I forgot! Come with me.”
+
+His wife caught his hand and led him through the small connecting door
+to her tiny stateroom. Still holding his hand, she fished in the depths
+of a hat-locker and brought forth a pint bottle of champagne.
+
+“The dinner is complete!” he cried.
+
+“Wait.”
+
+She fished again, and was rewarded with a silver-mounted whisky flask.
+She held it to the light of a port-hole, and the liquor showed a quarter
+of the distance from the bottom.
+
+“I've been saving it for weeks,” she explained. “And there's enough for
+you and Captain Dettmar.”
+
+“Two mighty small drinks,” Duncan complained.
+
+“There would have been more, but I gave a drink to Lorenzo when he was
+sick.”
+
+Duncan growled, “Might have given him rum,” facetiously.
+
+“The nasty stuff! For a sick man? Don't be greedy, Boyd. And I'm glad
+there isn't any more, for Captain Dettmar's sake. Drinking always makes
+him irritable. And now for the men's dinner. Soda crackers, sweet cakes,
+candy--”
+
+“Substantial, I must say.”
+
+“Do hush. Rice, and curry, yam, taro, bonita, of course, a big cake
+Toyama is making, young pig--”
+
+“Oh, I say,” he protested.
+
+“It is all right, Boyd. We'll be in Attu-Attu in three days. Besides,
+it's my pig. That old chief what-ever-his-name distinctly presented it
+to me. You saw him yourself. And then two tins of bullamacow. That's
+their dinner. And now about the presents. Shall we wait until tomorrow,
+or give them this evening?”
+
+“Christmas Eve, by all means,” was the man's judgment. “We'll call all
+hands at eight bells; I'll give them a tot of rum all around, and then
+you give the presents. Come on up on deck. It's stifling down here. I
+hope Lorenzo has better luck with the dynamo; without the fans there
+won't be much sleeping to-night if we're driven below.”
+
+They passed through the small main-cabin, climbed a steep companion
+ladder, and emerged on deck. The sun was setting, and the promise was
+for a clear tropic night. The Samoset, with fore- and main-sail winged
+out on either side, was slipping a lazy four-knots through the smooth
+sea. Through the engine-room skylight came a sound of hammering. They
+strolled aft to where Captain Dettmar, one foot on the rail, was
+oiling the gear of the patent log. At the wheel stood a tall South Sea
+Islander, clad in white undershirt and scarlet hip-cloth.
+
+Boyd Duncan was an original. At least that was the belief of his
+friends. Of comfortable fortune, with no need to do anything but take
+his comfort, he elected to travel about the world in outlandish and
+most uncomfortable ways. Incidentally, he had ideas about coral-reefs,
+disagreed profoundly with Darwin on that subject, had voiced his opinion
+in several monographs and one book, and was now back at his hobby,
+cruising the South Seas in a tiny, thirty-ton yacht and studying
+reef-formations.
+
+His wife, Minnie Duncan, was also declared an original, inasmuch as she
+joyfully shared his vagabond wanderings. Among other things, in the six
+exciting years of their marriage she had climbed Chimborazo with him,
+made a three-thousand-mile winter journey with dogs and sleds in Alaska,
+ridden a horse from Canada to Mexico, cruised the Mediterranean in a
+ten-ton yawl, and canoed from Germany to the Black Sea across the
+heart of Europe. They were a royal pair of wanderlusters, he, big and
+broad-shouldered, she a small, brunette, and happy woman, whose one
+hundred and fifteen pounds were all grit and endurance, and withal,
+pleasing to look upon.
+
+The Samoset had been a trading schooner, when Duncan bought her in San
+Francisco and made alterations. Her interior was wholly rebuilt, so that
+the hold became main-cabin and staterooms, while abaft amidships were
+installed engines, a dynamo, an ice machine, storage batteries, and,
+far in the stern, gasoline tanks. Necessarily, she carried a small crew.
+Boyd, Minnie, and Captain Dettmar were the only whites on board, though
+Lorenzo, the small and greasy engineer, laid a part claim to white,
+being a Portuguese half-caste. A Japanese served as cook, and a Chinese
+as cabin boy. Four white sailors had constituted the original crew
+for'ard, but one by one they had yielded to the charms of palm-waving
+South Sea isles and been replaced by islanders. Thus, one of the dusky
+sailors hailed from Easter Island, a second from the Carolines, a third
+from the Paumotus, while the fourth was a gigantic Samoan. At sea, Boyd
+Duncan, himself a navigator, stood a mate's watch with Captain Dettmar,
+and both of them took a wheel or lookout occasionally. On a pinch,
+Minnie herself could take a wheel, and it was on pinches that she proved
+herself more dependable at steering than did the native sailors.
+
+At eight bells, all hands assembled at the wheel, and Boyd Duncan
+appeared with a black bottle and a mug. The rum he served out himself,
+half a mug of it to each man. They gulped the stuff down with many
+facial expressions of delight, followed by loud lip-smackings of
+approval, though the liquor was raw enough and corrosive enough to burn
+their mucous membranes. All drank except Lee Goom, the abstemious
+cabin boy. This rite accomplished, they waited for the next, the
+present-giving. Generously molded on Polynesian lines, huge-bodied and
+heavy-muscled, they were nevertheless like so many children, laughing
+merrily at little things, their eager black eyes flashing in the lantern
+light as their big bodies swayed to the heave and roll of the ship.
+
+Calling each by name, Minnie gave the presents out, accompanying each
+presentation with some happy remark that added to the glee. There
+were trade watches, clasp knives, amazing assortments of fish-hooks
+in packages, plug tobacco, matches, and gorgeous strips of cotton for
+loincloths all around. That Boyd Duncan was liked by them was evidenced
+by the roars of laughter with which they greeted his slightest joking
+allusion.
+
+Captain Dettmar, white-faced, smiling only when his employer chanced to
+glance at him, leaned against the wheel-box, looking on. Twice, he left
+the group and went below, remaining there but a minute each time. Later,
+in the main cabin, when Lorenzo, Lee Goom and Toyama received their
+presents, he disappeared into his stateroom twice again. For of all
+times, the devil that slumbered in Captain Dettmar's soul chose this
+particular time of good cheer to awaken. Perhaps it was not entirely the
+devil's fault, for Captain Dettmar, privily cherishing a quart of whisky
+for many weeks, had selected Christmas Eve for broaching it.
+
+It was still early in the evening--two bells had just gone--when Duncan
+and his wife stood by the cabin companionway, gazing to windward and
+canvassing the possibility of spreading their beds on deck. A small,
+dark blot of cloud, slowly forming on the horizon, carried the threat
+of a rain-squall, and it was this they were discussing when Captain
+Dettmar, coming from aft and about to go below, glanced at them with
+sudden suspicion. He paused, his face working spasmodically. Then he
+spoke:
+
+“You are talking about me.”
+
+His voice was hoarse, and there was an excited vibration in it. Minnie
+Duncan started, then glanced at her husband's immobile face, took the
+cue, and remained silent.
+
+“I say you were talking about me,” Captain Dettmar repeated, this time
+with almost a snarl.
+
+He did not lurch nor betray the liquor on him in any way save by the
+convulsive working of his face.
+
+“Minnie, you'd better go down,” Duncan said gently. “Tell Lee Goom we'll
+sleep below. It won't be long before that squall is drenching things.”
+
+She took the hint and left, delaying just long enough to give one
+anxious glance at the dim faces of the two men.
+
+Duncan puffed at his cigar and waited till his wife's voice, in talk
+with the cabin-boy, came up through the open skylight.
+
+“Well?” Duncan demanded in a low voice, but sharply.
+
+“I said you were talking about me. I say it again. Oh, I haven't been
+blind. Day after day I've seen the two of you talking about me. Why
+don't you come out and say it to my face! I know you know. And I know
+your mind's made up to discharge me at Attu-Attu.”
+
+“I am sorry you are making such a mess of everything,” was Duncan's
+quiet reply.
+
+But Captain Dettmar's mind was set on trouble.
+
+“You know you are going to discharge me. You think you are too good to
+associate with the likes of me--you and your wife.”
+
+“Kindly keep her out of this,” Duncan warned. “What do you want?”
+
+“I want to know what you are going to do!”
+
+“Discharge you, after this, at Attu-Attu.”
+
+“You intended to, all along.”
+
+“On the contrary. It is your present conduct that compels me.”
+
+“You can't give me that sort of talk.”
+
+“I can't retain a captain who calls me a liar.”
+
+Captain Dettmar for the moment was taken aback. His face and lips
+worked, but he could say nothing. Duncan coolly pulled at his cigar and
+glanced aft at the rising cloud of squall.
+
+“Lee Goom brought the mail aboard at Tahiti,” Captain Dettmar began.
+
+“We were hove short then and leaving. You didn't look at your letters
+until we were outside, and then it was too late. That's why you didn't
+discharge me at Tahiti. Oh, I know. I saw the long envelope when Lee
+Goom came over the side. It was from the Governor of California, printed
+on the corner for any one to see. You'd been working behind my back.
+Some beachcomber in Honolulu had whispered to you, and you'd written to
+the Governor to find out. And that was his answer Lee Goom carried
+out to you. Why didn't you come to me like a man! No, you must play
+underhand with me, knowing that this billet was the one chance for me to
+get on my feet again. And as soon as you read the Governor's letter your
+mind was made up to get rid of me. I've seen it on your face ever since
+for all these months.. I've seen the two of you, polite as hell to me
+all the time, and getting away in corners and talking about me and that
+affair in 'Frisco.”
+
+“Are you done?” Duncan asked, his voice low, and tense. “Quite done?”
+
+Captain Dettmar made no answer.
+
+“Then I'll tell you a few things. It was precisely because of that
+affair in 'Frisco that I did not discharge you in Tahiti. God knows you
+gave me sufficient provocation. I thought that if ever a man needed a
+chance to rehabilitate himself, you were that man. Had there been no
+black mark against you, I would have discharged you when I learned how
+you were robbing me.”
+
+Captain Dettmar showed surprise, started to interrupt, then changed his
+mind.
+
+“There was that matter of the deck-calking, the bronze rudder-irons, the
+overhauling of the engine, the new spinnaker boom, the new davits, and
+the repairs to the whale-boat. You OKd the shipyard bill. It was four
+thousand one hundred and twenty-two francs. By the regular shipyard
+charges it ought not to have been a centime over twenty-five hundred
+francs-”
+
+“If you take the word of those alongshore sharks against mine--' the
+other began thickly.
+
+“Save yourself the trouble of further lying,” Duncan went on coldly.
+“I looked it up. I got Flaubin before the Governor himself, and the old
+rascal confessed to sixteen hundred overcharge. Said you'd stuck him up
+for it. Twelve hundred went to you, and his share was four hundred and
+the job. Don't interrupt. I've got his affidavit below. Then was when I
+would have put you ashore, except for the cloud you were under. You had
+to have this one chance or go clean to hell. I gave you the chance. And
+what have you got to say about it?”
+
+“What did the Governor say?” Captain Dettmar demanded truculently.
+
+“Which governor?”
+
+“Of California. Did he lie to you like all the rest?”
+
+“I'll tell you what he said. He said that you had been convicted on
+circumstantial evidence; that was why you had got life imprisonment
+instead of hanging; that you had always stoutly maintained your
+innocence; that you were the black sheep of the Maryland Dettmars; that
+they moved heaven and earth for your pardon; that your prison conduct
+was most exemplary; that he was prosecuting attorney at the time you
+were convicted; that after you had served seven years he yielded to your
+family's plea and pardoned you; and that in his own mind existed a doubt
+that you had killed McSweeny.”
+
+There was a pause, during which Duncan went on studying the rising
+squall, while Captain Dettmar's face worked terribly.
+
+“Well, the Governor was wrong,” he announced, with a short laugh. “I did
+kill McSweeny. I did get the watchman drunk that night. I beat McSweeny
+to death in his bunk. I used the iron belaying pin that appeared in the
+evidence. He never had a chance. I beat him to a jelly. Do you want the
+details?”
+
+Duncan looked at him in the curious way one looks at any monstrosity,
+but made no reply.
+
+“Oh, I'm not afraid to tell you,” Captain Dettmar blustered on. “There
+are no witnesses. Besides, I am a free man now. I am pardoned, and by
+God they can never put me back in that hole again. I broke McSweeny's
+jaw with the first blow. He was lying on his back asleep. He said, 'My
+God, Jim! My God!' It was funny to see his broken jaw wabble as he said
+it. Then I smashed him... I say, do you want the rest of the details?”
+
+“Is that all you have to say?” was the answer.
+
+“Isn't it enough?” Captain Dettmar retorted.
+
+“It is enough.”
+
+“What are you going to do about it?”
+
+“Put you ashore at Attu-Attu.”
+
+“And in the meantime?”
+
+“In the meantime...” Duncan paused. An increase of weight in the wind
+rippled his hair. The stars overhead vanished, and the Samoset swung
+four points off her course in the careless steersman's hands. “In the
+meantime throw your halyards down on deck and look to your wheel. I'll
+call the men.”
+
+The next moment the squall burst upon them. Captain Dettmar, springing
+aft, lifted the coiled mainsail halyards from their pins and threw them,
+ready to run, on the deck. The three islanders swarmed from the tiny
+forecastle, two of them leaping to the halyards and holding by a single
+turn, while the third fastened down the engineroom, companion and
+swung the ventilators around. Below, Lee Goom and Toyama were lowering
+skylight covers and screwing up deadeyes. Duncan pulled shut the cover
+of the companion scuttle, and held on, waiting, the first drops of rain
+pelting his face, while the Samoset leaped violently ahead, at the same
+time heeling first to starboard then to port as the gusty pressures
+caught her winged-out sails.
+
+All waited. But there was no need to lower away on the run. The
+power went out of the wind, and the tropic rain poured a deluge over
+everything. Then it was, the danger past, and as the Kanakas began to
+coil the halyards back on the pins, that Boyd Duncan went below.
+
+“All right,” he called in cheerily to his wife. “Only a puff.”
+
+“And Captain Dettmar?” she queried.
+
+“Has been drinking, that is all. I shall get rid of him at Attu-Attu.”
+
+But before Duncan climbed into his bunk, he strapped around himself,
+against the skin and under his pajama coat, a heavy automatic pistol.
+
+He fell asleep almost immediately, for his was the gift of perfect
+relaxation. He did things tensely, in the way savages do, but the
+instant the need passed he relaxed, mind and body. So it was that he
+slept, while the rain still poured on deck and the yacht plunged and
+rolled in the brief, sharp sea caused by the squall.
+
+He awoke with a feeling of suffocation and heaviness. The electric fans
+had stopped, and the air was thick and stifling. Mentally cursing
+all Lorenzos and storage batteries, he heard his wife moving in the
+adjoining stateroom and pass out into the main cabin. Evidently heading
+for the fresher air on deck, he thought, and decided it was a good
+example to imitate. Putting on his slippers and tucking a pillow and a
+blanket under his arm, he followed her. As he was about to emerge from
+the companionway, the ship's clock in the cabin began to strike and he
+stopped to listen. Four bells sounded. It was two in the morning. From
+without came the creaking of the gaff-jaw against the mast. The Samoset
+rolled and righted on a sea, and in the light breeze her canvas gave
+forth a hollow thrum.
+
+He was just putting his foot out on the damp deck when he heard his
+wife scream. It was a startled frightened scream that ended in a splash
+overside. He leaped out and ran aft. In the dim starlight he could make
+out her head and shoulders disappearing astern in the lazy wake.
+
+“What was it?” Captain Dettmar, who was at the wheel, asked.
+
+“Mrs. Duncan,” was Duncan's reply, as he tore the life-buoy from its
+hook and flung it aft. “Jibe over to starboard and come up on the wind!”
+ he commanded.
+
+And then Boyd Duncan made a mistake. He dived overboard.
+
+When he came up, he glimpsed the blue-light on the buoy, which had
+ignited automatically when it struck the water. He swam for it, and
+found Minnie had reached it first.
+
+“Hello,” he said. “Just trying to keep cool?”
+
+“Oh, Boyd!” was her answer, and one wet hand reached out and touched
+his.
+
+The blue light, through deterioration or damage, flickered out. As they
+lifted on the smooth crest of a wave, Duncan turned to look where the
+Samoset made a vague blur in the darkness. No lights showed, but there
+was noise of confusion. He could hear Captain Dettmar's shouting above
+the cries of the others.
+
+“I must say he's taking his time,” Duncan grumbled. “Why doesn't he
+jibe? There she goes now.”
+
+They could hear the rattle of the boom tackle blocks as the sail was
+eased across.
+
+“That was the mainsail,” he muttered. “Jibed to port when I told him
+starboard.”
+
+Again they lifted on a wave, and again and again, ere they could make
+out the distant green of the Samoset's starboard light. But instead of
+remaining stationary, in token that the yacht was coming toward them, it
+began moving across their field of vision. Duncan swore.
+
+“What's the lubber holding over there for!” he demanded. “He's got his
+compass. He knows our bearing.”
+
+But the green light, which was all they could see, and which they could
+see only when they were on top of a wave, moved steadily away from them,
+withal it was working up to windward, and grew dim and dimmer. Duncan
+called out loudly and repeatedly, and each time, in the intervals, they
+could hear, very faintly, the voice of Captain Dettmar shouting orders.
+
+“How can he hear me with such a racket?” Duncan complained.
+
+“He's doing it so the crew won't hear you,” was Minnie's answer.
+
+There was something in the quiet way she said it that caught her
+husband's attention.
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“I mean that he is not trying to pick us up,” she went on in the same
+composed voice. “He threw me overboard.”
+
+“You are not making a mistake?”
+
+“How could I? I was at the main rigging, looking to see if any more
+rain threatened. He must have left the wheel and crept behind me. I was
+holding on to a stay with one hand. He gripped my hand free from behind
+and threw me over. It's too bad you didn't know, or else you would have
+staid aboard.”
+
+Duncan groaned, but said nothing for several minutes. The green light
+changed the direction of its course.
+
+“She's gone about,” he announced. “You are right. He's deliberately
+working around us and to windward. Up wind they can never hear me. But
+here goes.”
+
+He called at minute intervals for a long time. The green light
+disappeared, being replaced by the red, showing that the yacht had gone
+about again.
+
+“Minnie,” he said finally, “it pains me to tell you, but you married a
+fool. Only a fool would have gone overboard as I did.”
+
+“What chance have we of being picked up... by some other vessel, I
+mean?” she asked.
+
+“About one in ten thousand, or ten thousand million. Not a steamer route
+nor trade route crosses this stretch of ocean. And there aren't any
+whalers knocking about the South Seas. There might be a stray trading
+schooner running across from Tutuwanga. But I happen to know that island
+is visited only once a year. A chance in a million is ours.”
+
+“And we'll play that chance,” she rejoined stoutly.
+
+“You ARE a joy!” His hand lifted hers to his lips. “And Aunt Elizabeth
+always wondered what I saw in you. Of course we'll play that chance. And
+we'll win it, too. To happen otherwise would be unthinkable. Here goes.”
+
+He slipped the heavy pistol from his belt and let it sink into the sea.
+The belt, however, he retained.
+
+“Now you get inside the buoy and get some sleep. Duck under.”
+
+She ducked obediently, and came up inside the floating circle. He
+fastened the straps for her, then, with the pistol belt, buckled himself
+across one shoulder to the outside of the buoy.
+
+“We're good for all day to-morrow,” he said. “Thank God the water's
+warm. It won't be a hardship for the first twenty-hour hours, anyway.
+And if we're not picked up by nightfall, we've just got to hang on for
+another day, that's all.”
+
+For half an hour they maintained silence, Duncan, his head resting on
+the arm that was on the buoy, seemed asleep.
+
+“Boyd?” Minnie said softly.
+
+“Thought you were asleep,” he growled.
+
+“Boyd, if we don't come through this--”
+
+“Stow that!” he broke in ungallantly. “Of course we're coming through.
+There is isn't a doubt of it. Somewhere on this ocean is a ship that's
+heading right for us. You wait and see. Just the same I wish my brain
+were equipped with wireless. Now I'm going to sleep, if you don't.”
+
+But for once, sleep baffled him. An hour later he heard Minnie stir and
+knew she was awake.
+
+“Say, do you know what I've been thinking!” she asked.
+
+“No; what?”
+
+“That I'll wish you a Merry Christmas.”
+
+“By George, I never thought of it. Of course it's Christmas Day. We'll
+have many more of them, too. And do you know what I've been thinking?
+What a confounded shame we're done out of our Christmas dinner. Wait
+till I lay hands on Dettmar. I'll take it out of him. And it won't be
+with an iron belaying pin either, Just two bunches of naked knuckles,
+that's all.”
+
+Despite his facetiousness, Boyd Duncan had little hope. He knew well
+enough the meaning of one chance in a million, and was calmly certain
+that his wife and he had entered upon their last few living hours--hours
+that were inevitably bound to be black and terrible with tragedy.
+
+The tropic sun rose in a cloudless sky. Nothing was to be seen. The
+Samoset was beyond the sea-rim. As the sun rose higher, Duncan ripped
+his pajama trousers in halves and fashioned them into two rude turbans.
+Soaked in sea-water they offset the heat-rays.
+
+“When I think of that dinner, I'm really angry,” he complained, as he
+noted an anxious expression threatening to set on his wife's face. “And
+I want you to be with me when I settle with Dettmar. I've always been
+opposed to women witnessing scenes of blood, but this is different. It
+will be a beating.”
+
+“I hope I don't break my knuckles on him,” he added, after a pause.
+
+Midday came and went, and they floated on, the center of a narrow
+sea-circle. A gentle breath of the dying trade-wind fanned them, and
+they rose and fell monotonously on the smooth swells of a perfect summer
+sea. Once, a gunie spied them, and for half an hour circled about them
+with majestic sweeps. And, once, a huge rayfish, measuring a score of
+feet across the tips, passed within a few yards.
+
+By sunset, Minnie began to rave, softly, babblingly, like a child.
+Duncan's face grew haggard as he watched and listened, while in his
+mind he revolved plans of how best to end the hours of agony that were
+coming. And, so planning, as they rose on a larger swell than usual,
+he swept the circle of the sea with his eyes, and saw, what made him cry
+out.
+
+“Minnie!” She did not answer, and he shouted her name again in her ear,
+with all the voice he could command. Her eyes opened, in them fluttered
+commingled consciousness and delirium. He slapped her hands and wrists
+till the sting of the blows roused her.
+
+“There she is, the chance in a million!” he cried.
+
+“A steamer at that, heading straight for us! By George, it's a cruiser!
+I have it!--the Annapolis, returning with those astronomers from
+Tutuwanga.”
+
+*****
+
+United States Consul Lingford was a fussy, elderly gentleman, and in
+the two years of his service at Attu-Attu had never encountered so
+unprecedented a case as that laid before him by Boyd Duncan. The
+latter, with his wife, had been landed there by the Annapolis, which had
+promptly gone on with its cargo of astronomers to Fiji.
+
+“It was cold-blooded, deliberate attempt to murder,” said Consul
+Lingford. “The law shall take its course. I don't know how precisely
+to deal with this Captain Dettmar, but if he comes to Attu-Attu, depend
+upon it he shall be dealt with, he--ah--shall be dealt with. In the
+meantime, I shall read up the law. And now, won't you and your good lady
+stop for lunch!”
+
+As Duncan accepted the invitation, Minnie, who had been glancing out
+of the window at the harbor, suddenly leaned forward and touched her
+husband's arm. He followed her gaze, and saw the Samoset, flag at half
+mast, rounding up and dropping anchor scarcely a hundred yards away.
+
+“There's my boat now,” Duncan said to the Consul. “And there's the
+launch over the side, and Captain Dettmar dropping into it. If I don't
+miss my guess, he's coming to report our deaths to you.”
+
+The launch landed on the white beach, and leaving Lorenzo tinkering with
+the engine, Captain Dettmar strode across the beach and up the path to
+the Consulate.
+
+“Let him make his report,” Duncan said. “We'll just step into this next
+room and listen.”
+
+And through the partly open door, he and his wife heard Captain Dettmar,
+with tears in his voice, describe the loss of his owners.
+
+“I jibed over and went back across the very spot,” he concluded. “There
+was not a sign of them. I called and called, but there was never an
+answer. I tacked back and forth and wore for two solid hours, then hove
+to till daybreak, and cruised back and forth all day, two men at the
+mastheads. It is terrible. I am heartbroken. Mr. Duncan was a splendid
+man, and I shall never...”
+
+But he never completed the sentence, for at that moment his splendid
+employer strode out upon him, leaving Minnie standing in the doorway.
+Captain Dettmar's white face blanched even whiter.
+
+“I did my best to pick you up, sir,” he began.
+
+Boyd Duncan's answer was couched in terms of bunched knuckles, two
+bunches of them, that landed right and left on Captain Dettmar's face.
+
+Captain Dettmar staggered backward, recovered, and rushed with swinging
+arms at his employer, only to be met with a blow squarely between the
+eyes. This time the Captain went down, bearing the typewriter under him
+as he crashed to the floor.
+
+“This is not permissible,” Consul Lingford spluttered. “I beg of you, I
+beg of you, to desist.”
+
+“I'll pay the damages to office furniture,” Duncan answered, and at the
+same time landing more bunched knuckles on the eyes and nose of Dettmar.
+
+Consul Lingford bobbed around in the turmoil like a wet hen, while his
+office furniture went to ruin. Once, he caught Duncan by the arm, but
+was flung back, gasping, half-across the room. Another time he appealed
+to Minnie.
+
+“Mrs. Duncan, won't you, please, please, restrain your husband?”
+
+But she, white-faced and trembling, resolutely shook her head and
+watched the fray with all her eyes.
+
+“It is outrageous,” Consul Lingford cried, dodging the hurtling bodies
+of the two men. “It is an affront to the Government, to the United
+States Government. Nor will it be overlooked, I warn you. Oh, do pray
+desist, Mr. Duncan. You will kill the man. I beg of you. I beg, I
+beg...”
+
+But the crash of a tall vase filled with crimson hibiscus blossoms left
+him speechless.
+
+The time came when Captain Dettmar could no longer get up. He got as far
+as hands and knees, struggled vainly to rise further, then collapsed.
+Duncan stirred the groaning wreck with his foot.
+
+“He's all right,” he announced. “I've only given him what he has given
+many a sailor and worse.”
+
+“Great heavens, sir!” Consul Lingford exploded, staring horror-stricken
+at the man whom he had invited to lunch.
+
+Duncan giggled involuntarily, then controlled himself.
+
+“I apologize, Mr. Lingford, I most heartily apologize. I fear I was
+slightly carried away by my feelings.”
+
+Consul Lingford gulped and sawed the air speechlessly with his arms.
+
+“Slightly, sir? Slightly?” he managed to articulate.
+
+“Boyd,” Minnie called softly from the doorway.
+
+He turned and looked.
+
+“You ARE a joy,” she said.
+
+“And now, Mr. Lingford, I am done with him,” Duncan said. “I turn over
+what is left to you and the law.”
+
+“That?” Consul Lingford queried, in accent of horror.
+
+“That,” Boyd Duncan replied, looking ruefully at his battered knuckles.
+
+
+
+
+WAR
+
+HE was a young man, not more than twenty-four or five, and he might have
+sat his horse with the careless grace of his youth had he not been
+so catlike and tense. His black eyes roved everywhere, catching the
+movements of twigs and branches where small birds hopped, questing ever
+onward through the changing vistas of trees and brush, and returning
+always to the clumps of undergrowth on either side. And as he watched,
+so did he listen, though he rode on in silence, save for the boom of
+heavy guns from far to the west. This had been sounding monotonously
+in his ears for hours, and only its cessation could have aroused his
+notice. For he had business closer to hand. Across his saddle-bow was
+balanced a carbine.
+
+So tensely was he strung, that a bunch of quail, exploding into flight
+from under his horse's nose, startled him to such an extent that
+automatically, instantly, he had reined in and fetched the carbine
+halfway to his shoulder. He grinned sheepishly, recovered himself, and
+rode on. So tense was he, so bent upon the work he had to do, that the
+sweat stung his eyes unwiped, and unheeded rolled down his nose and
+spattered his saddle pommel. The band of his cavalryman's hat was
+fresh-stained with sweat. The roan horse under him was likewise wet. It
+was high noon of a breathless day of heat. Even the birds and squirrels
+did not dare the sun, but sheltered in shady hiding places among the
+trees.
+
+Man and horse were littered with leaves and dusted with yellow pollen,
+for the open was ventured no more than was compulsory. They kept to the
+brush and trees, and invariably the man halted and peered out before
+crossing a dry glade or naked stretch of upland pasturage. He worked
+always to the north, though his way was devious, and it was from the
+north that he seemed most to apprehend that for which he was looking.
+He was no coward, but his courage was only that of the average civilized
+man, and he was looking to live, not die.
+
+Up a small hillside he followed a cowpath through such dense scrub that
+he was forced to dismount and lead his horse. But when the path swung
+around to the west, he abandoned it and headed to the north again along
+the oak-covered top of the ridge.
+
+The ridge ended in a steep descent-so steep that he zigzagged back and
+forth across the face of the slope, sliding and stumbling among the dead
+leaves and matted vines and keeping a watchful eye on the horse above
+that threatened to fall down upon him. The sweat ran from him, and the
+pollen-dust, settling pungently in mouth and nostrils, increased
+his thirst. Try as he would, nevertheless the descent was noisy, and
+frequently he stopped, panting in the dry heat and listening for any
+warning from beneath.
+
+At the bottom he came out on a flat, so densely forested that he could
+not make out its extent. Here the character of the woods changed, and he
+was able to remount. Instead of the twisted hillside oaks, tall straight
+trees, big-trunked and prosperous, rose from the damp fat soil. Only
+here and there were thickets, easily avoided, while he encountered
+winding, park-like glades where the cattle had pastured in the days
+before war had run them off.
+
+His progress was more rapid now, as he came down into the valley, and at
+the end of half an hour he halted at an ancient rail fence on the edge
+of a clearing. He did not like the openness of it, yet his path lay
+across to the fringe of trees that marked the banks of the stream.
+It was a mere quarter of a mile across that open, but the thought of
+venturing out in it was repugnant. A rifle, a score of them, a thousand,
+might lurk in that fringe by the stream.
+
+Twice he essayed to start, and twice he paused. He was appalled by his
+own loneliness. The pulse of war that beat from the West suggested the
+companionship of battling thousands; here was naught but silence, and
+himself, and possible death-dealing bullets from a myriad ambushes. And
+yet his task was to find what he feared to find. He must on, and on,
+till somewhere, some time, he encountered another man, or other men,
+from the other side, scouting, as he was scouting, to make report, as he
+must make report, of having come in touch.
+
+Changing his mind, he skirted inside the woods for a distance, and again
+peeped forth. This time, in the middle of the clearing, he saw a
+small farmhouse. There were no signs of life. No smoke curled from the
+chimney, not a barnyard fowl clucked and strutted. The kitchen door
+stood open, and he gazed so long and hard into the black aperture that
+it seemed almost that a farmer's wife must emerge at any moment.
+
+He licked the pollen and dust from his dry lips, stiffened himself, mind
+and body, and rode out into the blazing sunshine. Nothing stirred. He
+went on past the house, and approached the wall of trees and bushes by
+the river's bank. One thought persisted maddeningly. It was of the crash
+into his body of a high-velocity bullet. It made him feel very fragile
+and defenseless, and he crouched lower in the saddle.
+
+Tethering his horse in the edge of the wood, he continued a hundred
+yards on foot till he came to the stream. Twenty feet wide it was,
+without perceptible current, cool and inviting, and he was very thirsty.
+But he waited inside his screen of leafage, his eyes fixed on the screen
+on the opposite side. To make the wait endurable, he sat down, his
+carbine resting on his knees. The minutes passed, and slowly his
+tenseness relaxed. At last he decided there was no danger; but just as
+he prepared to part the bushes and bend down to the water, a movement
+among the opposite bushes caught his eye.
+
+It might be a bird. But he waited. Again there was an agitation of the
+bushes, and then, so suddenly that it almost startled a cry from him,
+the bushes parted and a face peered out. It was a face covered with
+several weeks' growth of ginger-colored beard. The eyes were blue and
+wide apart, with laughter-wrinkles in the comers that showed despite the
+tired and anxious expression of the whole face.
+
+All this he could see with microscopic clearness, for the distance was
+no more than twenty feet. And all this he saw in such brief time, that
+he saw it as he lifted his carbine to his shoulder. He glanced along the
+sights, and knew that he was gazing upon a man who was as good as dead.
+It was impossible to miss at such point blank range.
+
+But he did not shoot. Slowly he lowered the carbine and watched. A
+hand, clutching a water-bottle, became visible and the ginger beard bent
+downward to fill the bottle. He could hear the gurgle of the water. Then
+arm and bottle and ginger beard disappeared behind the closing bushes.
+A long time he waited, when, with thirst unslaked, he crept back to his
+horse, rode slowly across the sun-washed clearing, and passed into the
+shelter of the woods beyond.
+
+II
+
+Another day, hot and breathless. A deserted farmhouse, large, with many
+outbuildings and an orchard, standing in a clearing. From the Woods, on
+a roan horse, carbine across pommel, rode the young man with the quick
+black eyes. He breathed with relief as he gained the house. That a fight
+had taken place here earlier in the season was evident. Clips and empty
+cartridges, tarnished with verdigris, lay on the ground, which, while
+wet, had been torn up by the hoofs of horses. Hard by the kitchen garden
+were graves, tagged and numbered. From the oak tree by the kitchen door,
+in tattered, weatherbeaten garments, hung the bodies of two men. The
+faces, shriveled and defaced, bore no likeness to the faces of men. The
+roan horse snorted beneath them, and the rider caressed and soothed it
+and tied it farther away.
+
+Entering the house, he found the interior a wreck. He trod on empty
+cartridges as he walked from room to room to reconnoiter from the
+windows. Men had camped and slept everywhere, and on the floor of one
+room he came upon stains unmistakable where the wounded had been laid
+down.
+
+Again outside, he led the horse around behind the barn and invaded the
+orchard. A dozen trees were burdened with ripe apples. He filled his
+pockets, eating while he picked. Then a thought came to him, and he
+glanced at the sun, calculating the time of his return to camp. He
+pulled off his shirt, tying the sleeves and making a bag. This he
+proceeded to fill with apples.
+
+As he was about to mount his horse, the animal suddenly pricked up its
+ears. The man, too, listened, and heard, faintly, the thud of hoofs on
+soft earth. He crept to the corner of the barn and peered out. A dozen
+mounted men, strung out loosely, approaching from the opposite side of
+the clearing, were only a matter of a hundred yards or so away. They
+rode on to the house. Some dismounted, while others remained in the
+saddle as an earnest that their stay would be short. They seemed to
+be holding a council, for he could hear them talking excitedly in the
+detested tongue of the alien invader. The time passed, but they seemed
+unable to reach a decision. He put the carbine away in its boot,
+mounted, and waited impatiently, balancing the shirt of apples on the
+pommel.
+
+He heard footsteps approaching, and drove his spurs so fiercely into the
+roan as to force a surprised groan from the animal as it leaped forward.
+At the corner of the barn he saw the intruder, a mere boy of nineteen or
+twenty for all of his uniform jump back to escape being run down. At
+the same moment the roan swerved and its rider caught a glimpse of the
+aroused men by the house. Some were springing from their horses, and
+he could see the rifles going to their shoulders. He passed the kitchen
+door and the dried corpses swinging in the shade, compelling his foes to
+run around the front of the house. A rifle cracked, and a second, but he
+was going fast, leaning forward, low in the saddle, one hand clutching
+the shirt of apples, the other guiding the horse.
+
+The top bar of the fence was four feet high, but he knew his roan and
+leaped it at full career to the accompaniment of several scattered
+shots. Eight hundred yards straight away were the woods, and the roan
+was covering the distance with mighty strides. Every man was now firing.
+pumping their guns so rapidly that he no longer heard individual shots.
+A bullet went through his hat, but he was unaware, though he did know
+when another tore through the apples on the pommel. And he winced and
+ducked even lower when a third bullet, fired low, struck a stone between
+his horse's legs and ricochetted off through the air, buzzing and
+humming like some incredible insect.
+
+The shots died down as the magazines were emptied, until, quickly, there
+was no more shooting. The young man was elated. Through that astonishing
+fusillade he had come unscathed. He glanced back. Yes, they had emptied
+their magazines. He could see several reloading. Others were running
+back behind the house for their horses. As he looked, two already
+mounted, came back into view around the corner, riding hard. And at the
+same moment, he saw the man with the unmistakable ginger beard kneel
+down on the ground, level his gun, and coolly take his time for the long
+shot.
+
+The young man threw his spurs into the horse, crouched very low, and
+swerved in his flight in order to distract the other's aim. And still
+the shot did not come. With each jump of the horse, the woods sprang
+nearer. They were only two hundred yards away and still the shot was
+delayed.
+
+And then he heard it, the last thing he was to hear, for he was dead ere
+he hit the ground in the long crashing fall from the saddle. And they,
+watching at the house, saw him fall, saw his body bounce when it struck
+the earth, and saw the burst of red-cheeked apples that rolled about
+him. They laughed at the unexpected eruption of apples, and clapped
+their hands in applause of the long shot by the man with the ginger
+beard.
+
+
+
+
+UNDER THE DECK AWNINGS
+
+“CAN any man--a gentleman, I mean--call a woman a pig?”
+
+The little man flung this challenge forth to the whole group, then
+leaned back in his deck chair, sipping lemonade with an air commingled
+of certitude and watchful belligerence. Nobody made answer. They were
+used to the little man and his sudden passions and high elevations.
+
+“I repeat, it was in my presence that he said a certain lady, whom none
+of you knows, was a pig. He did not say swine. He grossly said that she
+was a pig. And I hold that no man who is a man could possibly make such
+a remark about any woman.”
+
+Dr. Dawson puffed stolidly at his black pipe. Matthews, with knees
+hunched up and clasped by his arms, was absorbed in the flight of a
+gunie. Sweet, finishing his Scotch and soda, was questing about with his
+eyes for a deck steward.
+
+“I ask you, Mr. Treloar, can any man call any woman a pig?”
+
+Treloar, who happened to be sitting next to him, was startled by the
+abruptness of the attack, and wondered what grounds he had ever given
+the little man to believe that he could call a woman a pig.
+
+“I should say,” he began his hesitant answer, “that it--er--depends on
+the--er--the lady.”
+
+The little man was aghast.
+
+“You mean...?” he quavered.
+
+“That I have seen female humans who were as bad as pigs--and worse.”
+
+There was a long pained silence. The little man seemed withered by the
+coarse brutality of the reply. In his face was unutterable hurt and woe.
+
+“You have told of a man who made a not nice remark and you have
+classified him,” Treloar said in cold, even tones. “I shall now tell
+you about a woman--I beg your pardon--a lady, and when I have finished
+I shall ask you to classify her. Miss Caruthers I shall call her,
+principally for the reason that it is not her name. It was on a P. & O.
+boat, and it occurred neither more nor less than several years ago.
+
+“Miss Caruthers was charming. No; that is not the word. She was amazing.
+She was a young woman, and a lady. Her father was a certain high
+official whose name, if I mentioned it, would be immediately recognized
+by all of you. She was with her mother and two maids at the time, going
+out to join the old gentleman wherever you like to wish in the East.
+
+“She, and pardon me for repeating, was amazing. It is the one adequate
+word. Even the most minor adjectives applicable to her are bound to be
+sheer superlatives. There was nothing she could not do better than any
+woman and than most men. Sing, play--bah!--as some rhetorician once
+said of old Nap, competition fled from her. Swim! She could have made
+a fortune and a name as a public performer. She was one of those rare
+women who can strip off all the frills of dress, and in simple swimming
+suit be more satisfying beautiful. Dress! She was an artist.
+
+“But her swimming. Physically, she was the perfect woman--you know
+what I mean, not in the gross, muscular way of acrobats, but in all the
+delicacy of line and fragility of frame and texture. And combined with
+this, strength. How she could do it was the marvel. You know the wonder
+of a woman's arm--the fore arm, I mean; the sweet fading away from
+rounded biceps and hint of muscle, down through small elbow and firm
+soft swell to the wrist, small, unthinkably small and round and strong.
+This was hers. And yet, to see her swimming the sharp quick English
+overhand stroke, and getting somewhere with it, too, was--well, I
+understand anatomy and athletics and such things, and yet it was a
+mystery to me how she could do it.
+
+“She could stay under water for two minutes. I have timed her. No man
+on board, except Dennitson, could capture as many coins as she with a
+single dive. On the forward main-deck was a big canvas tank with six
+feet of sea-water. We used to toss small coins into it. I have seen her
+dive from the bridge deck--no mean feat in itself--into that six-feet
+of water, and fetch up no less than forty-seven coins, scattered
+willy-nilly over the whole bottom of the tank. Dennitson, a quiet young
+Englishman, never exceeded her in this, though he made it a point always
+to tie her score.
+
+“She was a sea-woman, true. But she was a land-woman, a
+horsewoman--a--she was the universal woman. To see her, all softness of
+soft dress, surrounded by half a dozen eager men, languidly careless of
+them all or flashing brightness and wit on them and at them and through
+them, one would fancy she was good for nothing else in the world.
+At such moments I have compelled myself to remember her score of
+forty-seven coins from the bottom of the swimming tank. But that was
+she, the everlasting, wonder of a woman who did all things well.
+
+“She fascinated every betrousered human around her. She had me--and I
+don't mind confessing it--she bad me to heel along with the rest. Young
+puppies and old gray dogs who ought to have known better--oh, they all
+came up and crawled around her skirts and whined and fawned when she
+whistled. They were all guilty, from young Ardmore, a pink cherub of
+nineteen outward bound for some clerkship in the Consular Service, to
+old Captain Bentley, grizzled and sea-worn, and as emotional, to look
+at, as a Chinese joss. There was a nice middle-aged chap, Perkins, I
+believe, who forgot his wife was on board until Miss Caruthers sent him
+to the right about and back where he belonged.
+
+“Men were wax in her hands. She melted them, or softly molded them, or
+incinerated them, as she pleased. There wasn't a steward, even, grand
+and remote as she was, who, at her bidding, would have hesitated to
+souse the Old Man himself with a plate of soup. You have all seen such
+women--a sort of world's desire to all men. As a man-conqueror she was
+supreme. She was a whip-lash, a sting and a flame, an electric spark.
+Oh, believe me, at times there were flashes of will that scorched
+through her beauty and seduction and smote a victim into blank and
+shivering idiocy and fear.
+
+“And don't fail to mark, in the light of what is to come, that she was
+a prideful woman. Pride of race, pride of caste, pride of sex, pride of
+power--she had it all, a pride strange and wilful and terrible.
+
+“She ran the ship, she ran the voyage, she ran everything, and she ran
+Dennitson. That he had outdistanced the pack even the least wise of us
+admitted. That she liked him, and that this feeling was growing, there
+was not a doubt. I am certain that she looked on him with kinder eyes
+than she had ever looked with on man before. We still worshiped, and
+were always hanging about waiting to be whistled up, though we knew that
+Dennitson was laps and laps ahead of us. What might have happened we
+shall never know, for we came to Colombo and something else happened.
+
+“You know Colombo, and how the native boys dive for coins in the
+shark-infested bay. Of course, it is only among the ground sharks and
+fish sharks that they venture. It is almost uncanny the way they know
+sharks and can sense the presence of a real killer--a tiger shark, for
+instance, or a gray nurse strayed up from Australian waters. Let such a
+shark appear, and, long before the passengers can guess, every mother's
+son of them is out of the water in a wild scramble for safety.
+
+“It was after tiffin, and Miss Caruthers was holding her usual court
+under the deck-awnings. Old Captain Bentley had just been whistled
+up, and had granted her what he never granted before... nor
+since--permission for the boys to come up on the promenade deck. You
+see, Miss Caruthers was a swimmer, and she was interested. She took up
+a collection of all our small change, and herself tossed it overside,
+singly and in handfuls, arranging the terms of the contests, chiding a
+miss, giving extra rewards to clever wins, in short, managing the whole
+exhibition.
+
+“She was especially keen on their jumping. You know, jumping feet-first
+from a height, it is very difficult to hold the body perpendicularly
+while in the air. The center of gravity of the male body is high, and
+the tendency is to overtopple. But the little beggars employed a method
+which she declared was new to her and which she desired to learn.
+Leaping from the davits of the boat-deck above, they plunged downward,
+their faces and shoulders bowed forward, looking at the water. And only
+at the last moment did they abruptly straighten up and enter the water
+erect and true.
+
+“It was a pretty sight. Their diving was not so good, though there was
+one of them who was excellent at it, as he was in all the other stunts.
+Some white man must have taught him, for he made the proper swan dive
+and did it as beautifully as I have ever seen it. You know, headfirst
+into the water, from a great height, the problem is to enter the water
+at the perfect angle. Miss the angle and it means at the least a twisted
+back and injury for life. Also, it has meant death for many a bungler.
+But this boy could do it--seventy feet I know he cleared in one dive
+from the rigging--clenched hands on chest, head thrown back, sailing
+more like a bird, upward and out, and out and down, body flat on the air
+so that if it struck the surface in that position it would be split in
+half like a herring. But the moment before the water is reached, the
+head drops forward, the hands go out and lock the arms in an arch in
+advance of the head, and the body curves gracefully downward and enters
+the water just right.
+
+“This the boy did, again and again, to the delight of all of us, but
+particularly of Miss Caruthers. He could not have been a moment over
+twelve or thirteen, yet he was by far the cleverest of the gang. He was
+the favorite of his crowd, and its leader. Though there were a number
+older than he, they acknowledged his chieftaincy. He was a beautiful
+boy, a lithe young god in breathing bronze, eyes wide apart, intelligent
+and daring, a bubble, a mote, a beautiful flash and sparkle of life. You
+have seen wonderful glorious creatures--animals, anything, a leopard,
+a horse-restless, eager, too much alive ever to be still, silken of
+muscle, each slightest movement a benediction of grace, every action
+wild, untrammeled, and over all spilling out that intense vitality, that
+sheen and luster of living light. The boy had it. Life poured out of him
+almost in an effulgence. His skin glowed with it. It burned in his eyes.
+I swear I could almost hear it crackle from him. Looking at him, it was
+as if a whiff of ozone came to one's nostrils--so fresh and young was
+he, so resplendent with health, so wildly wild.
+
+“This was the boy. And it was he who gave the alarm in the midst of the
+sport. The boys made a dash of it for the gangway platform, swimming the
+fastest strokes they knew, pellmell, floundering and splashing, fright
+in their faces, clambering out with jumps and surges, any way to get
+out, lending one another a hand to safety, till all were strung along
+the gangway and peering down into the water.
+
+“'What is the matter?' asked Miss Caruthers.
+
+“'A shark, I fancy,' Captain Bentley answered. 'Lucky little beggars
+that he didn't get one of them.'
+
+“'Are they afraid of sharks?' she asked.
+
+“'Aren't you?' he asked back.”
+
+She shuddered, looked overside at the water, and made a move.
+
+“'Not for the world would I venture where a shark might be,' she said,
+and shuddered again. 'They are horrible! Horrible!'
+
+“The boys came up on the promenade deck, clustering close to the rail
+and worshiping Miss Caruthers who had flung them such a wealth of
+backsheesh. The performance being over, Captain Bentley motioned to them
+to clear out. But she stopped him.
+
+“'One moment, please, Captain. I have always understood that the natives
+are not afraid of sharks.'
+
+“She beckoned the boy of the swan dive nearer to her, and signed to
+him to dive over again. He shook his head, and along with all his crew
+behind him laughed as if it were a good joke.
+
+“'Shark,' he volunteered, pointing to the water.
+
+“'No,' she said. 'There is no shark.'
+
+“But he nodded his head positively, and the boys behind him nodded with
+equal positiveness.
+
+“'No, no, no,' she cried. And then to us, 'Who'll lend me a half-crown
+and a sovereign!'
+
+“Immediately the half dozen of us were presenting her with crowns and
+sovereigns, and she accepted the two coins from young Ardmore.
+
+“She held up the half-crown for the boys to see. But there was no eager
+rush to the rail preparatory to leaping. They stood there grinning
+sheepishly. She offered the coin to each one individually, and each,
+as his turn came, rubbed his foot against his calf, shook his head,
+and grinned. Then she tossed the half-crown overboard. With wistful,
+regretful faces they watched its silver flight through the air, but not
+one moved to follow it.
+
+“'Don't do it with the sovereign,' Dennitson said to her in a low voice.
+
+“She took no notice, but held up the gold coin before the eyes of the
+boy of the swan dive.
+
+“'Don't,' said Captain Bentley. 'I wouldn't throw a sick cat overside
+with a shark around.'
+
+“But she laughed, bent on her purpose, and continued to dazzle the boy.
+
+“'Don't tempt him,' Dennitson urged. 'It is a fortune to him, and he
+might go over after it.'
+
+“'Wouldn't YOU?' she flared at him. 'If I threw it?'”
+
+This last more softly.
+
+Dennitson shook his head.
+
+“'Your price is high,' she said. 'For how many sovereigns would you go?'
+
+“'There are not enough coined to get me overside,' was his answer.
+
+“She debated a moment, the boy forgotten in her tilt with Dennitson.
+
+“'For me?' she said very softly.
+
+“'To save your life--yes. But not otherwise.'
+
+“She turned back to the boy. Again she held the coin before his eyes,
+dazzling him with the vastness of its value. Then she made as to toss
+it out, and, involuntarily, he made a half-movement toward the rail,
+but was checked by sharp cries of reproof from his companions. There was
+anger in their voices as well.
+
+“'I know it is only fooling,' Dennitson said. 'Carry it as far as you
+like, but for heaven's sake don't throw it.'
+
+“Whether it was that strange wilfulness of hers, or whether she doubted
+the boy could be persuaded, there is no telling. It was unexpected to
+all of us. Out from the shade of the awning the coin flashed golden
+in the blaze of sunshine and fell toward the sea in a glittering arch.
+Before a hand could stay him, the boy was over the rail and curving
+beautifully downward after the coin. Both were in the air at the same
+time. It was a pretty sight. The sovereign cut the water sharply, and at
+the very spot, almost at the same instant, with scarcely a splash, the
+boy entered.
+
+“From the quicker-eyed black boys watching, came an exclamation. We were
+all at the railing. Don't tell me it is necessary for a shark to turn on
+its back. That one did not. In the clear water, from the height we were
+above it, we saw everything. The shark was a big brute, and with one
+drive he cut the boy squarely in half.
+
+“There was a murmur or something from among us--who made it I did not
+know; it might have been I. And then there was silence. Miss Caruthers
+was the first to speak. Her face was deathly white.
+
+“'I never dreamed,' she said, and laughed a short, hysterical laugh.
+
+“All her pride was at work to give her control. She turned weakly toward
+Dennitson, and then, on from one to another of us. In her eyes was a
+terrible sickness, and her lips were trembling. We were brutes--oh, I
+know it, now that I look back upon it. But we did nothing.
+
+“'Mr. Dennitson,' she said, 'Tom, won't you take me below!'
+
+“He never changed the direction of his gaze, which was the bleakest I
+have ever seen in a man's face, nor did he move an eyelid. He took a
+cigarette from his case and lighted it. Captain Bentley made a nasty
+sound in his throat and spat overboard. That was all; that and the
+silence.
+
+“She turned away and started to walk firmly down the deck. Twenty feet
+away, she swayed and thrust a hand against the wall to save herself. And
+so she went on, supporting herself against the cabins and walking very
+slowly.” Treloar ceased. He turned his head and favored the little man
+with a look of cold inquiry.
+
+“Well,” he said finally. “Classify her.”
+
+The little man gulped and swallowed.
+
+“I have nothing to say,” he said. “I have nothing whatever to say.”
+
+
+
+
+TO KILL A MAN
+
+THOUGH dim night-lights burned, she moved familiarly through the big
+rooms and wide halls, seeking vainly the half-finished book of verse she
+had mislaid and only now remembered. When she turned on the lights in
+the drawing-room, she disclosed herself clad in a sweeping negligee gown
+of soft rose-colored stuff, throat and shoulders smothered in lace. Her
+rings were still on her fingers, her massed yellow hair had not yet been
+taken down. She was delicately, gracefully beautiful, with slender,
+oval face, red lips, a faint color in the cheeks, and blue eyes of the
+chameleon sort that at will stare wide with the innocence of childhood,
+go hard and gray and brilliantly cold, or flame up in hot wilfulness and
+mastery.
+
+She turned the lights off and passed out and down the hall toward the
+morning room. At the entrance she paused and listened. From farther on
+had come, not a noise, but an impression of movement. She could have
+sworn she had not heard anything, yet something had been different.
+The atmosphere of night quietude had been disturbed. She wondered what
+servant could be prowling about. Not the butler, who was notorious
+for retiring early save on special occasion. Nor could it be her maid,
+whom she had permitted to go that evening.
+
+Passing on to the dining-room, she found the door closed. Why she opened
+it and went on in, she did not know, except for the feeling that the
+disturbing factor, whatever it might be, was there. The room was in
+darkness, and she felt her way to the button and pressed. As the blaze
+of light flashed on, she stepped back and cried out. It was a mere “Oh!”
+ and it was not loud.
+
+
+Facing her, alongside the button, flat against the wall, was a man. In
+his hand, pointed toward her, was a revolver. She noticed, even in
+the shock of seeing him, that the weapon was black and exceedingly
+long-barreled. She knew black and exceedingly long it for what it was, a
+Colt's. He was a medium-sized man, roughly clad, brown-eyed, and swarthy
+with sunburn. He seemed very cool. There was no wabble to the revolver
+and it was directed toward her stomach, not from an outstretched arm,
+but from the hip, against which the forearm rested.
+
+“Oh,” she said. “I beg your pardon. You startled me. What do you want?”
+
+“I reckon I want to get out,” he answered, with a humorous twitch to
+the lips. “I've kind of lost my way in this here shebang, and if you'll
+kindly show me the door I'll cause no trouble and sure vamoose.”
+
+“But what are you doing here?” she demanded, her voice touched with the
+sharpness of one used to authority.
+
+“Plain robbing, Miss, that's all. I came snooping around to see what I
+could gather up. I thought you wan't to home, seein' as I saw you pull
+out with your old man in an auto. I reckon that must a ben your pa, and
+you're Miss Setliffe.”
+
+Mrs. Setliffe saw his mistake, appreciated the naive compliment, and
+decided not to undeceive him.
+
+“How do you know I am Miss Setliffe?” she asked.
+
+“This is old Setliffe's house, ain't it?”
+
+She nodded.
+
+“I didn't know he had a daughter, but I reckon you must be her. And now,
+if it ain't botherin' you too much, I'd sure be obliged if you'd show me
+the way out.”
+
+“But why should I? You are a robber, a burglar.”
+
+“If I wan't an ornery shorthorn at the business, I'd be accumulatin'
+them rings on your fingers instead of being polite,” he retorted.
+
+“I come to make a raise outa old Setliffe, and not to be robbing
+women-folks. If you get outa the way, I reckon I can find my own way
+out.”
+
+Mrs. Setliffe was a keen woman, and she felt that from such a man there
+was little to fear. That he was not a typical criminal, she was certain.
+From his speech she knew he was not of the cities, and she seemed to
+sense the wider, homelier air of large spaces.
+
+“Suppose I screamed?” she queried curiously. “Suppose I made an outcry
+for help? You couldn't shoot me?... a woman?”
+
+She noted the fleeting bafflement in his brown eyes. He answered slowly
+and thoughtfully, as if working out a difficult problem. “I reckon,
+then, I'd have to choke you and maul you some bad.”
+
+“A woman?”
+
+“I'd sure have to,” he answered, and she saw his mouth set grimly.
+
+“You're only a soft woman, but you see, Miss, I can't afford to go to
+jail. No, Miss, I sure can't. There's a friend of mine waitin' for
+me out West. He's in a hole, and I've got to help him out.” The mouth
+shaped even more grimly. “I guess I could choke you without hurting you
+much to speak of.”
+
+Her eyes took on a baby stare of innocent incredulity as she watched
+him.
+
+“I never met a burglar before,” she assured him, “and I can't begin to
+tell you how interested I am.”
+
+“I'm not a burglar, Miss. Not a real one,” he hastened to add as she
+looked her amused unbelief. “It looks like it, me being here in your
+house. But it's the first time I ever tackled such a job. I needed the
+money bad. Besides, I kind of look on it like collecting what's coming
+to me.”
+
+“I don't understand,” she smiled encouragingly. “You came here to rob,
+and to rob is to take what is not yours.”
+
+“Yes, and no, in this here particular case. But I reckon I'd better be
+going now.”
+
+He started for the door of the dining-room, but she interposed, and a
+very beautiful obstacle she made of herself. His left hand went out
+as if to grip her, then hesitated. He was patently awed by her soft
+womanhood.
+
+“There!” she cried triumphantly. “I knew you wouldn't.”
+
+The man was embarrassed.
+
+“I ain't never manhandled a woman yet,” he explained, “and it don't come
+easy. But I sure will, if you set to screaming.”
+
+“Won't you stay a few minutes and talk?” she urged. “I'm so interested.
+I should like to hear you explain how burglary is collecting what is
+coming to you.”
+
+He looked at her admiringly.
+
+“I always thought women-folks were scairt of robbers,” he confessed.
+“But you don't seem none.”
+
+She laughed gaily.
+
+“There are robbers and robbers, you know. I am not afraid of you,
+because I am confident you are not the sort of creature that would harm
+a woman. Come, talk with me a while. Nobody will disturb us. I am all
+alone. My--father caught the night train to New York. The servants are
+all asleep. I should like to give you something to eat--women always
+prepare midnight suppers for the burglars they catch, at least they
+do in the magazine stories. But I don't know where to find the food.
+Perhaps you will have something to drink?”
+
+He hesitated, and did not reply; but she could see the admiration for
+her growing in his eyes.
+
+“You're not afraid?” she queried. “I won't poison you, I promise. I'll
+drink with you to show you it is all right.”
+
+“You sure are a surprise package of all right,” he declared, for the
+first time lowering the weapon and letting it hang at his side. “No one
+don't need to tell me ever again that women-folks in cities is afraid.
+You ain't much--just a little soft pretty thing. But you've sure got the
+spunk. And you're trustful on top of it. There ain't many women, or men
+either, who'd treat a man with a gun the way you're treating me.”
+
+She smiled her pleasure in the compliment, and her face, was very
+earnest as she said:
+
+“That is because I like your appearance. You are too decent-looking a
+man to be a robber. You oughtn't to do such things. If you are in bad
+luck you should go to work. Come, put away that nasty revolver and let
+us talk it over. The thing for you to do is to work.”
+
+“Not in this burg,” he commented bitterly. “I've walked two inches off
+the bottom of my legs trying to find a job. Honest, I was a fine large
+man once... before I started looking for a job.”
+
+The merry laughter with which she greeted his sally obviously pleased
+him, and she was quick to note and take advantage of it. She moved
+directly away from the door and toward the sideboard.
+
+“Come, you must tell me all about it while I get that drink for you.
+What will it be? Whisky?”
+
+“Yes, ma'am,” he said, as he followed her, though he still carried
+the big revolver at his side, and though he glanced reluctantly at the
+unguarded open door.
+
+She filled a glass for him at the sideboard.
+
+“I promised to drink with you,” she said hesitatingly. “But I don't like
+whisky. I... I prefer sherry.”
+
+She lifted the sherry bottle tentatively for his consent.
+
+“Sure,” he answered, with a nod. “Whisky's a man's drink. I never like
+to see women at it. Wine's more their stuff.”
+
+She raised her glass to his, her eyes meltingly sympathetic.
+
+“Here's to finding you a good position--”
+
+But she broke off at sight of the expression of surprised disgust on his
+face. The glass, barely touched, was removed from his wry lips.
+
+“What is the matter!” she asked anxiously. “Don't you like it? Have I
+made a mistake?”
+
+“It's sure funny whisky. Tastes like it got burned and smoked in the
+making.”
+
+“Oh! How silly of me! I gave you Scotch. Of course you are accustomed to
+rye. Let me change it.”
+
+She was almost solicitiously maternal, as she replaced the glass with
+another and sought and found the proper bottle.
+
+“Better?” she asked.
+
+“Yes, ma'am. No smoke in it. It's sure the real good stuff. I ain't had
+a drink in a week. Kind of slick, that; oily, you know; not made in a
+chemical factory.”
+
+“You are a drinking man?” It was half a question, half a challenge.
+
+“No, ma'am, not to speak of. I HAVE rared up and ripsnorted at spells,
+but most unfrequent. But there is times when a good stiff jolt lands on
+the right spot kerchunk, and this is sure one of them. And now, thanking
+you for your kindness, ma'am, I'll just be a pulling along.”
+
+But Mrs. Setliffe did not want to lose her burglar. She was too poised a
+woman to possess much romance, but there was a thrill about the present
+situation that delighted her. Besides, she knew there was no danger. The
+man, despite his jaw and the steady brown eyes, was eminently tractable.
+Also, farther back in her consciousness glimmered the thought of an
+audience of admiring friends. It was too bad not to have that audience.
+
+“You haven't explained how burglary, in your case, is merely collecting
+what is your own,” she said. “Come, sit down, and tell me about it here
+at the table.”
+
+She maneuvered for her own seat, and placed him across the corner from
+her. His alertness had not deserted him, as she noted, and his eyes
+roved sharply about, returning always with smoldering admiration to
+hers, but never resting long. And she noted likewise that while she
+spoke he was intent on listening for other sounds than those of her
+voice. Nor had he relinquished the revolver, which lay at the corner of
+the table between them, the butt close to his right hand.
+
+But he was in a new habitat which he did not know. This man from the
+West, cunning in woodcraft and plainscraft, with eyes and ears open,
+tense and suspicious, did not know that under the table, close to her
+foot, was the push button of an electric bell. He had never heard of
+such a contrivance, and his keenness and wariness went for naught.
+
+“It's like this, Miss,” he began, in response to her urging. “Old
+Setliffe done me up in a little deal once. It was raw, but it worked.
+Anything will work full and legal when it's got few hundred million
+behind it. I'm not squealin', and I ain't taking a slam at your pa.
+He don't know me from Adam, and I reckon he don't know he done me outa
+anything. He's too big, thinking and dealing in millions, to ever hear
+of a small potato like me. He's an operator. He's got all kinds of
+experts thinking and planning and working for him, some of them, I hear,
+getting more cash salary than the President of the United States. I'm
+only one of thousands that have been done up by your pa, that's all.
+
+“You see, ma'am, I had a little hole in the ground--a dinky, hydraulic,
+one-horse outfit of a mine. And when the Setliffe crowd shook down
+Idaho, and reorganized the smelter trust, and roped in the rest of the
+landscape, and put through the big hydraulic scheme at Twin Pines, why
+I sure got squeezed. I never had a run for my money. I was scratched
+off the card before the first heat. And so, to-night, being broke and my
+friend needing me bad, I just dropped around to make a raise outa your
+pa. Seeing as I needed it, it kinda was coming to me.”
+
+“Granting all that you say is so,” she said, “nevertheless it does not
+make house-breaking any the less house-breaking. You couldn't make such
+a defense in a court of law.”
+
+“I know that,” he confessed meekly. “What's right ain't always legal.
+And that's why I am so uncomfortable a-settin' here and talking with
+you. Not that I ain't enjoying your company--I sure do enjoy it--but I
+just can't afford to be caught. I know what they'd do to me in this here
+city. There was a young fellow that got fifty years only last week for
+holding a man up on the street for two dollars and eighty-five cents. I
+read about it in the paper. When times is hard and they ain't no work,
+men get desperate. And then the other men who've got something to be
+robbed of get desperate, too, and they just sure soak it to the other
+fellows. If I got caught, I reckon I wouldn't get a mite less than ten
+years. That's why I'm hankering to be on my way.”
+
+“No; wait.” She lifted a detaining hand, at the same time removing her
+foot from the bell, which she had been pressing intermittently. “You
+haven't told me your name yet.”
+
+He hesitated.
+
+“Call me Dave.”
+
+“Then... Dave,” she laughed with pretty confusion. “Something must be
+done for you. You are a young man, and you are just at the beginning
+of a bad start. If you begin by attempting to collect what you think is
+coming to you, later on you will be collecting what you are perfectly
+sure isn't coming to you. And you know what the end will be. Instead of
+this, we must find something honorable for you to do.”
+
+“I need the money, and I need it now,” he replied doggedly. “It's not
+for myself, but for that friend I told you about. He's in a peck of
+trouble, and he's got to get his lift now or not at all.”
+
+“I can find you a position,” she said quickly. “And--yes, the very
+thing!--I'll lend you the money you want to send to your friend. This
+you can pay back out of your salary.”
+
+“About three hundred would do,” he said slowly. “Three hundred would
+pull him through. I'd work my fingers off for a year for that, and my
+keep, and a few cents to buy Bull Durham with.”
+
+“Ah! You smoke! I never thought of it.”
+
+Her hand went out over the revolver toward his hand, as she pointed to
+the tell-tale yellow stain on his fingers. At the same time her eyes
+measured the nearness of her own hand and of his to the weapon. She
+ached to grip it in one swift movement. She was sure she could do
+it, and yet she was not sure; and so it was that she refrained as she
+withdrew her hand.
+
+“Won't you smoke?” she invited.
+
+“I'm 'most dying to.”
+
+“Then do so. I don't mind. I really like it--cigarettes, I mean.”
+
+With his left band he dipped into his side pocket, brought out a
+loose wheat-straw paper and shifted it to his right hand close by the
+revolver. Again he dipped, transferring to the paper a pinch of brown,
+flaky tobacco. Then he proceeded, both hands just over the revolver, to
+roll the cigarette.
+
+“From the way you hover close to that nasty weapon, you seem to be
+afraid of me,” she challenged.
+
+“Not exactly afraid of you, ma'am, but, under the circumstances, just a
+mite timid.”
+
+“But I've not been afraid of you.”
+
+“You've got nothing to lose.”
+
+“My life,” she retorted.
+
+“That's right,” he acknowledged promptly, “and you ain't been scairt of
+me. Mebbe I am over anxious.”
+
+“I wouldn't cause you any harm.”
+
+Even as she spoke, her slipper felt for the bell and pressed it. At the
+same time her eyes were earnest with a plea of honesty.
+
+“You are a judge of men. I know it. And of women. Surely, when I am
+trying to persuade you from a criminal life and to get you honest work
+to do....?”
+
+He was immediately contrite.
+
+“I sure beg your pardon, ma'am,” he said. “I reckon my nervousness ain't
+complimentary.”
+
+As he spoke, he drew his right hand from the table, and after lighting
+the cigarette, dropped it by his side.
+
+“Thank you for your confidence,” she breathed softly, resolutely keeping
+her eyes from measuring the distance to the revolver, and keeping her
+foot pressed firmly on the bell.
+
+“About that three hundred,” he began. “I can telegraph it West to-night.
+And I'll agree to work a year for it and my keep.”
+
+“You will earn more than that. I can promise seventy-five dollars a
+month at the least. Do you know horses?”
+
+His face lighted up and his eyes sparkled.
+
+“Then go to work for me--or for my father, rather, though I engage all
+the servants. I need a second coachman--”
+
+“And wear a uniform?” he interrupted sharply, the sneer of the free-born
+West in his voice and on his lips.
+
+She smiled tolerantly.
+
+“Evidently that won't do. Let me think. Yes. Can you break and handle
+colts?”
+
+He nodded.
+
+“We have a stock farm, and there's room for just such a man as you. Will
+you take it?”
+
+“Will I, ma'am?” His voice was rich with gratitude and enthusiasm. “Show
+me to it. I'll dig right in to-morrow. And I can sure promise you one
+thing, ma'am. You'll never be sorry for lending Hughie Luke a hand in
+his trouble--”
+
+“I thought you said to call you Dave,” she chided forgivingly.
+
+“I did, ma'am. I did. And I sure beg your pardon. It was just plain
+bluff. My real name is Hughie Luke. And if you'll give me the address
+of that stock farm of yours, and the railroad fare, I head for it first
+thing in the morning.”
+
+Throughout the conversation she had never relaxed her attempts on the
+bell. She had pressed it in every alarming way--three shorts and a long,
+two and a long, and five. She had tried long series of shorts, and,
+once, she had held the button down for a solid three minutes. And she
+had been divided between objurgation of the stupid, heavy-sleeping
+butler and doubt if the bell were in order.
+
+“I am so glad,” she said; “so glad that you are willing. There won't be
+much to arrange. But you will first have to trust me while I go upstairs
+for my purse.”
+
+She saw the doubt flicker momentarily in his eyes, and added hastily,
+“But you see I am trusting you with the three hundred dollars.”
+
+“I believe you, ma'am,” he came back gallantly. “Though I just can't
+help this nervousness.”
+
+“Shall I go and get it?”
+
+But before she could receive consent, a slight muffled jar from the
+distance came to her ear. She knew it for the swing-door of the butler's
+pantry. But so slight was it--more a faint vibration than a sound--that
+she would not have heard had not her ears been keyed and listening for
+it. Yet the man had heard. He was startled in his composed way.
+
+“What was that?” he demanded.
+
+For answer, her left hand flashed out to the revolver and brought it
+back. She had had the start of him, and she needed it, for the next
+instant his hand leaped up from his side, clutching emptiness where the
+revolver had been.
+
+“Sit down!” she commanded sharply, in a voice new to him. “Don't move.
+Keep your hands on the table.”
+
+She had taken a lesson from him. Instead of holding the heavy weapon
+extended, the butt of it and her forearm rested on the table, the muzzle
+pointed, not at his head, but his chest. And he, looking coolly and
+obeying her commands, knew there was no chance of the kick-up of the
+recoil producing a miss. Also, he saw that the revolver did not wabble,
+nor the hand shake, and he was thoroughly conversant with the size of
+hole the soft-nosed bullets could make. He had eyes, not for her, but
+for the hammer, which had risen under the pressure of her forefinger on
+the trigger.
+
+“I reckon I'd best warn you that that there trigger-pull is filed
+dreadful fine. Don't press too hard, or I'll have a hole in me the size
+of a walnut.”
+
+She slacked the hammer partly down.
+
+“That's better,” he commented. “You'd best put it down all the way. You
+see how easy it works. If you want to, a quick light pull will jiffy her
+up and back and make a pretty mess all over your nice floor.”
+
+A door opened behind him, and he heard somebody enter the room. But he
+did not turn his bead. He was looking at her, and he found it the face
+of another woman--hard, cold, pitiless yet brilliant in its beauty. The
+eyes, too, were hard, though blazing with a cold light.
+
+“Thomas,” she commanded, “go to the telephone and call the police. Why
+were you so long in answering?”
+
+“I came as soon as I heard the bell, madam,” was the answer.
+
+The robber never took his eyes from hers, nor did she from his, but
+at mention of the bell she noticed that his eyes were puzzled for the
+moment.
+
+“Beg your pardon,” said the butler from behind, “but wouldn't it be
+better for me to get a weapon and arouse the servants?”
+
+“No; ring for the police. I can hold this man. Go and do it--quickly.”
+
+The butler slippered out of the room, and the man and the woman sat on,
+gazing into each other's eyes. To her it was an experience keen with
+enjoyment, and in her mind was the gossip of her crowd, and she saw
+notes in the society weeklies of the beautiful young Mrs. Setliffe
+capturing an armed robber single-handed. It would create a sensation,
+she was sure.
+
+“When you get that sentence you mentioned,” she said coldly, “you will
+have time to meditate upon what a fool you have been, taking other
+persons' property and threatening women with revolvers. You will have
+time to learn your lesson thoroughly. Now tell the truth. You haven't
+any friend in trouble. All that you told me was lies.”
+
+He did not reply. Though his eyes were upon her, they seemed blank. In
+truth, for the instant she was veiled to him, and what he saw was the
+wide sunwashed spaces of the West, where men and women were bigger than
+the rotten denizens, as he had encountered them, of the thrice rotten
+cities of the East.
+
+“Go on. Why don't you speak? Why don't you lie some more? Why don't you
+beg to be let off?”
+
+“I might,” he answered, licking his dry lips. “I might ask to be let off
+if...”
+
+“If what?” she demanded peremptorily, as he paused.
+
+“I was trying to think of a word you reminded me of. As I was saying, I
+might if you was a decent woman.”
+
+Her face paled.
+
+“Be careful,” she warned.
+
+“You don't dast kill me,” he sneered. “The world's a pretty low down
+place to have a thing like you prowling around in it, but it ain't so
+plumb low down, I reckon, as to let you put a hole in me. You're sure
+bad, but the trouble with you is that you're weak in your badness. It
+ain't much to kill a man, but you ain't got it in you. There's where you
+lose out.”
+
+“Be careful of what you say,” she repeated. “Or else, I warn you, it
+will go hard with you. It can be seen to whether your sentence is light
+or heavy.”
+
+“Something's the matter with God,” he remarked irrelevantly, “to be
+letting you around loose. It's clean beyond me what he's up to, playing
+such-like tricks on poor humanity. Now if I was God--”
+
+His further opinion was interrupted by the entrance of the butler.
+
+“Something is wrong with the telephone, madam,” he announced. “The wires
+are crossed or something, because I can't get Central.”
+
+“Go and call one of the servants,” she ordered. “Send him out for an
+officer, and then return here.”
+
+Again the pair was left alone.
+
+“Will you kindly answer one question, ma'am?” the man said. “That
+servant fellow said something about a bell. I watched you like a cat,
+and you sure rung no bell.”
+
+“It was under the table, you poor fool. I pressed it with my foot.”
+
+“Thank you, ma'am. I reckoned I'd seen your kind before, and now I sure
+know I have. I spoke to you true and trusting, and all the time you was
+lying like hell to me.”
+
+She laughed mockingly.
+
+“Go on. Say what you wish. It is very interesting.”
+
+“You made eyes at me, looking soft and kind, playing up all the time the
+fact that you wore skirts instead of pants--and all the time with your
+foot on the bell under the table. Well, there's some consolation. I'd
+sooner be poor Hughie Luke, doing his ten years, than be in your skin.
+Ma'am, hell is full of women like you.”
+
+There was silence for a space, in which the man, never taking his eyes
+from her, studying her, was making up his mind.
+
+“Go on,” she urged. “Say something.”
+
+“Yes, ma'am, I'll say something. I'll sure say something. Do you know
+what I'm going to do? I'm going to get right up from this chair and walk
+out that door. I'd take the gun from you, only you might turn foolish
+and let it go off. You can have the gun. It's a good one. As I was
+saying, I am going right out that door. And you ain't going to pull that
+gun off either. It takes guts to shoot a man, and you sure ain't got
+them. Now get ready and see if you can pull that trigger. I ain't going
+to harm you. I'm going out that door, and I'm starting.”
+
+Keeping his eyes fixed on her, he pushed back the chair and slowly stood
+erect. The hammer rose halfway. She watched it. So did he.
+
+“Pull harder,” he advised. “It ain't half up yet. Go on and pull it and
+kill a man. That's what I said, kill a man, spatter his brains out on
+the floor, or slap a hole into him the size of your fist. That's what
+killing a man means.”
+
+The hammer lowered jerkily but gently. The man turned his back and
+walked slowly to the door. She swung the revolver around so that it bore
+on his back. Twice again the hammer came up halfway and was reluctantly
+eased down.
+
+At the door the man turned for a moment before passing on. A sneer was
+on his lips. He spoke to her in a low voice, almost drawling, but in
+it was the quintessence of all loathing, as he called her a name
+unspeakable and vile.
+
+
+
+
+THE MEXICAN
+
+NOBODY knew his history--they of the Junta least of all. He was their
+“little mystery,” their “big patriot,” and in his way he worked as
+hard for the coming Mexican Revolution as did they. They were tardy in
+recognizing this, for not one of the Junta liked him. The day he first
+drifted into their crowded, busy rooms, they all suspected him of being
+a spy--one of the bought tools of the Diaz secret service. Too many of
+the comrades were in civil an military prisons scattered over the United
+States, and others of them, in irons, were even then being taken across
+the border to be lined up against adobe walls and shot.
+
+At the first sight the boy did not impress them favorably. Boy he was,
+not more than eighteen and not over large for his years. He announced
+that he was Felipe Rivera, and that it was his wish to work for the
+Revolution. That was all--not a wasted word, no further explanation. He
+stood waiting. There was no smile on his lips, no geniality in his eyes.
+Big dashing Paulino Vera felt an inward shudder. Here was something
+forbidding, terrible, inscrutable. There was something venomous and
+snakelike in the boy's black eyes. They burned like cold fire, as with
+a vast, concentrated bitterness. He flashed them from the faces of
+the conspirators to the typewriter which little Mrs. Sethby was
+industriously operating. His eyes rested on hers but an instant--she
+had chanced to look up--and she, too, sensed the nameless something that
+made her pause. She was compelled to read back in order to regain the
+swing of the letter she was writing.
+
+Paulino Vera looked questioningly at Arrellano and Ramos, and
+questioningly they looked back and to each other. The indecision of
+doubt brooded in their eyes. This slender boy was the Unknown, vested
+with all the menace of the Unknown. He was unrecognizable, something
+quite beyond the ken of honest, ordinary revolutionists whose fiercest
+hatred for Diaz and his tyranny after all was only that of honest and
+ordinary patriots. Here was something else, they knew not what. But
+Vera, always the most impulsive, the quickest to act, stepped into the
+breach.
+
+“Very well,” he said coldly. “You say you want to work for the
+Revolution. Take off your coat. Hang it over there. I will show you,
+come--where are the buckets and cloths. The floor is dirty. You will
+begin by scrubbing it, and by scrubbing the floors of the other rooms.
+The spittoons need to be cleaned. Then there are the windows.”
+
+“Is it for the Revolution?” the boy asked.
+
+“It is for the Revolution,” Vera answered.
+
+Rivera looked cold suspicion at all of them, then proceeded to take off
+his coat.
+
+“It is well,” he said.
+
+And nothing more. Day after day he came to his work--sweeping,
+scrubbing, cleaning. He emptied the ashes from the stoves, brought up
+the coal and kindling, and lighted the fires before the most energetic
+one of them was at his desk.
+
+“Can I sleep here?” he asked once.
+
+Ah, ha! So that was it--the hand of Diaz showing through! To sleep in
+the rooms of the Junta meant access to their secrets, to the lists of
+names, to the addresses of comrades down on Mexican soil. The request
+was denied, and Rivera never spoke of it again. He slept they knew not
+where, and ate they knew not where nor how. Once, Arrellano offered him
+a couple of dollars. Rivera declined the money with a shake of the head.
+When Vera joined in and tried to press it upon him, he said:
+
+“I am working for the Revolution.”
+
+It takes money to raise a modern revolution, and always the Junta was
+pressed. The members starved and toiled, and the longest day was none
+too long, and yet there were times when it appeared as if the Revolution
+stood or fell on no more than the matter of a few dollars. Once, the
+first time, when the rent of the house was two months behind and the
+landlord was threatening dispossession, it was Felipe Rivera, the
+scrub-boy in the poor, cheap clothes, worn and threadbare, who laid
+sixty dollars in gold on May Sethby's desk. There were other times.
+Three hundred letters, clicked out on the busy typewriters (appeals for
+assistance, for sanctions from the organized labor groups, requests for
+square news deals to the editors of newspapers, protests against the
+high-handed treatment of revolutionists by the United States courts),
+lay unmailed, awaiting postage. Vera's watch had disappeared--the
+old-fashioned gold repeater that had been his father's. Likewise had
+gone the plain gold band from May Setbby's third finger. Things were
+desperate. Ramos and Arrellano pulled their long mustaches in despair.
+The letters must go off, and the Post Office allowed no credit to
+purchasers of stamps. Then it was that Rivera put on his hat and
+went out. When he came back he laid a thousand two-cent stamps on May
+Sethby's desk.
+
+“I wonder if it is the cursed gold of Diaz?” said Vera to the comrades.
+
+They elevated their brows and could not decide. And Felipe Rivera, the
+scrubber for the Revolution, continued, as occasion arose, to lay down
+gold and silver for the Junta's use.
+
+And still they could not bring themselves to like him. They did not know
+him. His ways were not theirs. He gave no confidences. He repelled all
+probing. Youth that he was, they could never nerve themselves to dare to
+question him.
+
+“A great and lonely spirit, perhaps, I do not know, I do not know,”
+ Arrellano said helplessly.
+
+“He is not human,” said Ramos.
+
+“His soul has been seared,” said May Sethby. “Light and laughter have
+been burned out of him. He is like one dead, and yet he is fearfully
+alive.”
+
+“He has been through hell,” said Vera. “No man could look like that who
+has not been through hell--and he is only a boy.”
+
+Yet they could not like him. He never talked, never inquired, never
+suggested. He would stand listening, expressionless, a thing dead, save
+for his eyes, coldly burning, while their talk of the Revolution ran
+high and warm. From face to face and speaker to speaker his eyes
+would turn, boring like gimlets of incandescent ice, disconcerting and
+perturbing.
+
+“He is no spy,” Vera confided to May Sethby. “He is a patriot--mark me,
+the greatest patriot of us all. I know it, I feel it, here in my heart
+and head I feel it. But him I know not at all.”
+
+“He has a bad temper,” said May Sethby.
+
+“I know,” said Vera, with a shudder. “He has looked at me with those
+eyes of his. They do not love; they threaten; they are savage as a wild
+tiger's. I know, if I should prove unfaithful to the Cause, that he
+would kill me. He has no heart. He is pitiless as steel, keen and cold
+as frost. He is like moonshine in a winter night when a man freezes to
+death on some lonely mountain top. I am not afraid of Diaz and all his
+killers; but this boy, of him am I afraid. I tell you true. I am afraid.
+He is the breath of death.”
+
+Yet Vera it was who persuaded the others to give the first trust
+to Rivera. The line of communication between Los Angeles and Lower
+California had broken down. Three of the comrades had dug their own
+graves and been shot into them. Two more were United States prisoners
+in Los Angeles. Juan Alvarado, the Federal commander, was a monster. All
+their plans did he checkmate. They could no longer gain access to the
+active revolutionists, and the incipient ones, in Lower California.
+
+Young Rivera was given his instructions and dispatched south. When he
+returned, the line of communication was reestablished, and Juan Alvarado
+was dead. He had been found in bed, a knife hilt-deep in his breast.
+This had exceeded Rivera's instructions, but they of the Junta knew the
+times of his movements. They did not ask him. He said nothing. But they
+looked at one another and conjectured.
+
+“I have told you,” said Vera. “Diaz has more to fear from this youth
+than from any man. He is implacable. He is the hand of God.”
+
+The bad temper, mentioned by May Sethby, and sensed by them all,
+was evidenced by physical proofs. Now he appeared with a cut lip,
+a blackened cheek, or a swollen ear. It was patent that he brawled,
+somewhere in that outside world where he ate and slept, gained money,
+and moved in ways unknown to them. As the time passed, he had come to
+set type for the little revolutionary sheet they published weekly. There
+were occasions when he was unable to set type, when his knuckles were
+bruised and battered, when his thumbs were injured and helpless, when
+one arm or the other hung wearily at his side while his face was drawn
+with unspoken pain.
+
+“A wastrel,” said Arrellano.
+
+“A frequenter of low places,” said Ramos.
+
+“But where does he get the money?” Vera demanded. “Only to-day, just
+now, have I learned that he paid the bill for white paper--one hundred
+and forty dollars.”
+
+“There are his absences,” said May Sethby. “He never explains them.”
+
+“We should set a spy upon him,” Ramos propounded.
+
+“I should not care to be that spy,” said Vera. “I fear you would never
+see me again, save to bury me. He has a terrible passion. Not even God
+would he permit to stand between him and the way of his passion.”
+
+“I feel like a child before him,” Ramos confessed.
+
+“To me he is power--he is the primitive, the wild wolf, the striking
+rattlesnake, the stinging centipede,” said Arrellano.
+
+“He is the Revolution incarnate,” said Vera. “He is the flame and the
+spirit of it, the insatiable cry for vengeance that makes no cry but
+that slays noiselessly. He is a destroying angel in moving through the
+still watches of the night.”
+
+“I could weep over him,” said May Sethby. “He knows nobody. He hates
+all people. Us he tolerates, for we are the way of his desire. He is
+alone.... lonely.” Her voice broke in a half sob and there was dimness
+in her eyes.
+
+Rivera's ways and times were truly mysterious. There were periods when
+they did not see him for a week at a time. Once, he was away a month.
+These occasions were always capped by his return, when, without
+advertisement or speech, he laid gold coins on May Sethby's desk. Again,
+for days and weeks, he spent all his time with the Junta. And yet again,
+for irregular periods, he would disappear through the heart of each day,
+from early morning until late afternoon. At such times he came early and
+remained late. Arrellano had found him at midnight, setting type with
+fresh swollen knuckles, or mayhap it was his lip, new-split, that still
+bled.
+
+II
+
+The time of the crisis approached. Whether or not the Revolution would
+be depended upon the Junta, and the Junta was hard-pressed. The need
+for money was greater than ever before, while money was harder to get.
+Patriots had given their last cent and now could give no more. Section
+gang laborers-fugitive peons from Mexico--were contributing half
+their scanty wages. But more than that was needed. The heart-breaking,
+conspiring, undermining toil of years approached fruition. The time
+was ripe. The Revolution hung on the balance. One shove more, one last
+heroic effort, and it would tremble across the scales to victory. They
+knew their Mexico. Once started, the Revolution would take care of
+itself. The whole Diaz machine would go down like a house of cards. The
+border was ready to rise. One Yankee, with a hundred I.W.W. men, waited
+the word to cross over the border and begin the conquest of Lower
+California. But he needed guns. And clear across to the Atlantic,
+the Junta in touch with them all and all of them needing guns, mere
+adventurers, soldiers of fortune, bandits, disgruntled American union
+men, socialists, anarchists, rough-necks, Mexican exiles, peons escaped
+from bondage, whipped miners from the bull-pens of Coeur d'Alene and
+Colorado who desired only the more vindictively to fight--all the
+flotsam and jetsam of wild spirits from the madly complicated modern
+world. And it was guns and ammunition, ammunition and guns--the
+unceasing and eternal cry.
+
+Fling this heterogeneous, bankrupt, vindictive mass across the border,
+and the Revolution was on. The custom house, the northern ports of
+entry, would be captured. Diaz could not resist. He dared not throw
+the weight of his armies against them, for he must hold the south. And
+through the south the flame would spread despite. The people would rise.
+The defenses of city after city would crumple up. State after state
+would totter down. And at last, from every side, the victorious armies
+of the Revolution would close in on the City of Mexico itself, Diaz's
+last stronghold.
+
+But the money. They had the men, impatient and urgent, who would use the
+guns. They knew the traders who would sell and deliver the guns. But to
+culture the Revolution thus far had exhausted the Junta. The last dollar
+had been spent, the last resource and the last starving patriot milked
+dry, and the great adventure still trembled on the scales. Guns and
+ammunition! The ragged battalions must be armed. But how? Ramos lamented
+his confiscated estates. Arrellano wailed the spendthriftness of his
+youth. May Sethby wondered if it would have been different had they of
+the Junta been more economical in the past.
+
+“To think that the freedom of Mexico should stand or fall on a few
+paltry thousands of dollars,” said Paulino Vera.
+
+Despair was in all their faces. Jose Amarillo, their last hope, a recent
+convert, who had promised money, had been apprehended at his hacienda in
+Chihuahua and shot against his own stable wall. The news had just come
+through.
+
+Rivera, on his knees, scrubbing, looked up, with suspended brush, his
+bare arms flecked with soapy, dirty water.
+
+“Will five thousand do it?” he asked.
+
+They looked their amazement. Vera nodded and swallowed. He could not
+speak, but he was on the instant invested with a vast faith.
+
+“Order the guns,” Rivera said, and thereupon was guilty of the longest
+flow of words they had ever heard him utter. “The time is short. In
+three weeks I shall bring you the five thousand. It is well. The weather
+will be warmer for those who fight. Also, it is the best I can do.”
+
+Vera fought his faith. It was incredible. Too many fond hopes had been
+shattered since he had begun to play the revolution game. He believed
+this threadbare scrubber of the Revolution, and yet he dared not
+believe.
+
+“You are crazy,” he said.
+
+“In three weeks,” said Rivera. “Order the guns.”
+
+He got up, rolled down his sleeves, and put on his coat.
+
+“Order the guns,” he said.
+
+“I am going now.”
+
+III
+
+After hurrying and scurrying, much telephoning and bad language, a night
+session was held in Kelly's office. Kelly was rushed with business;
+also, he was unlucky. He had brought Danny Ward out from New York,
+arranged the fight for him with Billy Carthey, the date was three
+weeks away, and for two days now, carefully concealed from the sporting
+writers, Carthey had been lying up, badly injured. There was no one to
+take his place. Kelly had been burning the wires East to every eligible
+lightweight, but they were tied up with dates and contracts. And now
+hope had revived, though faintly.
+
+“You've got a hell of a nerve,” Kelly addressed Rivera, after one look,
+as soon as they got together.
+
+Hate that was malignant was in Rivera's eyes, but his face remained
+impassive.
+
+“I can lick Ward,” was all he said.
+
+“How do you know? Ever see him fight?”
+
+Rivera shook his head.
+
+“He can beat you up with one hand and both eyes closed.”
+
+Rivera shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“Haven't you got anything to say?” the fight promoter snarled.
+
+“I can lick him.”
+
+“Who'd you ever fight, anyway!” Michael Kelly demanded. Michael was the
+promotor's brother, and ran the Yellowstone pool rooms where he made
+goodly sums on the fight game.
+
+Rivera favored him with a bitter, unanswering stare.
+
+The promoter's secretary, a distinctively sporty young man, sneered
+audibly.
+
+“Well, you know Roberts,” Kelly broke the hostile silence. “He ought to
+be here. I've sent for him. Sit down and wait, though f rom the looks of
+you, you haven't got a chance. I can't throw the public down with a bum
+fight. Ringside seats are selling at fifteen dollars, you know that.”
+
+When Roberts arrived, it was patent that he was mildly drunk. He was a
+tall, lean, slack-jointed individual, and his walk, like his talk, was a
+smooth and languid drawl.
+
+Kelly went straight to the point.
+
+“Look here, Roberts, you've been bragging you discovered this little
+Mexican. You know Carthey's broke his arm. Well, this little yellow
+streak has the gall to blow in to-day and say he'll take Carthey's
+place. What about it?”
+
+“It's all right, Kelly,” came the slow response. “He can put up a
+fight.”
+
+“I suppose you'll be sayin' next that he can lick Ward,” Kelly snapped.
+
+Roberts considered judicially.
+
+“No, I won't say that. Ward's a top-notcher and a ring general. But he
+can't hashhouse Rivera in short order. I know Rivera. Nobody can get
+his goat. He ain't got a goat that I could ever discover. And he's a
+two-handed fighter. He can throw in the sleep-makers from any position.”
+
+“Never mind that. What kind of a show can he put up? You've been
+conditioning and training fighters all your life. I take off my hat to
+your judgment. Can he give the public a run for its money?”
+
+“He sure can, and he'll worry Ward a mighty heap on top of it. You
+don't know that boy. I do. I discovered him. He ain't got a goat. He's a
+devil. He's a wizzy-wooz if anybody should ask you. He'll make Ward sit
+up with a show of local talent that'll make the rest of you sit up. I
+won't say he'll lick Ward, but he'll put up such a show that you'll all
+know he's a comer.”
+
+“All right.” Kelly turned to his secretary. “Ring up Ward. I warned
+him to show up if I thought it worth while. He's right across at the
+Yellowstone, throwin' chests and doing the popular.”
+
+Kelly turned back to the conditioner. “Have a drink?”
+
+Roberts sipped his highball and unburdened himself.
+
+“Never told you how I discovered the little cuss. It was a couple of
+years ago he showed up out at the quarters. I was getting Prayne ready
+for his fight with Delaney. Prayne's wicked. He ain't got a tickle of
+mercy in his make-up. I chopped up his pardner's something cruel, and
+I couldn't find a willing boy that'd work with him. I'd noticed this
+little starved Mexican kid hanging around, and I was desperate. So
+I grabbed him, shoved on the gloves and put him in. He was tougher'n
+rawhide, but weak. And he didn't know the first letter in the alphabet
+of boxing. Prayne chopped him to ribbons. But he hung on for two
+sickening rounds, when he fainted. Starvation, that was all. Battered!
+You couldn't have recognized him. I gave him half a dollar and a square
+meal. You oughta seen him wolf it down. He hadn't had the end of a bite
+for a couple of days. That's the end of him, thinks I. But next day he
+showed up, stiff an' sore, ready for another half and a square meal. And
+he done better as time went by. Just a born fighter, and tough beyond
+belief. He hasn't a heart. He's a piece of ice. And he never talked
+eleven words in a string since I know him. He saws wood and does his
+work.”
+
+“I've seen 'm,” the secretary said. “He's worked a lot for you.”
+
+“All the big little fellows has tried out on him,” Roberts answered.
+“And he's learned from 'em. I've seen some of them he could lick. But
+his heart wasn't in it. I reckoned he never liked the game. He seemed to
+act that way.”
+
+“He's been fighting some before the little clubs the last few months,”
+ Kelly said.
+
+“Sure. But I don't know what struck 'm. All of a sudden his heart got
+into it. He just went out like a streak and cleaned up all the little
+local fellows. Seemed to want the money, and he's won a bit, though his
+clothes don't look it. He's peculiar. Nobody knows his business. Nobody
+knows how he spends his time. Even when he's on the job, he plumb up and
+disappears most of each day soon as his work is done. Sometimes he just
+blows away for weeks at a time. But he don't take advice. There's a
+fortune in it for the fellow that gets the job of managin' him, only he
+won't consider it. And you watch him hold out for the cash money when
+you get down to terms.”
+
+It was at this stage that Danny Ward arrived. Quite a party it was.
+His manager and trainer were with him, and he breezed in like a gusty
+draught of geniality, good-nature, and all-conqueringness. Greetings
+flew about, a joke here, a retort there, a smile or a laugh for
+everybody. Yet it was his way, and only partly sincere. He was a good
+actor, and he had found geniality a most valuable asset in the game
+of getting on in the world. But down underneath he was the deliberate,
+cold-blooded fighter and business man. The rest was a mask. Those who
+knew him or trafficked with him said that when it came to brass tacks
+he was Danny-on-the-Spot. He was invariably present at all business
+discussions, and it was urged by some that his manager was a blind whose
+only function was to serve as Danny's mouth-piece.
+
+Rivera's way was different. Indian blood, as well as Spanish, was in
+his veins, and he sat back in a corner, silent, immobile, only his black
+eyes passing from face to face and noting everything.
+
+“So that's the guy,” Danny said, running an appraising eye over his
+proposed antagonist. “How de do, old chap.”
+
+Rivera's eyes burned venomously, but he made no sign of acknowledgment.
+He disliked all Gringos, but this Gringo he hated with an immediacy that
+was unusual even in him.
+
+“Gawd!” Danny protested facetiously to the promoter. “You ain't
+expectin' me to fight a deef mute.” When the laughter subsided, he made
+another hit. “Los Angeles must be on the dink when this is the best you
+can scare up. What kindergarten did you get 'm from?”
+
+“He's a good little boy, Danny, take it from me,” Roberts defended. “Not
+as easy as he looks.”
+
+“And half the house is sold already,” Kelly pleaded. “You'll have to
+take 'm on, Danny. It is the best we can do.”
+
+Danny ran another careless and unflattering glance over Rivera and
+sighed.
+
+“I gotta be easy with 'm, I guess. If only he don't blow up.”
+
+Roberts snorted.
+
+“You gotta be careful,” Danny's manager warned. “No taking chances with
+a dub that's likely to sneak a lucky one across.”
+
+“Oh, I'll be careful all right, all right,” Danny smiled. “I'll get in
+at the start an' nurse 'im along for the dear public's sake. What d' ye
+say to fifteen rounds, Kelly--an' then the hay for him?”
+
+“That'll do,” was the answer. “As long as you make it realistic.”
+
+“Then let's get down to biz.” Danny paused and calculated. “Of course,
+sixty-five per cent of the gate receipts, same as with Carthey. But
+the split'll be different. Eighty will just about suit me.” And to his
+manager, “That right?”
+
+The manager nodded.
+
+“Here, you, did you get that?” Kelly asked Rivera.
+
+Rivera shook his head.
+
+“Well, it is this way,” Kelly exposited. “The purse'll be sixty-five per
+cent of the gate receipts. You're a dub, and an unknown. You and Danny
+split, twenty per cent goin' to you, an' eighty to Danny. That's fair,
+isn't it, Roberts?”
+
+“Very fair, Rivera,” Roberts agreed.
+
+“You see, you ain't got a reputation yet.”
+
+“What will sixty-five per cent of the gate receipts be?” Rivera
+demanded.
+
+“Oh, maybe five thousand, maybe as high as eight thousand,” Danny broke
+in to explain. “Something like that. Your share'll come to something
+like a thousand or sixteen hundred. Pretty good for takin' a licking
+from a guy with my reputation. What d' ye say?”
+
+Then Rivera took their breaths away. “Winner takes all,” he said with
+finality.
+
+A dead silence prevailed.
+
+“It's like candy from a baby,” Danny's manager proclaimed.
+
+Danny shook his head.
+
+“I've been in the game too long,” he explained.
+
+“I'm not casting reflections on the referee, or the present company.
+I'm not sayin' nothing about book-makers an' frame-ups that sometimes
+happen. But what I do say is that it's poor business for a fighter like
+me. I play safe. There's no tellin'. Mebbe I break my arm, eh? Or some
+guy slips me a bunch of dope?” He shook his head solemnly. “Win or lose,
+eighty is my split. What d' ye say, Mexican?”
+
+Rivera shook his head.
+
+Danny exploded. He was getting down to brass tacks now.
+
+“Why, you dirty little greaser! I've a mind to knock your block off
+right now.”
+
+Roberts drawled his body to interposition between hostilities.
+
+“Winner takes all,” Rivera repeated sullenly.
+
+“Why do you stand out that way?” Danny asked.
+
+“I can lick you,” was the straight answer.
+
+Danny half started to take off his coat. But, as his manager knew, it
+was a grand stand play. The coat did not come off, and Danny allowed
+himself to be placated by the group. Everybody sympathized with him.
+Rivera stood alone.
+
+“Look here, you little fool,” Kelly took up the argument. “You're
+nobody. We know what you've been doing the last few months--putting away
+little local fighters. But Danny is class. His next fight after this
+will be for the championship. And you're unknown. Nobody ever heard of
+you out of Los Angeles.”
+
+“They will,” Rivera answered with a shrug, “after this fight.”
+
+“You think for a second you can lick me?” Danny blurted in.
+
+Rivera nodded.
+
+“Oh, come; listen to reason,” Kelly pleaded. “Think of the advertising.”
+
+“I want the money,” was Rivera's answer.
+
+“You couldn't win from me in a thousand years,” Danny assured him.
+
+“Then what are you holdin' out for?” Rivera countered. “If the money's
+that easy, why don't you go after it?”
+
+“I will, so help me!” Danny cried with abrupt conviction. “I'll beat you
+to death in the ring, my boy--you monkeyin' with me this way. Make
+out the articles, Kelly. Winner take all. Play it up in the sportin'
+columns. Tell 'em it's a grudge fight. I'll show this fresh kid a few.”
+
+Kelly's secretary had begun to write, when Danny interrupted.
+
+“Hold on!” He turned to Rivera.
+
+“Weights?”
+
+“Ringside,” came the answer.
+
+“Not on your life, Fresh Kid. If winner takes all, we weigh in at ten
+A.M.”
+
+“And winner takes all?” Rivera queried.
+
+Danny nodded. That settled it. He would enter the ring in his full
+ripeness of strength.
+
+“Weigh in at ten,” Rivera said.
+
+The secretary's pen went on scratching.
+
+“It means five pounds,” Roberts complained to Rivera.
+
+“You've given too much away. You've thrown the fight right there.
+Danny'll lick you sure. He'll be as strong as a bull. You're a fool. You
+ain't got the chance of a dewdrop in hell.”
+
+Rivera's answer was a calculated look of hatred. Even this Gringo he
+despised, and him had he found the whitest Gringo of them all.
+
+IV
+
+Barely noticed was Rivera as he entered the ring. Only a very slight and
+very scattering ripple of half-hearted hand-clapping greeted him. The
+house did not believe in him. He was the lamb led to slaughter at the
+hands of the great Danny. Besides, the house was disappointed. It had
+expected a rushing battle between Danny Ward and Billy Carthey, and
+here it must put up with this poor little tyro. Still further, it had
+manifested its disapproval of the change by betting two, and even three,
+to one on Danny. And where a betting audience's money is, there is its
+heart.
+
+The Mexican boy sat down in his corner and waited. The slow minutes
+lagged by. Danny was making him wait. It was an old trick, but ever it
+worked on the young, new fighters. They grew frightened, sitting thus
+and facing their own apprehensions and a callous, tobacco-smoking
+audience. But for once the trick failed. Roberts was right. Rivera had
+no goat. He, who was more delicately coordinated, more finely nerved and
+strung than any of them, had no nerves of this sort. The atmosphere of
+foredoomed defeat in his own corner had no effect on him. His handlers
+were Gringos and strangers. Also they were scrubs--the dirty driftage
+of the fight game, without honor, without efficiency. And they were
+chilled, as well, with certitude that theirs was the losing corner.
+
+“Now you gotta be careful,” Spider Hagerty warned him. Spider was his
+chief second. “Make it last as long as you can--them's my instructions
+from Kelly. If you don't, the papers'll call it another bum fight and
+give the game a bigger black eye in Los Angeles.”
+
+All of which was not encouraging. But Rivera took no notice. He despised
+prize fighting. It was the hated game of the hated Gringo. He had taken
+up with it, as a chopping block for others in the training quarters,
+solely because he was starving. The fact that he was marvelously made
+for it had meant nothing. He hated it. Not until he had come in to the
+Junta, had he fought for money, and he had found the money easy. Not
+first among the sons of men had he been to find himself successful at a
+despised vocation.
+
+He did not analyze. He merely knew that he must win this fight. There
+could be no other outcome. For behind him, nerving him to this belief,
+were profounder forces than any the crowded house dreamed. Danny Ward
+fought for money, and for the easy ways of life that money would bring.
+But the things Rivera fought for burned in his brain--blazing and
+terrible visions, that, with eyes wide open, sitting lonely in the
+corner of the ring and waiting for his tricky antagonist, he saw as
+clearly as he had lived them.
+
+He saw the white-walled, water-power factories of Rio Blanco. He saw the
+six thousand workers, starved and wan, and the little children, seven
+and eight years of age, who toiled long shifts for ten cents a day.
+He saw the perambulating corpses, the ghastly death's heads of men who
+labored in the dye-rooms. He remembered that he had heard his father
+call the dye-rooms the “suicide-holes,” where a year was death. He
+saw the little patio, and his mother cooking and moiling at crude
+housekeeping and finding time to caress and love him. And his father he
+saw, large, big-moustached and deep-chested, kindly above all men,
+who loved all men and whose heart was so large that there was love to
+overflowing still left for the mother and the little muchacho playing
+in the corner of the patio. In those days his name had not been Felipe
+Rivera. It had been Fernandez, his father's and mother's name. Him had
+they called Juan. Later, he had changed it himself, for he had found
+the name of Fernandez hated by prefects of police, jefes politicos, and
+rurales.
+
+Big, hearty Joaquin Fernandez! A large place he occupied in Rivera's
+visions. He had not understood at the time, but looking back he could
+understand. He could see him setting type in the little printery, or
+scribbling endless hasty, nervous lines on the much-cluttered desk. And
+he could see the strange evenings, when workmen, coming secretly in the
+dark like men who did ill deeds, met with his father and talked long
+hours where he, the muchacho, lay not always asleep in the corner.
+
+As from a remote distance he could hear Spider Hagerty saying to him:
+“No layin' down at the start. Them's instructions. Take a beatin' and
+earn your dough.”
+
+Ten minutes had passed, and he still sat in his corner. There were no
+signs of Danny, who was evidently playing the trick to the limit.
+
+But more visions burned before the eye of Rivera's memory. The strike,
+or, rather, the lockout, because the workers of Rio Blanco had helped
+their striking brothers of Puebla. The hunger, the expeditions in the
+hills for berries, the roots and herbs that all ate and that twisted and
+pained the stomachs of all of them. And then, the nightmare; the waste
+of ground before the company's store; the thousands of starving workers;
+General Rosalio Martinez and the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz, and the
+death-spitting rifles that seemed never to cease spitting, while the
+workers' wrongs were washed and washed again in their own blood. And
+that night! He saw the flat cars, piled high with the bodies of the
+slain, consigned to Vera Cruz, food for the sharks of the bay. Again
+he crawled over the grisly heaps, seeking and finding, stripped
+and mangled, his father and his mother. His mother he especially
+remembered--only her face projecting, her body burdened by the weight
+of dozens of bodies. Again the rifles of the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz
+cracked, and again he dropped to the ground and slunk away like some
+hunted coyote of the hills.
+
+To his ears came a great roar, as of the sea, and he saw Danny Ward,
+leading his retinue of trainers and seconds, coming down the center
+aisle. The house was in wild uproar for the popular hero who was bound
+to win. Everybody proclaimed him. Everybody was for him. Even Rivera's
+own seconds warmed to something akin to cheerfulness when Danny ducked
+jauntily through the ropes and entered the ring. His face continually
+spread to an unending succession of smiles, and when Danny smiled he
+smiled in every feature, even to the laughter-wrinkles of the corners of
+the eyes and into the depths of the eyes themselves. Never was there so
+genial a fighter. His face was a running advertisement of good feeling,
+of good fellowship. He knew everybody. He joked, and laughed, and
+greeted his friends through the ropes. Those farther away, unable to
+suppress their admiration, cried loudly: “Oh, you Danny!” It was a
+joyous ovation of affection that lasted a full five minutes.
+
+Rivera was disregarded. For all that the audience noticed, he did not
+exist. Spider Lagerty's bloated face bent down close to his.
+
+“No gettin' scared,” the Spider warned.
+
+“An' remember instructions. You gotta last. No layin' down. If you lay
+down, we got instructions to beat you up in the dressing rooms. Savve?
+You just gotta fight.”
+
+The house began to applaud. Danny was crossing the ring to him. Danny
+bent over, caught Rivera's right hand in both his own and shook it with
+impulsive heartiness. Danny's smile-wreathed face was close to his. The
+audience yelled its appreciation of Danny's display of sporting spirit.
+He was greeting his opponent with the fondness of a brother. Danny's
+lips moved, and the audience, interpreting the unheard words to be
+those of a kindly-natured sport, yelled again. Only Rivera heard the low
+words.
+
+“You little Mexican rat,” hissed from between Danny's gaily smiling
+lips, “I'll fetch the yellow outa you.”
+
+Rivera made no move. He did not rise. He merely hated with his eyes.
+
+“Get up, you dog!” some man yelled through the ropes from behind.
+
+The crowd began to hiss and boo him for his unsportsmanlike conduct,
+but he sat unmoved. Another great outburst of applause was Danny's as he
+walked back across the ring.
+
+When Danny stripped, there was ohs! and ahs! of delight. His body was
+perfect, alive with easy suppleness and health and strength. The skin
+was white as a woman's, and as smooth. All grace, and resilience,
+and power resided therein. He had proved it in scores of battles. His
+photographs were in all the physical culture magazines.
+
+A groan went up as Spider Hagerty peeled Rivera's sweater over his head.
+His body seemed leaner, because of the swarthiness of the skin. He had
+muscles, but they made no display like his opponent's. What the audience
+neglected to see was the deep chest. Nor could it guess the toughness of
+the fiber of the flesh, the instantaneousness of the cell explosions
+of the muscles, the fineness of the nerves that wired every part of
+him into a splendid fighting mechanism. All the audience saw was a
+brown-skinned boy of eighteen with what seemed the body of a boy. With
+Danny it was different. Danny was a man of twenty-four, and his body
+was a man's body. The contrast was still more striking as they stood
+together in the center of the ring receiving the referee's last
+instructions.
+
+Rivera noticed Roberts sitting directly behind the newspaper men. He was
+drunker than usual, and his speech was correspondingly slower.
+
+“Take it easy, Rivera,” Roberts drawled.
+
+“He can't kill you, remember that. He'll rush you at the go-off, but
+don't get rattled. You just and stall, and clinch. He can't hurt cover
+up, much. Just make believe to yourself that he's choppin' out on you at
+the trainin' quarters.”
+
+Rivera made no sign that he had heard.
+
+“Sullen little devil,” Roberts muttered to the man next to him. “He
+always was that way.”
+
+But Rivera forgot to look his usual hatred. A vision of countless rifles
+blinded his eyes. Every face in the audience, far as he could see, to
+the high dollar-seats, was transformed into a rifle. And he saw the long
+Mexican border arid and sun-washed and aching, and along it he saw the
+ragged bands that delayed only for the guns.
+
+Back in his corner he waited, standing up. His seconds had crawled out
+through the ropes, taking the canvas stool with them. Diagonally across
+the squared ring, Danny faced him. The gong struck, and the battle was
+on. The audience howled its delight. Never had it seen a battle open
+more convincingly. The papers were right. It was a grudge fight.
+Three-quarters of the distance Danny covered in the rush to get
+together, his intention to eat up the Mexican lad plainly advertised. He
+assailed with not one blow, nor two, nor a dozen. He was a gyroscope
+of blows, a whirlwind of destruction. Rivera was nowhere. He was
+overwhelmed, buried beneath avalanches of punches delivered from every
+angle and position by a past master in the art. He was overborne, swept
+back against the ropes, separated by the referee, and swept back against
+the ropes again.
+
+It was not a fight. It was a slaughter, a massacre. Any audience, save
+a prize fighting one, would have exhausted its emotions in that first
+minute. Danny was certainly showing what he could do--a splendid
+exhibition. Such was the certainty of the audience, as well as its
+excitement and favoritism, that it failed to take notice that the
+Mexican still stayed on his feet. It forgot Rivera. It rarely saw him,
+so closely was he enveloped in Danny's man-eating attack. A minute of
+this went by, and two minutes. Then, in a separation, it caught a clear
+glimpse of the Mexican. His lip was cut, his nose was bleeding. As he
+turned and staggered into a clinch, the welts of oozing blood, from his
+contacts with the ropes, showed in red bars across his back. But what
+the audience did not notice was that his chest was not heaving and that
+his eyes were coldly burning as ever. Too many aspiring champions, in
+the cruel welter of the training camps, had practiced this man-eating
+attack on him. He had learned to live through for a compensation of from
+half a dollar a go up to fifteen dollars a week--a hard school, and he
+was schooled hard.
+
+Then happened the amazing thing. The whirling, blurring mix-up ceased
+suddenly. Rivera stood alone. Danny, the redoubtable Danny, lay on his
+back. His body quivered as consciousness strove to return to it. He had
+not staggered and sunk down, nor had he gone over in a long slumping
+fall. The right hook of Rivera had dropped him in midair with the
+abruptness of death. The referee shoved Rivera back with one hand, and
+stood over the fallen gladiator counting the seconds. It is the custom
+of prize-fighting audiences to cheer a clean knock-down blow. But this
+audience did not cheer. The thing had been too unexpected. It watched
+the toll of the seconds in tense silence, and through this silence the
+voice of Roberts rose exultantly:
+
+“I told you he was a two-handed fighter!”
+
+By the fifth second, Danny was rolling over on his face, and when seven
+was counted, he rested on one knee, ready to rise after the count of
+nine and before the count of ten. If his knee still touched the floor
+at “ten,” he was considered “down,” and also “out.” The instant his
+knee left the floor, he was considered “up,” and in that instant it was
+Rivera's right to try and put him down again. Rivera took no chances.
+The moment that knee left the floor he would strike again. He circled
+around, but the referee circled in between, and Rivera knew that the
+seconds he counted were very slow. All Gringos were against him, even
+the referee.
+
+At “nine” the referee gave Rivera a sharp thrust back. It was unfair,
+but it enabled Danny to rise, the smile back on his lips. Doubled partly
+over, with arms wrapped about face and abdomen, he cleverly stumbled
+into a clinch. By all the rules of the game the referee should have
+broken it, but he did not, and Danny clung on like a surf-battered
+barnacle and moment by moment recuperated. The last minute of the round
+was going fast. If he could live to the end, he would have a full minute
+in his corner to revive. And live to the end he did, smiling through all
+desperateness and extremity.
+
+“The smile that won't come off!” somebody yelled, and the audience
+laughed loudly in its relief.
+
+“The kick that Greaser's got is something God-awful,” Danny gasped in
+his corner to his adviser while his handlers worked frantically over
+him.
+
+The second and third rounds were tame. Danny, a tricky and consummate
+ring general, stalled and blocked and held on, devoting himself to
+recovering from that dazing first-round blow. In the fourth round he was
+himself again. Jarred and shaken, nevertheless his good condition had
+enabled him to regain his vigor. But he tried no man-eating tactics.
+The Mexican had proved a tartar. Instead, he brought to bear his best
+fighting powers. In tricks and skill and experience he was the master,
+and though he could land nothing vital, he proceeded scientifically to
+chop and wear down his opponent. He landed three blows to Rivera's one,
+but they were punishing blows only, and not deadly. It was the sum of
+many of them that constituted deadliness. He was respectful of this
+two-handed dub with the amazing short-arm kicks in both his fists.
+
+In defense, Rivera developed a disconcerting straight-left. Again
+and again, attack after attack he straight-lefted away from him with
+accumulated damage to Danny's mouth and nose. But Danny was protean.
+That was why he was the coming champion. He could change from style to
+style of fighting at will. He now devoted himself to infighting. In
+this he was particularly wicked, and it enabled him to avoid the other's
+straight-left. Here he set the house wild repeatedly, capping it with
+a marvelous lockbreak and lift of an inside upper-cut that raised the
+Mexican in the air and dropped him to the mat. Rivera rested on one
+knee, making the most of the count, and in the soul of him he knew the
+referee was counting short seconds on him.
+
+Again, in the seventh, Danny achieved the diabolical inside uppercut.
+He succeeded only in staggering Rivera, but, in the ensuing moment of
+defenseless helplessness, he smashed him with another blow through the
+ropes. Rivera's body bounced on the heads of the newspaper men below,
+and they boosted him back to the edge of the platform outside the ropes.
+Here he rested on one knee, while the referee raced off the seconds.
+Inside the ropes, through which he must duck to enter the ring, Danny
+waited for him. Nor did the referee intervene or thrust Danny back.
+
+The house was beside itself with delight.
+
+“Kill'm, Danny, kill'm!” was the cry.
+
+Scores of voices took it up until it was like a war-chant of wolves.
+
+Danny did his best, but Rivera, at the count of eight, instead of nine,
+came unexpectedly through the ropes and safely into a clinch. Now the
+referee worked, tearing him away so that he could be hit, giving Danny
+every advantage that an unfair referee can give.
+
+But Rivera lived, and the daze cleared from his brain. It was all of a
+piece. They were the hated Gringos and they were all unfair. And in the
+worst of it visions continued to flash and sparkle in his brain--long
+lines of railroad track that simmered across the desert; rurales and
+American constables, prisons and calabooses; tramps at water tanks--all
+the squalid and painful panorama of his odyssey after Rio Blanca and the
+strike. And, resplendent and glorious, he saw the great, red Revolution
+sweeping across his land. The guns were there before him. Every hated
+face was a gun. It was for the guns he fought. He was the guns. He was
+the Revolution. He fought for all Mexico.
+
+The audience began to grow incensed with Rivera. Why didn't he take the
+licking that was appointed him? Of course he was going to be licked, but
+why should he be so obstinate about it? Very few were interested in him,
+and they were the certain, definite percentage of a gambling crowd that
+plays long shots. Believing Danny to be the winner, nevertheless they
+had put their money on the Mexican at four to ten and one to three. More
+than a trifle was up on the point of how many rounds Rivera could last.
+Wild money had appeared at the ringside proclaiming that he could not
+last seven rounds, or even six. The winners of this, now that their cash
+risk was happily settled, had joined in cheering on the favorite.
+
+Rivera refused to be licked. Through the eighth round his opponent
+strove vainly to repeat the uppercut. In the ninth, Rivera stunned the
+house again. In the midst of a clinch he broke the lock with a quick,
+lithe movement, and in the narrow space between their bodies his right
+lifted from the waist. Danny went to the floor and took the safety of
+the count. The crowd was appalled. He was being bested at his own game.
+His famous right-uppercut had been worked back on him. Rivera made
+no attempt to catch him as he arose at “nine.” The referee was openly
+blocking that play, though he stood clear when the situation was
+reversed and it was Rivera who desired to rise.
+
+Twice in the tenth, Rivera put through the right-uppercut, lifted from
+waist to opponent's chin. Danny grew desperate. The smile never left his
+face, but he went back to his man-eating rushes. Whirlwind as he would,
+he could not damage Rivera, while Rivera through the blur and whirl,
+dropped him to the mat three times in succession. Danny did not
+recuperate so quickly now, and by the eleventh round he was in a serious
+way. But from then till the fourteenth he put up the gamest exhibition
+of his career. He stalled and blocked, fought parsimoniously, and strove
+to gather strength. Also, he fought as foully as a successful fighter
+knows how. Every trick and device he employed, butting in the clinches
+with the seeming of accident, pinioning Rivera's glove between arm and
+body, heeling his glove on Rivera's mouth to clog his breathing. Often,
+in the clinches, through his cut and smiling lips he snarled insults
+unspeakable and vile in Rivera's ear. Everybody, from the referee to the
+house, was with Danny and was helping Danny. And they knew what he had
+in mind. Bested by this surprise-box of an unknown, he was pinning
+all on a single punch. He offered himself for punishment, fished, and
+feinted, and drew, for that one opening that would enable him to whip
+a blow through with all his strength and turn the tide. As another and
+greater fighter had done before him, he might do a right and left, to
+solar plexus and across the jaw. He could do it, for he was noted for
+the strength of punch that remained in his arms as long as he could keep
+his feet.
+
+Rivera's seconds were not half-caring for him in the intervals between
+rounds. Their towels made a showing, but drove little air into his
+panting lungs. Spider Hagerty talked advice to him, but Rivera knew
+it was wrong advice. Everybody was against him. He was surrounded by
+treachery. In the fourteenth round he put Danny down again, and himself
+stood resting, hands dropped at side, while the referee counted. In
+the other corner Rivera had been noting suspicious whisperings. He saw
+Michael Kelly make his way to Roberts and bend and whisper. Rivera's
+ears were a cat's, desert-trained, and he caught snatches of what was
+said. He wanted to hear more, and when his opponent arose he maneuvered
+the fight into a clinch over against the ropes.
+
+“Got to,” he could hear Michael, while Roberts nodded. “Danny's got to
+win--I stand to lose a mint--I've got a ton of money covered--my own.
+If he lasts the fifteenth I'm bust--the boy'll mind you. Put something
+across.”
+
+And thereafter Rivera saw no more visions. They were trying to job him.
+Once again he dropped Danny and stood resting, his hands at his slide.
+Roberts stood up.
+
+“That settled him,” he said.
+
+“Go to your corner.”
+
+He spoke with authority, as he had often spoken to Rivera at the
+training quarters. But Rivera looked hatred at him and waited for Danny
+to rise. Back in his corner in the minute interval, Kelly, the promoter,
+came and talked to Rivera.
+
+“Throw it, damn you,” he rasped in, a harsh low voice. “You gotta lay
+down, Rivera. Stick with me and I'll make your future. I'll let you lick
+Danny next time. But here's where you lay down.”
+
+Rivera showed with his eyes that he heard, but he made neither sign of
+assent nor dissent.
+
+“Why don't you speak?” Kelly demanded angrily.
+
+“You lose, anyway,” Spider Hagerty supplemented. “The referee'll take it
+away from you. Listen to Kelly, and lay down.”
+
+“Lay down, kid,” Kelly pleaded, “and I'll help you to the championship.”
+
+Rivera did not answer.
+
+“I will, so help me, kid.”
+
+At the strike of the gong Rivera sensed something impending. The house
+did not. Whatever it was it was there inside the ring with him and very
+close. Danny's earlier surety seemed returned to him. The confidence of
+his advance frightened Rivera. Some trick was about to be worked. Danny
+rushed, but Rivera refused the encounter. He side-stepped away into
+safety. What the other wanted was a clinch. It was in some way necessary
+to the trick. Rivera backed and circled away, yet he knew, sooner or
+later, the clinch and the trick would come. Desperately he resolved
+to draw it. He made as if to effect the clinch with Danny's next rush.
+Instead, at the last instant, just as their bodies should have come
+together, Rivera darted nimbly back. And in the same instant Danny's
+corner raised a cry of foul. Rivera had fooled them. The referee paused
+irresolutely. The decision that trembled on his lips was never uttered,
+for a shrill, boy's voice from the gallery piped, “Raw work!”
+
+Danny cursed Rivera openly, and forced him, while Rivera danced away.
+Also, Rivera made up his mind to strike no more blows at the body. In
+this he threw away half his chance of winning, but he knew if he was to
+win at all it was with the outfighting that remained to him. Given the
+least opportunity, they would lie a foul on him. Danny threw all caution
+to the winds. For two rounds he tore after and into the boy who dared
+not meet him at close quarters. Rivera was struck again and again;
+he took blows by the dozens to avoid the perilous clinch. During this
+supreme final rally of Danny's the audience rose to its feet and went
+mad. It did not understand. All it could see was that its favorite was
+winning, after all.
+
+“Why don't you fight?” it demanded wrathfully of Rivera.
+
+“You're yellow! You're yellow!” “Open up, you cur! Open up!” “Kill'm,
+Danny! Kill 'm!” “You sure got 'm! Kill 'm!”
+
+In all the house, bar none, Rivera was the only cold man. By temperament
+and blood he was the hottest-passioned there; but he had gone through
+such vastly greater heats that this collective passion of ten thousand
+throats, rising surge on surge, was to his brain no more than the velvet
+cool of a summer twilight.
+
+Into the seventeenth round Danny carried his rally. Rivera, under a
+heavy blow, drooped and sagged. His hands dropped helplessly as he
+reeled backward. Danny thought it was his chance. The boy was at, his
+mercy. Thus Rivera, feigning, caught him off his guard, lashing out a
+clean drive to the mouth. Danny went down. When he arose, Rivera felled
+him with a down-chop of the right on neck and jaw. Three times he
+repeated this. It was impossible for any referee to call these blows
+foul.
+
+“Oh, Bill! Bill!” Kelly pleaded to the referee.
+
+“I can't,” that official lamented back. “He won't give me a chance.”
+
+Danny, battered and heroic, still kept coming up. Kelly and others near
+to the ring began to cry out to the police to stop it, though Danny's
+corner refused to throw in the towel. Rivera saw the fat police captain
+starting awkwardly to climb through the ropes, and was not sure what it
+meant. There were so many ways of cheating in this game of the Gringos.
+Danny, on his feet, tottered groggily and helplessly before him. The
+referee and the captain were both reaching for Rivera when he struck the
+last blow. There was no need to stop the fight, for Danny did not rise.
+
+“Count!” Rivera cried hoarsely to the referee.
+
+And when the count was finished, Danny's seconds gathered him up and
+carried him to his corner.
+
+“Who wins?” Rivera demanded.
+
+Reluctantly, the referee caught his gloved hand and held it aloft.
+
+There were no congratulations for Rivera. He walked to his corner
+unattended, where his seconds had not yet placed his stool. He leaned
+backward on the ropes and looked his hatred at them, swept it on and
+about him till the whole ten thousand Gringos were included. His knees
+trembled under him, and he was sobbing from exhaustion. Before his eyes
+the hated faces swayed back and forth in the giddiness of nausea. Then
+he remembered they were the guns. The guns were his. The Revolution
+could go on.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Night-Born, by Jack London
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