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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1089 ***
+
+MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES
+
+
+By Jack London
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     MOON-FACE
+     THE LEOPARD MAN’S STORY
+     LOCAL COLOR
+     AMATEUR NIGHT
+     THE MINIONS OF MIDAS
+     THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH
+     ALL GOLD CANYON
+     PLANCHETTE
+
+
+
+
+MOON-FACE
+
+
+John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones
+wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the
+perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the
+circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face like a
+dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly
+he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to
+be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been
+superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at
+the wrong time.
+
+Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me
+what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The
+evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to
+defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things
+at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain
+individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed;
+and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: “I do not like that
+man.” Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we know only that
+we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I with John
+Claverhouse.
+
+What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was
+always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse
+him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other
+men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh
+myself—before I met John Claverhouse.
+
+But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the
+sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and
+would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping
+it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like
+an enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across the fields to
+spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under the aching noonday glare, when
+the green things drooped and the birds withdrew to the depths of the
+forest, and all nature drowsed, his great “Ha! ha!” and “Ho! ho!” rose
+up to the sky and challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the
+lonely cross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came
+his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe
+and clench my nails into my palms.
+
+I went forth privily in the night-time, and turned his cattle into his
+fields, and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove them out
+again. “It is nothing,” he said; “the poor, dumb beasties are not to be
+blamed for straying into fatter pastures.”
+
+He had a dog he called “Mars,” a big, splendid brute, part deer-hound
+and part blood-hound, and resembling both. Mars was a great delight to
+him, and they were always together. But I bided my time, and one day,
+when opportunity was ripe, lured the animal away and settled for him
+with strychnine and beefsteak. It made positively no impression on John
+Claverhouse. His laugh was as hearty and frequent as ever, and his face
+as much like the full moon as it always had been.
+
+Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning,
+being Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.
+
+“Where are you going?” I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.
+
+“Trout,” he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. “I just dote on
+trout.”
+
+Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up in
+his haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the face
+of famine and the rigorous winter, he went out gayly in quest of a mess
+of trout, forsooth, because he “doted” on them! Had gloom but rested,
+no matter how lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine countenance grown
+long and serious and less like the moon, or had he removed that smile
+but once from off his face, I am sure I could have forgiven him for
+existing. But no, he grew only more cheerful under misfortune.
+
+I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.
+
+“I fight you? Why?” he asked slowly. And then he laughed. “You are so
+funny! Ho! ho! You’ll be the death of me! He! he! he! Oh! Ho! ho! ho!”
+
+What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how I
+hated him! Then there was that name—Claverhouse! What a name! Wasn’t it
+absurd? Claverhouse! Merciful heaven, WHY Claverhouse? Again and again I
+asked myself that question. I should not have minded Smith, or Brown,
+or Jones—but CLAVERHOUSE! I leave it to you. Repeat it to
+yourself—Claverhouse. Just listen to the ridiculous sound of
+it—Claverhouse! Should a man live with such a name? I ask of you. “No,”
+ you say. And “No” said I.
+
+But I bethought me of his mortgage. What of his crops and barn
+destroyed, I knew he would be unable to meet it. So I got a shrewd,
+close-mouthed, tight-fisted money-lender to get the mortgage
+transferred to him. I did not appear but through this agent I forced
+the foreclosure, and but few days (no more, believe me, than the law
+allowed) were given John Claverhouse to remove his goods and chattels
+from the premises. Then I strolled down to see how he took it, for
+he had lived there upward of twenty years. But he met me with his
+saucer-eyes twinkling, and the light glowing and spreading in his face
+till it was as a full-risen moon.
+
+“Ha! ha! ha!” he laughed. “The funniest tike, that youngster of mine!
+Did you ever hear the like? Let me tell you. He was down playing by the
+edge of the river when a piece of the bank caved in and splashed him. ‘O
+papa!’ he cried; ‘a great big puddle flewed up and hit me.’”
+
+He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.
+
+“I don’t see any laugh in it,” I said shortly, and I know my face went
+sour.
+
+He regarded me with wonderment, and then came the damnable light,
+glowing and spreading, as I have described it, till his face shone soft
+and warm, like the summer moon, and then the laugh—“Ha! ha! That’s
+funny! You don’t see it, eh? He! he! Ho! ho! ho! He doesn’t see it! Why,
+look here. You know a puddle—”
+
+But I turned on my heel and left him. That was the last. I could stand
+it no longer. The thing must end right there, I thought, curse him! The
+earth should be quit of him. And as I went over the hill, I could hear
+his monstrous laugh reverberating against the sky.
+
+Now, I pride myself on doing things neatly, and when I resolved to kill
+John Claverhouse I had it in mind to do so in such fashion that I should
+not look back upon it and feel ashamed. I hate bungling, and I hate
+brutality. To me there is something repugnant in merely striking a man
+with one’s naked fist—faugh! it is sickening! So, to shoot, or stab,
+or club John Claverhouse (oh, that name!) did not appeal to me. And not
+only was I impelled to do it neatly and artistically, but also in such
+manner that not the slightest possible suspicion could be directed
+against me.
+
+To this end I bent my intellect, and, after a week of profound
+incubation, I hatched the scheme. Then I set to work. I bought a water
+spaniel bitch, five months old, and devoted my whole attention to her
+training. Had any one spied upon me, they would have remarked that this
+training consisted entirely of one thing—RETRIEVING. I taught the dog,
+which I called “Bellona,” to fetch sticks I threw into the water, and
+not only to fetch, but to fetch at once, without mouthing or playing
+with them. The point was that she was to stop for nothing, but to
+deliver the stick in all haste. I made a practice of running away and
+leaving her to chase me, with the stick in her mouth, till she caught
+me. She was a bright animal, and took to the game with such eagerness
+that I was soon content.
+
+After that, at the first casual opportunity, I presented Bellona to
+John Claverhouse. I knew what I was about, for I was aware of a little
+weakness of his, and of a little private sinning of which he was
+regularly and inveterately guilty.
+
+“No,” he said, when I placed the end of the rope in his hand. “No, you
+don’t mean it.” And his mouth opened wide and he grinned all over his
+damnable moon-face.
+
+“I—I kind of thought, somehow, you didn’t like me,” he explained.
+“Wasn’t it funny for me to make such a mistake?” And at the thought he
+held his sides with laughter.
+
+“What is her name?” he managed to ask between paroxysms.
+
+“Bellona,” I said.
+
+“He! he!” he tittered. “What a funny name.”
+
+I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out
+between them, “She was the wife of Mars, you know.”
+
+Then the light of the full moon began to suffuse his face, until he
+exploded with: “That was my other dog. Well, I guess she’s a widow now.
+Oh! Ho! ho! E! he! he! Ho!” he whooped after me, and I turned and fled
+swiftly over the hill.
+
+The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, “You go away
+Monday, don’t you?”
+
+He nodded his head and grinned.
+
+“Then you won’t have another chance to get a mess of those trout you
+just ‘dote’ on.”
+
+But he did not notice the sneer. “Oh, I don’t know,” he chuckled. “I’m
+going up to-morrow to try pretty hard.”
+
+Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging
+myself with rapture.
+
+Early next morning I saw him go by with a dip-net and gunnysack, and
+Bellona trotting at his heels. I knew where he was bound, and cut out
+by the back pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the top of the
+mountain. Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed the crest along
+for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheatre in the hills, where the
+little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped for breath in a large
+and placid rock-bound pool. That was the spot! I sat down on the croup
+of the mountain, where I could see all that occurred, and lighted my
+pipe.
+
+Ere many minutes had passed, John Claverhouse came plodding up the bed
+of the stream. Bellona was ambling about him, and they were in high
+feather, her short, snappy barks mingling with his deeper chest-notes.
+Arrived at the pool, he threw down the dip-net and sack, and drew from
+his hip-pocket what looked like a large, fat candle. But I knew it to
+be a stick of “giant”; for such was his method of catching trout. He
+dynamited them. He attached the fuse by wrapping the “giant” tightly
+in a piece of cotton. Then he ignited the fuse and tossed the explosive
+into the pool.
+
+Like a flash, Bellona was into the pool after it. I could have shrieked
+aloud for joy. Claverhouse yelled at her, but without avail. He pelted
+her with clods and rocks, but she swam steadily on till she got the
+stick of “giant” in her mouth, when she whirled about and headed for
+shore. Then, for the first time, he realized his danger, and started to
+run. As foreseen and planned by me, she made the bank and took out after
+him. Oh, I tell you, it was great! As I have said, the pool lay in a
+sort of amphitheatre. Above and below, the stream could be crossed
+on stepping-stones. And around and around, up and down and across the
+stones, raced Claverhouse and Bellona. I could never have believed
+that such an ungainly man could run so fast. But run he did, Bellona
+hot-footed after him, and gaining. And then, just as she caught up,
+he in full stride, and she leaping with nose at his knee, there was a
+sudden flash, a burst of smoke, a terrific detonation, and where man and
+dog had been the instant before there was naught to be seen but a big
+hole in the ground.
+
+“Death from accident while engaged in illegal fishing.” That was the
+verdict of the coroner’s jury; and that is why I pride myself on the
+neat and artistic way in which I finished off John Claverhouse. There
+was no bungling, no brutality; nothing of which to be ashamed in
+the whole transaction, as I am sure you will agree. No more does his
+infernal laugh go echoing among the hills, and no more does his fat
+moon-face rise up to vex me. My days are peaceful now, and my night’s
+sleep deep.
+
+
+
+
+THE LEOPARD MAN’S STORY
+
+
+He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent
+voice, gentle-spoken as a maid’s, seemed the placid embodiment of some
+deep-seated melancholy. He was the Leopard Man, but he did not look
+it. His business in life, whereby he lived, was to appear in a cage of
+performing leopards before vast audiences, and to thrill those audiences
+by certain exhibitions of nerve for which his employers rewarded him on
+a scale commensurate with the thrills he produced.
+
+As I say, he did not look it. He was narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered,
+and anaemic, while he seemed not so much oppressed by gloom as by a
+sweet and gentle sadness, the weight of which was as sweetly and gently
+borne. For an hour I had been trying to get a story out of him, but
+he appeared to lack imagination. To him there was no romance in his
+gorgeous career, no deeds of daring, no thrills—nothing but a gray
+sameness and infinite boredom.
+
+Lions? Oh, yes! he had fought with them. It was nothing. All you had to
+do was to stay sober. Anybody could whip a lion to a standstill with an
+ordinary stick. He had fought one for half an hour once. Just hit him
+on the nose every time he rushed, and when he got artful and rushed with
+his head down, why, the thing to do was to stick out your leg. When he
+grabbed at the leg you drew it back and hit hint on the nose again. That
+was all.
+
+With the far-away look in his eyes and his soft flow of words he showed
+me his scars. There were many of them, and one recent one where a
+tigress had reached for his shoulder and gone down to the bone. I could
+see the neatly mended rents in the coat he had on. His right arm,
+from the elbow down, looked as though it had gone through a threshing
+machine, what of the ravage wrought by claws and fangs. But it was
+nothing, he said, only the old wounds bothered him somewhat when rainy
+weather came on.
+
+Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as
+anxious to give me a story as I was to get it.
+
+“I suppose you’ve heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?”
+ he asked.
+
+He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.
+
+“Got the toothache,” he explained. “Well, the lion-tamer’s big play to
+the audience was putting his head in a lion’s mouth. The man who hated
+him attended every performance in the hope sometime of seeing that lion
+crunch down. He followed the show about all over the country. The years
+went by and he grew old, and the lion-tamer grew old, and the lion grew
+old. And at last one day, sitting in a front seat, he saw what he had
+waited for. The lion crunched down, and there wasn’t any need to call a
+doctor.”
+
+The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which
+would have been critical had it not been so sad.
+
+“Now, that’s what I call patience,” he continued, “and it’s my style.
+But it was not the style of a fellow I knew. He was a little, thin,
+sawed-off, sword-swallowing and juggling Frenchman. De Ville, he called
+himself, and he had a nice wife. She did trapeze work and used to dive
+from under the roof into a net, turning over once on the way as nice as
+you please.
+
+“De Ville had a quick temper, as quick as his hand, and his hand was as
+quick as the paw of a tiger. One day, because the ring-master called him
+a frog-eater, or something like that and maybe a little worse, he shoved
+him against the soft pine background he used in his knife-throwing act,
+so quick the ring-master didn’t have time to think, and there, before
+the audience, De Ville kept the air on fire with his knives, sinking
+them into the wood all around the ring-master so close that they passed
+through his clothes and most of them bit into his skin.
+
+“The clowns had to pull the knives out to get him loose, for he was
+pinned fast. So the word went around to watch out for De Ville, and no
+one dared be more than barely civil to his wife. And she was a sly bit
+of baggage, too, only all hands were afraid of De Ville.
+
+“But there was one man, Wallace, who was afraid of nothing. He was the
+lion-tamer, and he had the self-same trick of putting his head into
+the lion’s mouth. He’d put it into the mouths of any of them, though
+he preferred Augustus, a big, good-natured beast who could always be
+depended upon.
+
+“As I was saying, Wallace—‘King’ Wallace we called him—was afraid
+of nothing alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I’ve seen him
+drunk, and on a wager go into the cage of a lion that’d turned nasty,
+and without a stick beat him to a finish. Just did it with his fist on
+the nose.
+
+“Madame de Ville—”
+
+At an uproar behind us the Leopard Man turned quietly around. It was
+a divided cage, and a monkey, poking through the bars and around the
+partition, had had its paw seized by a big gray wolf who was trying to
+pull it off by main strength. The arm seemed stretching out longer end
+longer like a thick elastic, and the unfortunate monkey’s mates were
+raising a terrible din. No keeper was at hand, so the Leopard Man
+stepped over a couple of paces, dealt the wolf a sharp blow on the nose
+with the light cane he carried, and returned with a sadly apologetic
+smile to take up his unfinished sentence as though there had been no
+interruption.
+
+“—looked at King Wallace and King Wallace looked at her, while De Ville
+looked black. We warned Wallace, but it was no use. He laughed at us,
+as he laughed at De Ville one day when he shoved De Ville’s head into a
+bucket of paste because he wanted to fight.
+
+“De Ville was in a pretty mess—I helped to scrape him off; but he was
+cool as a cucumber and made no threats at all. But I saw a glitter in
+his eyes which I had seen often in the eyes of wild beasts, and I went
+out of my way to give Wallace a final warning. He laughed, but he did
+not look so much in Madame de Ville’s direction after that.
+
+“Several months passed by. Nothing had happened and I was beginning to
+think it all a scare over nothing. We were West by that time, showing in
+‘Frisco. It was during the afternoon performance, and the big tent was
+filled with women and children, when I went looking for Red Denny, the
+head canvas-man, who had walked off with my pocket-knife.
+
+“Passing by one of the dressing tents I glanced in through a hole in the
+canvas to see if I could locate him. He wasn’t there, but directly in
+front of me was King Wallace, in tights, waiting for his turn to go on
+with his cage of performing lions. He was watching with much amusement a
+quarrel between a couple of trapeze artists. All the rest of the people
+in the dressing tent were watching the same thing, with the exception
+of De Ville whom I noticed staring at Wallace with undisguised hatred.
+Wallace and the rest were all too busy following the quarrel to notice
+this or what followed.
+
+“But I saw it through the hole in the canvas. De Ville drew his
+handkerchief from his pocket, made as though to mop the sweat from
+his face with it (it was a hot day), and at the same time walked past
+Wallace’s back. The look troubled me at the time, for not only did I see
+hatred in it, but I saw triumph as well.
+
+“‘De Ville will bear watching,’ I said to myself, and I really breathed
+easier when I saw him go out the entrance to the circus grounds and
+board an electric car for down town. A few minutes later I was in the
+big tent, where I had overhauled Red Denny. King Wallace was doing
+his turn and holding the audience spellbound. He was in a particularly
+vicious mood, and he kept the lions stirred up till they were all
+snarling, that is, all of them except old Augustus, and he was just too
+fat and lazy and old to get stirred up over anything.
+
+“Finally Wallace cracked the old lion’s knees with his whip and got him
+into position. Old Augustus, blinking good-naturedly, opened his mouth
+and in popped Wallace’s head. Then the jaws came together, CRUNCH, just
+like that.”
+
+The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the far-away
+look came into his eyes.
+
+“And that was the end of King Wallace,” he went on in his sad, low
+voice. “After the excitement cooled down I watched my chance and bent
+over and smelled Wallace’s head. Then I sneezed.”
+
+“It ... it was...?” I queried with halting eagerness.
+
+“Snuff—that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old
+Augustus never meant to do it. He only sneezed.”
+
+
+
+
+LOCAL COLOR
+
+
+“I do not see why you should not turn this immense amount of unusual
+information to account,” I told him. “Unlike most men equipped with
+similar knowledge, YOU have expression. Your style is—”
+
+“Is sufficiently—er—journalese?” he interrupted suavely.
+
+“Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny.”
+
+But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and
+dismissed the subject.
+
+“I have tried it. It does not pay.”
+
+“It was paid for and published,” he added, after a pause. “And I was
+also honored with sixty days in the Hobo.”
+
+“The Hobo?” I ventured.
+
+“The Hobo—” He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the titles
+while he cast his definition. “The Hobo, my dear fellow, is the name for
+that particular place of detention in city and county jails wherein are
+assembled tramps, drunks, beggars, and the riff-raff of petty offenders.
+The word itself is a pretty one, and it has a history. Hautbois—there’s
+the French of it. Haut, meaning high, and bois, wood. In English
+it becomes hautboy, a wooden musical instrument of two-foot tone, I
+believe, played with a double reed, an oboe, in fact. You remember in
+‘Henry IV’—
+
+    “‘The case of a treble hautboy
+     Was a mansion for him, a court.’
+
+“From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English
+used the terms interchangeably. But—and mark you, the leap paralyzes
+one—crossing the Western Ocean, in New York City, hautboy, or ho-boy,
+becomes the name by which the night-scavenger is known. In a way one
+understands its being born of the contempt for wandering players and
+musical fellows. But see the beauty of it! the burn and the brand!
+The night-scavenger, the pariah, the miserable, the despised, the man
+without caste! And in its next incarnation, consistently and logically,
+it attaches itself to the American outcast, namely, the tramp. Then,
+as others have mutilated its sense, the tramp mutilates its form, and
+ho-boy becomes exultantly hobo. Wherefore, the large stone and brick
+cells, lined with double and triple-tiered bunks, in which the Law is
+wont to incarcerate him, he calls the Hobo. Interesting, isn’t it?”
+
+And I sat back and marvelled secretly at this encyclopaedic-minded man,
+this Leith Clay-Randolph, this common tramp who made himself at home in
+my den, charmed such friends as gathered at my small table, outshone me
+with his brilliance and his manners, spent my spending money, smoked my
+best cigars, and selected from my ties and studs with a cultivated and
+discriminating eye.
+
+He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria’s “Economic
+Foundation of Society.”
+
+“I like to talk with you,” he remarked. “You are not indifferently
+schooled. You’ve read the books, and your economic interpretation of
+history, as you choose to call it” (this with a sneer), “eminently fits
+you for an intellectual outlook on life. But your sociologic judgments
+are vitiated by your lack of practical knowledge. Now I, who know the
+books, pardon me, somewhat better than you, know life, too. I have lived
+it, naked, taken it up in both my hands and looked at it, and tasted it,
+the flesh and the blood of it, and, being purely an intellectual, I have
+been biased by neither passion nor prejudice. All of which is necessary
+for clear concepts, and all of which you lack. Ah! a really clever
+passage. Listen!”
+
+And he read aloud to me in his remarkable style, paralleling the text
+with a running criticism and commentary, lucidly wording involved and
+lumbering periods, casting side and cross lights upon the subject,
+introducing points the author had blundered past and objections he had
+ignored, catching up lost ends, flinging a contrast into a paradox
+and reducing it to a coherent and succinctly stated truth—in short,
+flashing his luminous genius in a blaze of fire over pages erstwhile
+dull and heavy and lifeless.
+
+It is long since that Leith Clay-Randolph (note the hyphenated surname)
+knocked at the back door of Idlewild and melted the heart of Gunda. Now
+Gunda was cold as her Norway hills, though in her least frigid moods she
+was capable of permitting especially nice-looking tramps to sit on the
+back stoop and devour lone crusts and forlorn and forsaken chops. But
+that a tatterdemalion out of the night should invade the sanctity of her
+kitchen-kingdom and delay dinner while she set a place for him in the
+warmest corner, was a matter of such moment that the Sunflower went
+to see. Ah, the Sunflower, of the soft heart and swift sympathy! Leith
+Clay-Randolph threw his glamour over her for fifteen long minutes,
+whilst I brooded with my cigar, and then she fluttered back with vague
+words and the suggestion of a cast-off suit I would never miss.
+
+“Surely I shall never miss it,” I said, and I had in mind the dark gray
+suit with the pockets draggled from the freightage of many books—books
+that had spoiled more than one day’s fishing sport.
+
+“I should advise you, however,” I added, “to mend the pockets first.”
+
+But the Sunflower’s face clouded. “N—o,” she said, “the black one.”
+
+“The black one!” This explosively, incredulously. “I wear it quite
+often. I—I intended wearing it to-night.”
+
+“You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear,” the
+Sunflower hurried on. “Besides, it’s shiny—”
+
+“Shiny!”
+
+“It—it soon will be, which is just the same, and the man is really
+estimable. He is nice and refined, and I am sure he—”
+
+“Has seen better days.”
+
+“Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are
+threadbare. And you have many suits—”
+
+“Five,” I corrected, “counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
+draggled pockets.”
+
+“And he has none, no home, nothing—”
+
+“Not even a Sunflower,”—putting my arm around her,—“wherefore he is
+deserving of all things. Give him the black suit, dear—nay, the best
+one, the very best one. Under high heaven for such lack there must be
+compensation!”
+
+“You ARE a dear!” And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked back
+alluringly. “You are a PERFECT dear.”
+
+And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid
+and apologetic.
+
+“I—I gave him one of your white shirts. He wore a cheap horrid cotton
+thing, and I knew it would look ridiculous. And then his shoes were so
+slipshod, I let him have a pair of yours, the old ones with the narrow
+caps—”
+
+“Old ones!”
+
+“Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did.”
+
+It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.
+
+And so Leith Clay-Randolph came to Idlewild to stay, how long I did
+not dream. Nor did I dream how often he was to come, for he was like an
+erratic comet. Fresh he would arrive, and cleanly clad, from grand folk
+who were his friends as I was his friend, and again, weary and worn,
+he would creep up the brier-rose path from the Montanas or Mexico. And
+without a word, when his wanderlust gripped him, he was off and away
+into that great mysterious underworld he called “The Road.”
+
+“I could not bring myself to leave until I had thanked you, you of the
+open hand and heart,” he said, on the night he donned my good black
+suit.
+
+And I confess I was startled when I glanced over the top of my paper and
+saw a lofty-browed and eminently respectable-looking gentleman, boldly
+and carelessly at ease. The Sunflower was right. He must have known
+better days for the black suit and white shirt to have effected such a
+transformation. Involuntarily I rose to my feet, prompted to meet him on
+equal ground. And then it was that the Clay-Randolph glamour descended
+upon me. He slept at Idlewild that night, and the next night, and for
+many nights. And he was a man to love. The Son of Anak, otherwise Rufus
+the Blue-Eyed, and also plebeianly known as Tots, rioted with him from
+brier-rose path to farthest orchard, scalped him in the haymow with
+barbaric yells, and once, with pharisaic zeal, was near to crucifying
+him under the attic roof beams. The Sunflower would have loved him
+for the Son of Anak’s sake, had she not loved him for his own. As for
+myself, let the Sunflower tell, in the times he elected to be gone,
+of how often I wondered when Leith would come back again, Leith the
+Lovable. Yet he was a man of whom we knew nothing. Beyond the fact that
+he was Kentucky-born, his past was a blank. He never spoke of it. And
+he was a man who prided himself upon his utter divorce of reason from
+emotion. To him the world spelled itself out in problems. I charged him
+once with being guilty of emotion when roaring round the den with
+the Son of Anak pickaback. Not so, he held. Could he not cuddle a
+sense-delight for the problem’s sake?
+
+He was elusive. A man who intermingled nameless argot with polysyllabic
+and technical terms, he would seem sometimes the veriest criminal, in
+speech, face, expression, everything; at other times the cultured and
+polished gentleman, and again, the philosopher and scientist. But
+there was something glimmering; there which I never caught—flashes
+of sincerity, of real feeling, I imagined, which were sped ere I could
+grasp; echoes of the man he once was, possibly, or hints of the man
+behind the mask. But the mask he never lifted, and the real man we never
+knew.
+
+“But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?” I
+asked. “Never mind Loria. Tell me.”
+
+“Well, if I must.” He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.
+
+“In a town that shall be nameless,” he began, “in fact, a city of fifty
+thousand, a fair and beautiful city wherein men slave for dollars and
+women for dress, an idea came to me. My front was prepossessing, as
+fronts go, and my pockets empty. I had in recollection a thought I once
+entertained of writing a reconciliation of Kant and Spencer. Not that
+they are reconcilable, of course, but the room offered for scientific
+satire—”
+
+I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.
+
+“I was just tracing my mental states for you, in order to show the
+genesis of the action,” he explained. “However, the idea came. What
+was the matter with a tramp sketch for the daily press? The
+Irreconcilability of the Constable and the Tramp, for instance? So I hit
+the drag (the drag, my dear fellow, is merely the street), or the high
+places, if you will, for a newspaper office. The elevator whisked me
+into the sky, and Cerberus, in the guise of an anaemic office boy,
+guarded the door. Consumption, one could see it at a glance; nerve,
+Irish, colossal; tenacity, undoubted; dead inside the year.
+
+“‘Pale youth,’ quoth I, ‘I pray thee the way to the sanctum-sanctorum,
+to the Most High Cock-a-lorum.’
+
+“He deigned to look at me, scornfully, with infinite weariness.
+
+“‘G’wan an’ see the janitor. I don’t know nothin’ about the gas.’
+
+“‘Nay, my lily-white, the editor.’
+
+“‘Wich editor?’ he snapped like a young bullterrier. ‘Dramatic?
+Sportin’? Society? Sunday? Weekly? Daily? Telegraph? Local? News?
+Editorial? Wich?’
+
+“Which, I did not know. ‘THE Editor,’ I proclaimed stoutly. ‘The ONLY
+Editor.’
+
+“‘Aw, Spargo!’ he sniffed.
+
+“‘Of course, Spargo,’ I answered. ‘Who else?’
+
+“‘Gimme yer card,’ says he.
+
+“‘My what?’
+
+“‘Yer card—Say! Wot’s yer business, anyway?’
+
+“And the anaemic Cerberus sized me up with so insolent an eye that I
+reached over and took him out of his chair. I knocked on his meagre
+chest with my fore knuckle, and fetched forth a weak, gaspy cough; but
+he looked at me unflinchingly, much like a defiant sparrow held in the
+hand.
+
+“‘I am the census-taker Time,’ I boomed in sepulchral tones. ‘Beware
+lest I knock too loud.’
+
+“‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he sneered.
+
+“Whereupon I rapped him smartly, and he choked and turned purplish.
+
+“‘Well, whatcher want?’ he wheezed with returning breath.
+
+“‘I want Spargo, the only Spargo.’
+
+“‘Then leave go, an’ I’ll glide an’ see.’
+
+“‘No you don’t, my lily-white.’ And I took a tighter grip on his collar.
+‘No bouncers in mine, understand! I’ll go along.’”
+
+Leith dreamily surveyed the long ash of his cigar and turned to me.
+“Do you know, Anak, you can’t appreciate the joy of being the buffoon,
+playing the clown. You couldn’t do it if you wished. Your pitiful little
+conventions and smug assumptions of decency would prevent. But simply to
+turn loose your soul to every whimsicality, to play the fool unafraid of
+any possible result, why, that requires a man other than a householder
+and law-respecting citizen.
+
+“However, as I was saying, I saw the only Spargo. He was a big, beefy,
+red-faced personage, full-jowled and double-chinned, sweating at his
+desk in his shirt-sleeves. It was August, you know. He was talking into
+a telephone when I entered, or swearing rather, I should say, and
+the while studying me with his eyes. When he hung up, he turned to me
+expectantly.
+
+“‘You are a very busy man,’ I said.
+
+“He jerked a nod with his head, and waited.
+
+“‘And after all, is it worth it?’ I went on. ‘What does life mean that
+it should make you sweat? What justification do you find in sweat? Now
+look at me. I toil not, neither do I spin—’
+
+“‘Who are you? What are you?’ he bellowed with a suddenness that was,
+well, rude, tearing the words out as a dog does a bone.
+
+“‘A very pertinent question, sir,’ I acknowledged. ‘First, I am a
+man; next, a down-trodden American citizen. I am cursed with neither
+profession, trade, nor expectations. Like Esau, I am pottageless.
+My residence is everywhere; the sky is my coverlet. I am one of the
+dispossessed, a sansculotte, a proletarian, or, in simpler phraseology
+addressed to your understanding, a tramp.’
+
+“‘What the hell—?’
+
+“‘Nay, fair sir, a tramp, a man of devious ways and strange lodgements
+and multifarious—’
+
+“‘Quit it!’ he shouted. ‘What do you want?’
+
+“‘I want money.’
+
+“He started and half reached for an open drawer where must have reposed
+a revolver, then bethought himself and growled, ‘This is no bank.’
+
+“‘Nor have I checks to cash. But I have, sir, an idea, which, by your
+leave and kind assistance, I shall transmute into cash. In short, how
+does a tramp sketch, done by a tramp to the life, strike you? Are you
+open to it? Do your readers hunger for it? Do they crave after it? Can
+they be happy without it?’
+
+“I thought for a moment that he would have apoplexy, but he quelled the
+unruly blood and said he liked my nerve. I thanked him and assured him I
+liked it myself. Then he offered me a cigar and said he thought he’d do
+business with me.
+
+“‘But mind you,’ he said, when he had jabbed a bunch of copy paper into
+my hand and given me a pencil from his vest pocket, ‘mind you, I won’t
+stand for the high and flighty philosophical, and I perceive you have
+a tendency that way. Throw in the local color, wads of it, and a bit of
+sentiment perhaps, but no slumgullion about political economy nor social
+strata or such stuff. Make it concrete, to the point, with snap and go
+and life, crisp and crackling and interesting—tumble?’
+
+“And I tumbled and borrowed a dollar.
+
+“‘Don’t forget the local color!’ he shouted after me through the door.
+
+“And, Anak, it was the local color that did for me.
+
+“The anaemic Cerberus grinned when I took the elevator. ‘Got the bounce,
+eh?’
+
+“‘Nay, pale youth, so lily-white,’ I chortled, waving the copy paper;
+‘not the bounce, but a detail. I’ll be City Editor in three months, and
+then I’ll make you jump.’
+
+“And as the elevator stopped at the next floor down to take on a pair
+of maids, he strolled over to the shaft, and without frills or verbiage
+consigned me and my detail to perdition. But I liked him. He had pluck
+and was unafraid, and he knew, as well as I, that death clutched him
+close.”
+
+“But how could you, Leith,” I cried, the picture of the consumptive lad
+strong before me, “how could you treat him so barbarously?”
+
+Leith laughed dryly. “My dear fellow, how often must I explain to you
+your confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master
+you. And then your temperament! You are really incapable of rational
+judgments. Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle,
+a dim-pulsing and dying organism—pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of
+breath, what would you? A pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem.
+There is no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a dead child. They never
+arrived. Nor did Cerberus. Now for a really pretty problem—”
+
+“But the local color?” I prodded him.
+
+“That’s right,” he replied. “Keep me in the running. Well, I took my
+handful of copy paper down to the railroad yards (for local color),
+dangled my legs from a side-door Pullman, which is another name for a
+box-car, and ran off the stuff. Of course I made it clever and brilliant
+and all that, with my little unanswerable slings at the state and my
+social paradoxes, and withal made it concrete enough to dissatisfy the
+average citizen.
+
+“From the tramp standpoint, the constabulary of the township was
+particularly rotten, and I proceeded to open the eyes of the good
+people. It is a proposition, mathematically demonstrable, that it costs
+the community more to arrest, convict, and confine its tramps in jail,
+than to send them as guests, for like periods of time, to the best
+hotel. And this I developed, giving the facts and figures, the constable
+fees and the mileage, and the court and jail expenses. Oh, it was
+convincing, and it was true; and I did it in a lightly humorous fashion
+which fetched the laugh and left the sting. The main objection to the
+system, I contended, was the defraudment and robbery of the tramp. The
+good money which the community paid out for him should enable him to
+riot in luxury instead of rotting in dungeons. I even drew the figures
+so fine as to permit him not only to live in the best hotel but to smoke
+two twenty-five-cent cigars and indulge in a ten-cent shine each day,
+and still not cost the taxpayers so much as they were accustomed to pay
+for his conviction and jail entertainment. And, as subsequent events
+proved, it made the taxpayers wince.
+
+“One of the constables I drew to the life; nor did I forget a certain
+Sol Glenhart, as rotten a police judge as was to be found between the
+seas. And this I say out of a vast experience. While he was notorious
+in local trampdom, his civic sins were not only not unknown but a crying
+reproach to the townspeople. Of course I refrained from mentioning name
+or habitat, drawing the picture in an impersonal, composite sort of
+way, which none the less blinded no one to the faithfulness of the local
+color.
+
+“Naturally, myself a tramp, the tenor of the article was a protest
+against the maltreatment of the tramp. Cutting the taxpayers to the pits
+of their purses threw them open to sentiment, and then in I tossed the
+sentiment, lumps and chunks of it. Trust me, it was excellently done,
+and the rhetoric—say! Just listen to the tail of my peroration:
+
+“‘So, as we go mooching along the drag, with a sharp lamp out for John
+Law, we cannot help remembering that we are beyond the pale; that our
+ways are not their ways; and that the ways of John Law with us are
+different from his ways with other men. Poor lost souls, wailing for a
+crust in the dark, we know full well our helplessness and ignominy. And
+well may we repeat after a stricken brother over-seas: “Our pride it is
+to know no spur of pride.” Man has forgotten us; God has forgotten us;
+only are we remembered by the harpies of justice, who prey upon our
+distress and coin our sighs and tears into bright shining dollars.’
+
+“Incidentally, my picture of Sol Glenhart, the police judge, was good.
+A striking likeness, and unmistakable, with phrases tripping along like
+this: ‘This crook-nosed, gross-bodied harpy’; ‘this civic sinner, this
+judicial highwayman’; ‘possessing the morals of the Tenderloin and an
+honor which thieves’ honor puts to shame’; ‘who compounds criminality
+with shyster-sharks, and in atonement railroads the unfortunate and
+impecunious to rotting cells,’—and so forth and so forth, style
+sophomoric and devoid of the dignity and tone one would employ in a
+dissertation on ‘Surplus Value,’ or ‘The Fallacies of Marxism,’ but just
+the stuff the dear public likes.
+
+“‘Humph!’ grunted Spargo when I put the copy in his fist. ‘Swift gait
+you strike, my man.’
+
+“I fixed a hypnotic eye on his vest pocket, and he passed out one of his
+superior cigars, which I burned while he ran through the stuff. Twice or
+thrice he looked over the top of the paper at me, searchingly, but said
+nothing till he had finished.
+
+“‘Where’d you work, you pencil-pusher?’ he asked.
+
+“‘My maiden effort,’ I simpered modestly, scraping one foot and faintly
+simulating embarrassment.
+
+“‘Maiden hell! What salary do you want?’
+
+“‘Nay, nay,’ I answered. ‘No salary in mine, thank you most to death. I
+am a free down-trodden American citizen, and no man shall say my time is
+his.’
+
+“‘Save John Law,’ he chuckled.
+
+“‘Save John Law,’ said I.
+
+“‘How did you know I was bucking the police department?’ he demanded
+abruptly.
+
+“‘I didn’t know, but I knew you were in training,’ I answered.
+‘Yesterday morning a charitably inclined female presented me with three
+biscuits, a piece of cheese, and a funereal slab of chocolate cake, all
+wrapped in the current Clarion, wherein I noted an unholy glee because
+the Cowbell’s candidate for chief of police had been turned down.
+Likewise I learned the municipal election was at hand, and put two
+and two together. Another mayor, and the right kind, means new police
+commissioners; new police commissioners means new chief of police; new
+chief of police means Cowbell’s candidate; ergo, your turn to play.’
+
+“He stood up, shook my hand, and emptied his plethoric vest pocket. I
+put them away and puffed on the old one.
+
+“‘You’ll do,’ he jubilated. ‘This stuff’ (patting my copy) ‘is the first
+gun of the campaign. You’ll touch off many another before we’re done.
+I’ve been looking for you for years. Come on in on the editorial.’
+
+“But I shook my head.
+
+“‘Come, now!’ he admonished sharply. ‘No shenanagan! The Cowbell must
+have you. It hungers for you, craves after you, won’t be happy till it
+gets you. What say?’
+
+“In short, he wrestled with me, but I was bricks, and at the end of half
+an hour the only Spargo gave it up.
+
+“‘Remember,’ he said, ‘any time you reconsider, I’m open. No matter
+where you are, wire me and I’ll send the ducats to come on at once.’
+
+“I thanked him, and asked the pay for my copy—dope, he called it.
+
+“‘Oh, regular routine,’ he said. ‘Get it the first Thursday after
+publication.’
+
+“‘Then I’ll have to trouble you for a few scad until—’
+
+“He looked at me and smiled. ‘Better cough up, eh?’
+
+“‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Nobody to identify me, so make it cash.’
+
+“And cash it was made, thirty plunks (a plunk is a dollar, my dear
+Anak), and I pulled my freight ... eh?—oh, departed.
+
+“‘Pale youth,’ I said to Cerberus, ‘I am bounced.’ (He grinned with
+pallid joy.) ‘And in token of the sincere esteem I bear you, receive
+this little—’ (His eyes flushed and he threw up one hand, swiftly, to
+guard his head from the expected blow)—‘this little memento.’
+
+“I had intended to slip a fiver into his hand, but for all his surprise,
+he was too quick for me.
+
+“‘Aw, keep yer dirt,’ he snarled.
+
+“‘I like you still better,’ I said, adding a second fiver. ‘You grow
+perfect. But you must take it.’
+
+“He backed away growling, but I caught him round the neck, roughed what
+little wind he had out of him, and left him doubled up with the two
+fives in his pocket. But hardly had the elevator started, when the two
+coins tinkled on the roof and fell down between the car and the shaft.
+As luck had it, the door was not closed, and I put out my hand and
+caught them. The elevator boy’s eyes bulged.
+
+“‘It’s a way I have,’ I said, pocketing them.
+
+“‘Some bloke’s dropped ‘em down the shaft,’ he whispered, awed by the
+circumstance.
+
+“‘It stands to reason,’ said I.
+
+“‘I’ll take charge of ‘em,’ he volunteered.
+
+“‘Nonsense!’
+
+“‘You’d better turn ‘em over,’ he threatened, ‘or I stop the works.’
+
+“‘Pshaw!’
+
+“And stop he did, between floors.
+
+“‘Young man,’ I said, ‘have you a mother?’ (He looked serious, as though
+regretting his act! and further to impress him I rolled up my right
+sleeve with greatest care.) ‘Are you prepared to die?’ (I got a stealthy
+crouch on, and put a cat-foot forward.) ‘But a minute, a brief minute,
+stands between you and eternity.’ (Here I crooked my right hand into a
+claw and slid the other foot up.) ‘Young man, young man,’ I trumpeted,
+‘in thirty seconds I shall tear your heart dripping from your bosom and
+stoop to hear you shriek in hell.’
+
+“It fetched him. He gave one whoop, the car shot down, and I was on the
+drag. You see, Anak, it’s a habit I can’t shake off of leaving vivid
+memories behind. No one ever forgets me.
+
+“I had not got to the corner when I heard a familiar voice at my
+shoulder:
+
+“‘Hello, Cinders! Which way?’
+
+“It was Chi Slim, who had been with me once when I was thrown off a
+freight in Jacksonville. ‘Couldn’t see ‘em fer cinders,’ he described
+it, and the monica stuck by me.... Monica? From monos. The tramp
+nickname.
+
+“‘Bound south,’ I answered. ‘And how’s Slim?’
+
+“‘Bum. Bulls is horstile.’
+
+“‘Where’s the push?’
+
+“‘At the hang-out. I’ll put you wise.’
+
+“‘Who’s the main guy?’
+
+“‘Me, and don’t yer ferget it.’”
+
+The lingo was rippling from Leith’s lips, but perforce I stopped him.
+“Pray translate. Remember, I am a foreigner.”
+
+“Certainly,” he answered cheerfully. “Slim is in poor luck. Bull means
+policeman. He tells me the bulls are hostile. I ask where the push is,
+the gang he travels with. By putting me wise he will direct me to where
+the gang is hanging out. The main guy is the leader. Slim claims that
+distinction.
+
+“Slim and I hiked out to a neck of woods just beyond town, and there was
+the push, a score of husky hobos, charmingly located on the bank of a
+little purling stream.
+
+“‘Come on, you mugs!’ Slim addressed them. ‘Throw yer feet! Here’s
+Cinders, an’ we must do ‘em proud.’
+
+“All of which signifies that the hobos had better strike out and do some
+lively begging in order to get the wherewithal to celebrate my return to
+the fold after a year’s separation. But I flashed my dough and Slim sent
+several of the younger men off to buy the booze. Take my word for it,
+Anak, it was a blow-out memorable in Trampdom to this day. It’s amazing
+the quantity of booze thirty plunks will buy, and it is equally amazing
+the quantity of booze outside of which twenty stiffs will get. Beer
+and cheap wine made up the card, with alcohol thrown in for the
+blowd-in-the-glass stiffs. It was great—an orgy under the sky, a
+contest of beaker-men, a study in primitive beastliness. To me there is
+something fascinating in a drunken man, and were I a college president
+I should institute P.G. psychology courses in practical drunkenness. It
+would beat the books and compete with the laboratory.
+
+“All of which is neither here nor there, for after sixteen hours of it,
+early next morning, the whole push was copped by an overwhelming
+array of constables and carted off to jail. After breakfast, about ten
+o’clock, we were lined upstairs into court, limp and spiritless, the
+twenty of us. And there, under his purple panoply, nose crooked like a
+Napoleonic eagle and eyes glittering and beady, sat Sol Glenhart.
+
+“‘John Ambrose!’ the clerk called out, and Chi Slim, with the ease of
+long practice, stood up.
+
+“‘Vagrant, your Honor,’ the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not
+deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, ‘Ten days,’ and Chi Slim sat
+down.
+
+“And so it went, with the monotony of clockwork, fifteen seconds to the
+man, four men to the minute, the mugs bobbing up and down in turn like
+marionettes. The clerk called the name, the bailiff the offence, the
+judge the sentence, and the man sat down. That was all. Simple, eh?
+Superb!
+
+“Chi Slim nudged me. ‘Give’m a spiel, Cinders. You kin do it.’
+
+“I shook my head.
+
+“‘G’wan,’ he urged. ‘Give ‘m a ghost story The mugs’ll take it all
+right. And you kin throw yer feet fer tobacco for us till we get out.’
+
+“‘L. C. Randolph!’ the clerk called.
+
+“I stood up, but a hitch came in the proceedings. The clerk whispered to
+the judge, and the bailiff smiled.
+
+“‘You are a newspaper man, I understand, Mr. Randolph?’ his Honor
+remarked sweetly.
+
+“It took me by surprise, for I had forgotten the Cowbell in the
+excitement of succeeding events, and I now saw myself on the edge of the
+pit I had digged.
+
+“‘That’s yer graft. Work it,’ Slim prompted.
+
+“‘It’s all over but the shouting,’ I groaned back, but Slim, unaware of
+the article, was puzzled.
+
+“‘Your Honor,’ I answered, ‘when I can get work, that is my occupation.’
+
+“‘You take quite an interest in local affairs, I see.’ (Here his Honor
+took up the morning’s Cowbell and ran his eye up and down a column I
+knew was mine.) ‘Color is good,’ he commented, an appreciative twinkle
+in his eyes; ‘pictures excellent, characterized by broad, Sargent-like
+effects. Now this ... this judge you have depicted ... you, ah, draw from
+life, I presume?’
+
+“‘Rarely, your I Honor,’ I answered. ‘Composites, ideals, rather ... er,
+types, I may say.’
+
+“‘But you have color, sir, unmistakable color,’ he continued.
+
+“‘That is splashed on afterward,’ I explained.
+
+“‘This judge, then, is not modelled from life, as one might be led to
+believe?’
+
+“‘No, your Honor.’
+
+“‘Ah, I see, merely a type of judicial wickedness?’
+
+“‘Nay, more, your Honor,’ I said boldly, ‘an ideal.’
+
+“‘Splashed with local color afterward? Ha! Good! And may I venture to
+ask how much you received for this bit of work?’
+
+“‘Thirty dollars, your Honor.’
+
+“‘Hum, good!’ And his tone abruptly changed. ‘Young man, local color is
+a bad thing. I find you guilty of it and sentence you to thirty days’
+imprisonment, or, at your pleasure, impose a fine of thirty dollars.’
+
+“‘Alas!’ said I, ‘I spent the thirty dollars in riotous living.’
+
+“‘And thirty days more for wasting your substance.’
+
+“‘Next case!’ said his Honor to the clerk.
+
+“Slim was stunned. ‘Gee!’ he whispered. ‘Gee the push gets ten days and
+you get sixty. Gee!’”
+
+Leith struck a match, lighted his dead cigar, and opened the book on his
+knees. “Returning to the original conversation, don’t you find,
+Anak, that though Loria handles the bipartition of the revenues with
+scrupulous care, he yet omits one important factor, namely—”
+
+“Yes,” I said absently; “yes.”
+
+
+
+
+AMATEUR NIGHT
+
+
+The elevator boy smiled knowingly to himself. When he took her up, he
+had noted the sparkle in her eyes, the color in her cheeks. His little
+cage had quite warmed with the glow of her repressed eagerness. And now,
+on the down trip, it was glacier-like. The sparkle and the color were
+gone. She was frowning, and what little he could see of her eyes
+was cold and steel-gray. Oh, he knew the symptoms, he did. He was an
+observer, and he knew it, too, and some day, when he was big enough,
+he was going to be a reporter, sure. And in the meantime he studied
+the procession of life as it streamed up and down eighteen
+sky-scraper floors in his elevator car. He slid the door open for her
+sympathetically and watched her trip determinedly out into the street.
+
+There was a robustness in her carriage which came of the soil rather
+than of the city pavement. But it was a robustness in a finer than the
+wonted sense, a vigorous daintiness, it might be called, which gave an
+impression of virility with none of the womanly left out. It told of
+a heredity of seekers and fighters, of people that worked stoutly with
+head and hand, of ghosts that reached down out of the misty past and
+moulded and made her to be a doer of things.
+
+But she was a little angry, and a great deal hurt. “I can guess what you
+would tell me,” the editor had kindly but firmly interrupted her lengthy
+preamble in the long-looked-forward-to interview just ended. “And you
+have told me enough,” he had gone on (heartlessly, she was sure, as
+she went over the conversation in its freshness). “You have done no
+newspaper work. You are undrilled, undisciplined, unhammered into shape.
+You have received a high-school education, and possibly topped it off
+with normal school or college. You have stood well in English. Your
+friends have all told you how cleverly you write, and how beautifully,
+and so forth and so forth. You think you can do newspaper work, and you
+want me to put you on. Well, I am sorry, but there are no openings. If
+you knew how crowded—”
+
+“But if there are no openings,” she had interrupted, in turn, “how did
+those who are in, get in? How am I to show that I am eligible to get
+in?”
+
+“They made themselves indispensable,” was the terse response. “Make
+yourself indispensable.”
+
+“But how can I, if I do not get the chance?”
+
+“Make your chance.”
+
+“But how?” she had insisted, at the same time privately deeming him a
+most unreasonable man.
+
+“How? That is your business, not mine,” he said conclusively, rising
+in token that the interview was at an end. “I must inform you, my dear
+young lady, that there have been at least eighteen other aspiring young
+ladies here this week, and that I have not the time to tell each and
+every one of them how. The function I perform on this paper is hardly
+that of instructor in a school of journalism.”
+
+She caught an outbound car, and ere she descended from it she had
+conned the conversation over and over again. “But how?” she repeated to
+herself, as she climbed the three flights of stairs to the rooms where
+she and her sister “bach’ed.” “But how?” And so she continued to put the
+interrogation, for the stubborn Scotch blood, though many times removed
+from Scottish soil, was still strong in her. And, further, there was
+need that she should learn how. Her sister Letty and she had come up
+from an interior town to the city to make their way in the world. John
+Wyman was land-poor. Disastrous business enterprises had burdened his
+acres and forced his two girls, Edna and Letty, into doing something for
+themselves. A year of school-teaching and of night-study of shorthand
+and typewriting had capitalized their city project and fitted them for
+the venture, which same venture was turning out anything but
+successful. The city seemed crowded with inexperienced stenographers and
+typewriters, and they had nothing but their own inexperience to offer.
+Edna’s secret ambition had been journalism; but she had planned a
+clerical position first, so that she might have time and space in which
+to determine where and on what line of journalism she would embark. But
+the clerical position had not been forthcoming, either for Letty or
+her, and day by day their little hoard dwindled, though the room rent
+remained normal and the stove consumed coal with undiminished voracity.
+And it was a slim little hoard by now.
+
+“There’s Max Irwin,” Letty said, talking it over. “He’s a journalist
+with a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he
+should be able to tell you how.”
+
+“But I don’t know him,” Edna objected.
+
+“No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day.”
+
+“Y-e-s,” (long and judicially), “but that’s different.”
+
+“Not a bit different from the strange men and women you’ll interview
+when you’ve learned how,” Letty encouraged.
+
+“I hadn’t looked at it in that light,” Edna conceded. “After all,
+where’s the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some
+paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice,
+too. I’ll go and look him up in the directory.”
+
+“Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance,” she announced
+decisively a moment later. “I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if
+you know what I mean.”
+
+And Letty knew and nodded. “I wonder what he is like?” she asked softly.
+
+“I’ll make it my business to find out,” Edna assured her; “and I’ll let
+you know inside forty-eight hours.”
+
+Letty clapped her hands. “Good! That’s the newspaper spirit! Make it
+twenty-four hours and you are perfect!”
+
+    *       *       *
+
+“—and I am very sorry to trouble you,” she concluded the statement of
+her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist.
+
+“Not at all,” he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. “If you
+don’t do your own talking, who’s to do it for you? Now I understand your
+predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want
+to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first
+place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a
+line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or
+fall by your own ability. There’s Senator Longbridge, for instance,
+and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney—” He
+paused, with voice suspended.
+
+“I am sure I know none of them,” she answered despondently.
+
+“It’s not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one
+that knows any one else that knows them?”
+
+Edna shook her head.
+
+“Then we must think of something else,” he went on, cheerfully. “You’ll
+have to do something yourself. Let me see.”
+
+He stopped and thought for a moment, with closed eyes and wrinkled
+forehead. She was watching him, studying him intently, when his blue
+eyes opened with a snap and his face suddenly brightened.
+
+“I have it! But no, wait a minute.”
+
+And for a minute it was his turn to study her. And study her he did,
+till she could feel her cheeks flushing under his gaze.
+
+“You’ll do, I think, though it remains to be seen,” he said
+enigmatically. “It will show the stuff that’s in you, besides, and it
+will be a better claim upon the Intelligencer people than all the lines
+from all the senators and magnates in the world. The thing for you is to
+do Amateur Night at the Loops.”
+
+“I—I hardly understand,” Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no
+meaning to her. “What are the ‘Loops’? and what is ‘Amateur Night’?”
+
+“I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better,
+if you’ve only got the journalistic grip. It will be a first impression,
+and first impressions are always unbiased, unprejudiced, fresh, vivid.
+The Loops are out on the rim of the city, near the Park,—a place of
+diversion. There’s a scenic railway, a water toboggan slide, a concert
+band, a theatre, wild animals, moving pictures, and so forth and so
+forth. The common people go there to look at the animals and enjoy
+themselves, and the other people go there to enjoy themselves
+by watching the common people enjoy themselves. A democratic,
+fresh-air-breathing, frolicking affair, that’s what the Loops are.
+
+“But the theatre is what concerns you. It’s vaudeville. One turn follows
+another—jugglers, acrobats, rubber-jointed wonders, fire-dancers,
+coon-song artists, singers, players, female impersonators, sentimental
+soloists, and so forth and so forth. These people are professional
+vaudevillists. They make their living that way. Many are excellently
+paid. Some are free rovers, doing a turn wherever they can get an
+opening, at the Obermann, the Orpheus, the Alcatraz, the Louvre, and
+so forth and so forth. Others cover circuit pretty well all over the
+country. An interesting phase of life, and the pay is big enough to
+attract many aspirants.
+
+“Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted
+what is called ‘Amateur Night’; that is to say, twice a week, after
+the professionals have done their turns, the stage is given over to
+the aspiring amateurs. The audience remains to criticise. The populace
+becomes the arbiter of art—or it thinks it does, which is the same
+thing; and it pays its money and is well pleased with itself, and
+Amateur Night is a paying proposition to the management.
+
+“But the point of Amateur Night, and it is well to note it, is that
+these amateurs are not really amateurs. They are paid for doing their
+turn. At the best, they may be termed ‘professional amateurs.’ It stands
+to reason that the management could not get people to face a rampant
+audience for nothing, and on such occasions the audience certainly goes
+mad. It’s great fun—for the audience. But the thing for you to do, and
+it requires nerve, I assure you, is to go out, make arrangements for two
+turns, (Wednesday and Saturday nights, I believe), do your two turns,
+and write it up for the Sunday Intelligencer.”
+
+“But—but,” she quavered, “I—I—” and there was a suggestion of
+disappointment and tears in her voice.
+
+“I see,” he said kindly. “You were expecting something else, something
+different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the
+admiral of the Queen’s Na-vee, who swept the floor and polished up
+the handle of the big front door. You must face the drudgery of
+apprenticeship or quit right now. What do you say?”
+
+The abruptness with which he demanded her decision startled her. As she
+faltered, she could see a shade of disappointment beginning to darken
+his face.
+
+“In a way it must be considered a test,” he added encouragingly. “A
+severe one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?”
+
+“I’ll try,” she said faintly, at the same time making a note of the
+directness, abruptness, and haste of these city men with whom she was
+coming in contact.
+
+“Good! Why, when I started in, I had the dreariest, deadliest details
+imaginable. And after that, for a weary time, I did the police and
+divorce courts. But it all came well in the end and did me good. You
+are luckier in making your start with Sunday work. It’s not particularly
+great. What of it? Do it. Show the stuff you’re made of, and you’ll get
+a call for better work—better class and better pay. Now you go out this
+afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns.”
+
+“But what kind of turns can I do?” Edna asked dubiously.
+
+“Do? That’s easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don’t need to sing. Screech,
+do anything—that’s what you’re paid for, to afford amusement, to give
+bad art for the populace to howl down. And when you do your turn, take
+some one along for chaperon. Be afraid of no one. Talk up. Move about
+among the amateurs waiting their turn, pump them, study them, photograph
+them in your brain. Get the atmosphere, the color, strong color, lots of
+it. Dig right in with both hands, and get the essence of it, the spirit,
+the significance. What does it mean? Find out what it means. That’s what
+you’re there for. That’s what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer
+want to know.
+
+“Be terse in style, vigorous of phrase, apt, concretely apt, in
+similitude. Avoid platitudes and commonplaces. Exercise selection. Seize
+upon things salient, eliminate the rest, and you have pictures. Paint
+those pictures in words and the Intelligencer will have you. Get hold
+of a few back numbers, and study the Sunday Intelligencer feature story.
+Tell it all in the opening paragraph as advertisement of contents, and
+in the contents tell it all over again. Then put a snapper at the end,
+so if they’re crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere,
+reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There,
+that’s enough. Study the rest out for yourself.”
+
+They both rose to their feet, Edna quite carried away by his enthusiasm
+and his quick, jerky sentences, bristling with the things she wanted to
+know.
+
+“And remember, Miss Wyman, if you’re ambitious, that the aim and end of
+journalism is not the feature article. Avoid the rut. The feature is a
+trick. Master it, but don’t let it master you. But master it you must;
+for if you can’t learn to do a feature well, you can never expect to do
+anything better. In short, put your whole self into it, and yet, outside
+of it, above it, remain yourself, if you follow me. And now good luck to
+you.”
+
+They had reached the door and were shaking hands.
+
+“And one thing more,” he interrupted her thanks, “let me see your
+copy before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and
+there.”
+
+Edna found the manager of the Loops a full-fleshed, heavy-jowled
+man, bushy of eyebrow and generally belligerent of aspect, with an
+absent-minded scowl on his face and a black cigar stuck in the midst
+thereof. Symes was his name, she had learned, Ernst Symes.
+
+“Whatcher turn?” he demanded, ere half her brief application had left
+her lips.
+
+“Sentimental soloist, soprano,” she answered promptly, remembering
+Irwin’s advice to talk up.
+
+“Whatcher name?” Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her.
+
+She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that
+she had not considered the question of a name at all.
+
+“Any name? Stage name?” he bellowed impatiently.
+
+“Nan Bellayne,” she invented on the spur of the moment.
+“B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e. Yes, that’s it.”
+
+He scribbled it into a notebook. “All right. Take your turn Wednesday
+and Saturday.”
+
+“How much do I get?” Edna demanded.
+
+“Two-an’-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after
+second turn.”
+
+And without the simple courtesy of “Good day,” he turned his back on her
+and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered.
+
+Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope
+basket her costume—a simple affair. A plaid shawl borrowed from the
+washerwoman, a ragged scrubbing skirt borrowed from the charwoman, and a
+gray wig rented from a costumer for twenty-five cents a night, completed
+the outfit; for Edna had elected to be an old Irishwoman singing
+broken-heartedly after her wandering boy.
+
+Though they had come early, she found everything in uproar. The main
+performance was under way, the orchestra was playing and the audience
+intermittently applauding. The infusion of the amateurs clogged the
+working of things behind the stage, crowded the passages, dressing
+rooms, and wings, and forced everybody into everybody else’s way.
+This was particularly distasteful to the professionals, who carried
+themselves as befitted those of a higher caste, and whose behavior
+toward the pariah amateurs was marked by hauteur and even brutality. And
+Edna, bullied and elbowed and shoved about, clinging desperately to her
+basket and seeking a dressing room, took note of it all.
+
+A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur
+“ladies,” who were “making up” with much noise, high-pitched voices, and
+squabbling over a lone mirror. Her own make-up was so simple that it was
+quickly accomplished, and she left the trio of ladies holding an armed
+truce while they passed judgment upon her. Letty was close at her
+shoulder, and with patience and persistence they managed to get a nook
+in one of the wings which commanded a view of the stage.
+
+A small, dark man, dapper and debonair, swallow-tailed and top-hatted,
+was waltzing about the stage with dainty, mincing steps, and in a thin
+little voice singing something or other about somebody or something
+evidently pathetic. As his waning voice neared the end of the lines, a
+large woman, crowned with an amazing wealth of blond hair, thrust rudely
+past Edna, trod heavily on her toes, and shoved her contemptuously to
+the side. “Bloomin’ hamateur!” she hissed as she went past, and the next
+instant she was on the stage, graciously bowing to the audience, while
+the small, dark man twirled extravagantly about on his tiptoes.
+
+“Hello, girls!”
+
+This greeting, drawled with an inimitable vocal caress in every
+syllable, close in her ear, caused Edna to give a startled little jump.
+A smooth-faced, moon-faced young man was smiling at her good-naturedly.
+His “make-up” was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though
+the inevitable whiskers were lacking.
+
+“Oh, it don’t take a minute to slap’m on,” he explained, divining the
+search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question.
+“They make a feller sweat,” he explained further. And then, “What’s yer
+turn?”
+
+“Soprano—sentimental,” she answered, trying to be offhand and at ease.
+
+“Whata you doin’ it for?” he demanded directly.
+
+“For fun; what else?” she countered.
+
+“I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain’t
+graftin’ for a paper, are you?”
+
+“I never met but one editor in my life,” she replied evasively, “and I,
+he—well, we didn’t get on very well together.”
+
+“Hittin’ ‘m for a job?”
+
+Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her
+brains for something to turn the conversation.
+
+“What’d he say?”
+
+“That eighteen other girls had already been there that week.”
+
+“Gave you the icy mit, eh?” The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped
+his thighs. “You see, we’re kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers ‘d
+like to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and
+the manager don’t see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it.”
+
+“And what’s your turn?” she asked.
+
+“Who? me? Oh, I’m doin’ the tramp act to-night. I’m Charley Welsh, you
+know.”
+
+She felt that by the mention of his name he intended to convey to her
+complete enlightenment, but the best she could do was to say politely,
+“Oh, is that so?”
+
+She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face,
+but concealed her amusement.
+
+“Come, now,” he said brusquely, “you can’t stand there and tell me
+you’ve never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I’m
+an Only, the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I’m
+everywhere. I could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by
+doin’ the amateur.”
+
+“But what’s an ‘Only’?” she queried. “I want to learn.”
+
+“Sure,” Charley Welsh said gallantly. “I’ll put you wise. An ‘Only’ is
+a nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better’n any other
+feller. He’s the Only, see?”
+
+And Edna saw.
+
+“To get a line on the biz,” he continued, “throw yer lamps on me. I’m
+the Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act.
+It’s harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it’s acting, it’s
+amateur, it’s art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team
+song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I’m Charley Welsh, the Only
+Charley Welsh.”
+
+And in this fashion, while the thin, dark man and the large, blond woman
+warbled dulcetly out on the stage and the other professionals followed
+in their turns, did Charley Welsh put Edna wise, giving her much
+miscellaneous and superfluous information and much that she stored away
+for the Sunday Intelligencer.
+
+“Well, tra la loo,” he said suddenly. “There’s his highness chasin’
+you up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just
+finish yer turn like a lady.”
+
+It was at that moment that Edna felt her journalistic ambition departing
+from her, and was aware of an overmastering desire to be somewhere else.
+But the stage manager, like an ogre, barred her retreat. She could hear
+the opening bars of her song going up from the orchestra and the noises
+of the house dying away to the silence of anticipation.
+
+“Go ahead,” Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side
+came the peremptory “Don’t flunk!” of Charley Welsh.
+
+But her feet seemed rooted to the floor, and she leaned weakly against
+a shift scene. The orchestra was beginning over again, and a lone voice
+from the house piped with startling distinctness:
+
+“Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!”
+
+A roar of laughter greeted the sally, and Edna shrank back. But the
+strong hand of the manager descended on her shoulder, and with a quick,
+powerful shove propelled her out on to the stage. His hand and arm
+had flashed into full view, and the audience, grasping the situation,
+thundered its appreciation. The orchestra was drowned out by the
+terrible din, and Edna could see the bows scraping away across the
+violins, apparently without sound. It was impossible for her to begin
+in time, and as she patiently waited, arms akimbo and ears straining for
+the music, the house let loose again (a favorite trick, she afterward
+learned, of confusing the amateur by preventing him or her from hearing
+the orchestra).
+
+But Edna was recovering her presence of mind. She became aware, pit to
+dome, of a vast sea of smiling and fun-distorted faces, of vast roars of
+laughter, rising wave on wave, and then her Scotch blood went cold and
+angry. The hard-working but silent orchestra gave her the cue, and,
+without making a sound, she began to move her lips, stretch forth her
+arms, and sway her body, as though she were really singing. The noise in
+the house redoubled in the attempt to drown her voice, but she serenely
+went on with her pantomime. This seemed to continue an interminable
+time, when the audience, tiring of its prank and in order to hear,
+suddenly stilled its clamor, and discovered the dumb show she had been
+making. For a moment all was silent, save for the orchestra, her lips
+moving on without a sound, and then the audience realized that it had
+been sold, and broke out afresh, this time with genuine applause in
+acknowledgment of her victory. She chose this as the happy moment for
+her exit, and with a bow and a backward retreat, she was off the stage
+in Letty’s arms.
+
+The worst was past, and for the rest of the evening she moved about
+among the amateurs and professionals, talking, listening, observing,
+finding out what it meant and taking mental notes of it all. Charley
+Welsh constituted himself her preceptor and guardian angel, and so well
+did he perform the self-allotted task that when it was all over she felt
+fully prepared to write her article. But the proposition had been to do
+two turns, and her native pluck forced her to live up to it. Also, in
+the course of the intervening days, she discovered fleeting impressions
+that required verification; so, on Saturday, she was back again, with
+her telescope basket and Letty.
+
+The manager seemed looking for her, and she caught an expression of
+relief in his eyes when he first saw her. He hurried up, greeted her,
+and bowed with a respect ludicrously at variance with his previous
+ogre-like behavior. And as he bowed, across his shoulders she saw
+Charley Welsh deliberately wink.
+
+But the surprise had just begun. The manager begged to be introduced
+to her sister, chatted entertainingly with the pair of them, and strove
+greatly and anxiously to be agreeable. He even went so far as to give
+Edna a dressing room to herself, to the unspeakable envy of the three
+other amateur ladies of previous acquaintance. Edna was nonplussed,
+and it was not till she met Charley Welsh in the passage that light was
+thrown on the mystery.
+
+“Hello!” he greeted her. “On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin’ your
+way.”
+
+She smiled brightly.
+
+“Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw’m layin’
+himself out sweet an’ pleasin’. Honest, now, that ain’t yer graft, is
+it?”
+
+“I told you my experience with editors,” she parried. “And honest now,
+it was honest, too.”
+
+But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. “Not that I care
+a rap,” he declared. “And if you are, just gimme a couple of lines of
+notice, the right kind, good ad, you know. And if yer not, why yer all
+right anyway. Yer not our class, that’s straight.”
+
+After her turn, which she did this time with the nerve of an old
+campaigner, the manager returned to the charge; and after saying nice
+things and being generally nice himself, he came to the point.
+
+“You’ll treat us well, I hope,” he said insinuatingly. “Do the right
+thing by us, and all that?”
+
+“Oh,” she answered innocently, “you couldn’t persuade me to do another
+turn; I know I seemed to take and that you’d like to have me, but I
+really, really can’t.”
+
+“You know what I mean,” he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing
+manner.
+
+“No, I really won’t,” she persisted. “Vaudeville’s too—too wearing on
+the nerves, my nerves, at any rate.”
+
+Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point
+further.
+
+But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for
+the two turns, it was he who puzzled her.
+
+“You surely must have mistaken me,” he lied glibly. “I remember saying
+something about paying your car fare. We always do this, you know, but
+we never, never pay amateurs. That would take the life and sparkle out
+of the whole thing. No, Charley Welsh was stringing you. He gets paid
+nothing for his turns. No amateur gets paid. The idea is ridiculous.
+However, here’s fifty cents. It will pay your sister’s car fare also.
+And,”—very suavely,—“speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you
+for the kind and successful contribution of your services.”
+
+That afternoon, true to her promise to Max Irwin, she placed her
+typewritten copy into his hands. And while he ran over it, he nodded his
+head from time to time, and maintained a running fire of commendatory
+remarks: “Good!—that’s it!—that’s the stuff!—psychology’s all
+right!—the very idea!—you’ve caught it!—excellent!—missed it a
+bit here, but it’ll go—that’s vigorous!—strong!—vivid!—pictures!
+pictures!—excellent!—most excellent!”
+
+And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out
+his hand: “My dear Miss Wyman, I congratulate you. I must say you have
+exceeded my expectations, which, to say the least, were large. You are
+a journalist, a natural journalist. You’ve got the grip, and you’re sure
+to get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you
+too. They’ll have to take you. If they don’t, some of the other papers
+will get you.”
+
+“But what’s this?” he queried, the next instant, his face going serious.
+“You’ve said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that’s
+one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you’ll
+remember.”
+
+“It will never do,” he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had
+explained. “You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let
+me think a moment.”
+
+“Never mind, Mr. Irwin,” she said. “I’ve bothered you enough. Let me use
+your ‘phone, please, and I’ll try Mr. Ernst Symes again.”
+
+He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver.
+
+“Charley Welsh is sick,” she began, when the connection had been made.
+“What? No I’m not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister
+wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for
+him?”
+
+“Tell Charley Welsh’s sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning,
+and drew his own pay,” came back the manager’s familiar tones, crisp
+with asperity.
+
+“All right,” Edna went on. “And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she
+and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne’s pay?”
+
+“What’d he say? What’d he say?” Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung
+up.
+
+“That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister
+could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot.”
+
+“One thing, more,” he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her
+previous visit. “Now that you’ve shown the stuff you’re made of, I
+should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the
+Intelligencer people.”
+
+
+
+
+THE MINIONS OF MIDAS
+
+
+Wade Atsheler is dead—dead by his own hand. To say that this was
+entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say
+an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed
+the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible
+subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility
+is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it
+seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the
+time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the
+fact of his great trouble. I use “great trouble” advisedly. Young,
+handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale,
+the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to
+complain of fortune’s favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow
+and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had
+watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under
+brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the
+hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater
+avidity—who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods
+into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from
+height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn
+lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot
+with spasms of mental pain he wrestled on the edge of the abyss with
+some unknown danger.
+
+He never spoke of his trouble, nor were we indiscreet enough to ask.
+But it was just as well; for had we, and had he spoken, our help
+and strength could have availed nothing. When Eben Hale died, whose
+confidential secretary he was—nay, well-nigh adopted son and full
+business partner—he no longer came among us. Not, as I now know, that
+our company was distasteful to him, but because his trouble had so grown
+that he could not respond to our happiness nor find surcease with us.
+Why this should be so we could not at the time understand, for when Eben
+Hale’s will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to
+his employer’s many millions, and it was expressly stipulated that this
+great inheritance was given to him without qualification, hitch, or
+hindrance in the exercise thereof. Not a share of stock, not a penny
+of cash, was bequeathed to the dead man’s relatives. As for his direct
+family, one astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to
+dispense to Eben Hale’s wife and sons and daughters whatever moneys his
+judgement dictated, at whatever times he deemed advisable. Had there
+been any scandal in the dead man’s family, or had his sons been wild
+or undutiful, then there might have been a glimmering of reason in
+this most unusual action; but Eben Hale’s domestic happiness had been
+proverbial in the community, and one would have to travel far and wide
+to discover a cleaner, saner, wholesomer progeny of sons and daughters.
+While his wife—well, by those who knew her best she was endearingly
+termed “The Mother of the Gracchi.” Needless to state, this inexplicable
+will was a nine day’s wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed
+in that no contest was made.
+
+It was only the other day that Eben Hale was laid away in his stately
+marble mausoleum. And now Wade Atsheler is dead. The news was printed
+in this morning’s paper. I have just received through the mail a letter
+from him, posted, evidently, but a short hour before he hurled himself
+into eternity. This letter, which lies before me, is a narrative in
+his own handwriting, linking together numerous newspaper clippings and
+facsimiles of letters. The original correspondence, he has told me,
+is in the hands of the police. He has begged me, also, as a warning to
+society against a most frightful and diabolical danger which threatens
+its very existence, to make public the terrible series of tragedies in
+which he has been innocently concerned. I herewith append the text in
+full:
+
+It was in August, 1899, just after my return from my summer vacation,
+that the blow fell. We did not know it at the time; we had not yet
+learned to school our minds to such awful possibilities. Mr. Hale opened
+the letter, read it, and tossed it upon my desk with a laugh. When I had
+looked it over, I also laughed, saying, “Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale,
+and one in very poor taste.” Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate
+of the letter in question.
+
+OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899.
+
+MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+
+Dear Sir,—We desire you to realize upon whatever portion of your vast
+holdings is necessary to obtain, IN CASH, twenty millions of dollars.
+This sum we require you to pay over to us, or to our agents. You will
+note we do not specify any given time, for it is not our wish to hurry
+you in this matter. You may even, if it be easier for you, pay us
+in ten, fifteen, or twenty instalments; but we will accept no single
+instalment of less than a million.
+
+Believe us, dear Mr. Hale, when we say that we embark upon this course
+of action utterly devoid of animus. We are members of that intellectual
+proletariat, the increasing numbers of which mark in red lettering the
+last days of the nineteenth century. We have, from a thorough study
+of economics, decided to enter upon this business. It has many merits,
+chief among which may be noted that we can indulge in large and
+lucrative operations without capital. So far, we have been fairly
+successful, and we hope our dealings with you may be pleasant and
+satisfactory.
+
+Pray attend while we explain our views more fully. At the base of the
+present system of society is to be found the property right. And this
+right of the individual to hold property is demonstrated, in the last
+analysis, to rest solely and wholly upon MIGHT. The mailed gentlemen of
+William the Conqueror divided and apportioned England amongst themselves
+with the naked sword. This, we are sure you will grant, is true of
+all feudal possessions. With the invention of steam and the Industrial
+Revolution there came into existence the Capitalist Class, in the modern
+sense of the word. These capitalists quickly towered above the ancient
+nobility. The captains of industry have virtually dispossessed the
+descendants of the captains of war. Mind, and not muscle, wins in
+to-day’s struggle for existence. But this state of affairs is none the
+less based upon might. The change has been qualitative. The old-time
+Feudal Baronage ravaged the world with fire and sword; the modern
+Money Baronage exploits the world by mastering and applying the world’s
+economic forces. Brain, and not brawn, endures; and those best fitted to
+survive are the intellectually and commercially powerful.
+
+We, the M. of M., are not content to become wage slaves. The great
+trusts and business combinations (with which you have your rating)
+prevent us from rising to the place among you which our intellects
+qualify us to occupy. Why? Because we are without capital. We are of the
+unwashed, but with this difference: our brains are of the best, and we
+have no foolish ethical nor social scruples. As wage slaves, toiling
+early and late, and living abstemiously, we could not save in threescore
+years—nor in twenty times threescore years—a sum of money sufficient
+successfully to cope with the great aggregations of massed capital which
+now exist. Nevertheless, we have entered the arena. We now throw down
+the gage to the capital of the world. Whether it wishes to fight or not,
+it shall have to fight.
+
+Mr. Hale, our interests dictate us to demand of you twenty millions of
+dollars. While we are considerate enough to give you reasonable time in
+which to carry out your share of the transaction, please do not delay
+too long. When you have agreed to our terms, insert a suitable notice
+in the agony column of the “Morning Blazer.” We shall then acquaint you
+with our plan for transferring the sum mentioned. You had better do this
+some time prior to October 1st. If you do not, in order to show that
+we are in earnest we shall on that date kill a man on East Thirty-ninth
+Street. He will be a workingman. This man you do not know; nor do we.
+You represent a force in modern society; we also represent a force—a
+new force. Without anger or malice, we have closed in battle. As you
+will readily discern, we are simply a business proposition. You are the
+upper, and we the nether, millstone; this man’s life shall be ground
+out between. You may save him if you agree to our conditions and act in
+time.
+
+There was once a king cursed with a golden touch. His name we have taken
+to do duty as our official seal. Some day, to protect ourselves against
+competitors, we shall copyright it.
+
+We beg to remain,
+
+THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+
+I leave it to you, dear John, why should we not have laughed over such
+a preposterous communication? The idea, we could not but grant, was well
+conceived, but it was too grotesque to be taken seriously. Mr. Hale said
+he would preserve it as a literary curiosity, and shoved it away in a
+pigeonhole. Then we promptly forgot its existence. And as promptly, on
+the 1st of October, going over the morning mail, we read the following:
+
+OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., October 1, 1899.
+
+MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+
+Dear Sir,—Your victim has met his fate. An hour ago, on East
+Thirty-ninth Street, a workingman was thrust through the heart with a
+knife. Ere you read this his body will be lying at the Morgue. Go and
+look upon your handiwork.
+
+On October 14th, in token of our earnestness in this matter, and in case
+you do not relent, we shall kill a policeman on or near the corner of
+Polk Street and Clermont Avenue.
+
+Very cordially,
+
+THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+
+Again Mr. Hale laughed. His mind was full of a prospective deal with a
+Chicago syndicate for the sale of all his street railways in that city,
+and so he went on dictating to the stenographer, never giving it a
+second thought. But somehow, I know not why, a heavy depression
+fell upon me. What if it were not a joke, I asked myself, and turned
+involuntarily to the morning paper. There it was, as befitted an obscure
+person of the lower classes, a paltry half-dozen lines tucked away in a
+corner, next a patent medicine advertisement:
+
+Shortly after five o’clock this morning, on East Thirty-ninth Street,
+a laborer named Pete Lascalle, while on his way to work, was stabbed to
+the heart by an unknown assailant, who escaped by running. The police
+have been unable to discover any motive for the murder.
+
+“Impossible!” was Mr. Hale’s rejoinder, when I had read the item aloud;
+but the incident evidently weighed upon his mind, for late in the
+afternoon, with many epithets denunciatory of his foolishness, he asked
+me to acquaint the police with the affair. I had the pleasure of being
+laughed at in the Inspector’s private office, although I went away with
+the assurance that they would look into it and that the vicinity of Polk
+and Clermont would be doubly patrolled on the night mentioned. There it
+dropped, till the two weeks had sped by, when the following note came to
+us through the mail:
+
+OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 15, 1899.
+
+MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+
+Dear Sir,—Your second victim has fallen on schedule time. We are in no
+hurry; but to increase the pressure we shall henceforth kill weekly. To
+protect ourselves against police interference we shall hereafter inform
+you of the event but a little prior to or simultaneously with the deed.
+Trusting this finds you in good health,
+
+We are,
+
+THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+
+This time Mr. Hale took up the paper, and after a brief search, read to
+me this account:
+
+A DASTARDLY CRIME
+
+Joseph Donahue, assigned only last night to special patrol duty in the
+Eleventh Ward, at midnight was shot through the brain and instantly
+killed. The tragedy was enacted in the full glare of the street lights
+on the corner of Polk Street and Clermont Avenue. Our society is indeed
+unstable when the custodians of its peace are thus openly and wantonly
+shot down. The police have so far been unable to obtain the slightest
+clue.
+
+Barely had he finished this when the police arrived—the Inspector
+himself and two of his keenest sleuths. Alarm sat upon their faces, and
+it was plain that they were seriously perturbed. Though the facts were
+so few and simple, we talked long, going over the affair again and
+again. When the Inspector went away, he confidently assured us that
+everything would soon be straightened out and the assassins run to
+earth. In the meantime he thought it well to detail guards for the
+protection of Mr. Hale and myself, and several more to be constantly on
+the vigil about the house and grounds. After the lapse of a week, at one
+o’clock in the afternoon, this telegram was received:
+
+OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 21, 1899.
+
+MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+
+Dear Sir,—We are sorry to note how completely you have misunderstood
+us. You have seen fit to surround yourself and household with armed
+guards, as though, forsooth, we were common criminals, apt to break in
+upon you and wrest away by force your twenty millions. Believe us, this
+is farthest from our intention.
+
+You will readily comprehend, after a little sober thought, that your
+life is dear to us. Do not be afraid. We would not hurt you for the
+world. It is our policy to cherish you tenderly and protect you from all
+harm. Your death means nothing to us. If it did, rest assured that we
+would not hesitate a moment in destroying you. Think this over,
+Mr. Hale. When you have paid us our price, there will be need of
+retrenchment. Dismiss your guards now, and cut down your expenses.
+
+Within minutes of the time you receive this a nurse-girl will have
+been choked to death in Brentwood Park. The body may be found in
+the shrubbery lining the path which leads off to the left from the
+band-stand.
+
+Cordially yours,
+
+THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+
+The next instant Mr. Hale was at the telephone, warning the Inspector of
+the impending murder. The Inspector excused himself in order to call
+up Police Sub-station F and despatch men to the scene. Fifteen minutes
+later he rang us up and informed us that the body had been discovered,
+yet warm, in the place indicated. That evening the papers teemed with
+glaring Jack-the-Strangler headlines, denouncing the brutality of
+the deed and complaining about the laxity of the police. We were also
+closeted with the Inspector, who begged us by all means to keep the
+affair secret. Success, he said, depended upon silence.
+
+As you know, John, Mr. Hale was a man of iron. He refused to surrender.
+But, oh, John, it was terrible, nay, horrible—this awful something,
+this blind force in the dark. We could not fight, could not plan, could
+do nothing save hold our hands and wait. And week by week, as certain as
+the rising of the sun, came the notification and death of some person,
+man or woman, innocent of evil, but just as much killed by us as
+though we had done it with our own hands. A word from Mr. Hale and the
+slaughter would have ceased. But he hardened his heart and waited, the
+lines deepening, the mouth and eyes growing sterner and firmer, and
+the face aging with the hours. It is needless for me to speak of my
+own suffering during that frightful period. Find here the letters and
+telegrams of the M. of M., and the newspaper accounts, etc., of the
+various murders.
+
+You will notice also the letters warning Mr. Hale of certain
+machinations of commercial enemies and secret manipulations of stock.
+The M. of M. seemed to have its hand on the inner pulse of the business
+and financial world. They possessed themselves of and forwarded to us
+information which our agents could not obtain. One timely note from
+them, at a critical moment in a certain deal, saved all of five millions
+to Mr. Hale. At another time they sent us a telegram which probably was
+the means of preventing an anarchist crank from taking my employer’s
+life. We captured the man on his arrival and turned him over to the
+police, who found upon him enough of a new and powerful explosive to
+sink a battleship.
+
+We persisted. Mr. Hale was grit clear through. He disbursed at the rate
+of one hundred thousand per week for secret service. The aid of the
+Pinkertons and of countless private detective agencies was called in,
+and in addition to this thousands were upon our payroll. Our agents
+swarmed everywhere, in all guises, penetrating all classes of society.
+They grasped at a myriad clues; hundreds of suspects were jailed, and at
+various times thousands of suspicious persons were under surveillance,
+but nothing tangible came to light. With its communications the M. of
+M. continually changed its method of delivery. And every messenger
+they sent us was arrested forthwith. But these inevitably proved to be
+innocent individuals, while their descriptions of the persons who had
+employed them for the errand never tallied. On the last day of December
+we received this notification:
+
+OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., December 31, 1899.
+
+MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+
+Dear Sir,—Pursuant of our policy, with which we flatter ourselves you
+are already well versed, we beg to state that we shall give a passport
+from this Vale of Tears to Inspector Bying, with whom, because of our
+attentions, you have become so well acquainted. It is his custom to be
+in his private office at this hour. Even as you read this he breathes
+his last.
+
+Cordially yours,
+
+THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+
+I dropped the letter and sprang to the telephone. Great was my relief
+when I heard the Inspector’s hearty voice. But, even as he spoke, his
+voice died away in the receiver to a gurgling sob, and I heard faintly
+the crash of a falling body. Then a strange voice hello’d me, sent me
+the regards of the M. of M., and broke the switch. Like a flash I called
+up the public office of the Central Police, telling them to go at once
+to the Inspector’s aid in his private office. I then held the line, and
+a few minutes later received the intelligence that he had been
+found bathed in his own blood and breathing his last. There were no
+eyewitnesses, and no trace was discoverable of the murderer.
+
+Whereupon Mr. Hale immediately increased his secret service till a
+quarter of a million flowed weekly from his coffers. He was determined
+to win out. His graduated rewards aggregated over ten millions. You have
+a fair idea of his resources and you can see in what manner he drew upon
+them. It was the principle, he affirmed, that he was fighting for, not
+the gold. And it must be admitted that his course proved the nobility of
+his motive. The police departments of all the great cities cooperated,
+and even the United States Government stepped in, and the affair became
+one of the highest questions of state. Certain contingent funds of
+the nation were devoted to the unearthing of the M. of M., and every
+government agent was on the alert. But all in vain. The Minions of Midas
+carried on their damnable work unhampered. They had their way and struck
+unerringly.
+
+But while he fought to the last, Mr. Hale could not wash his hands of
+the blood with which they were dyed. Though not technically a murderer,
+though no jury of his peers would ever have convicted him, none the less
+the death of every individual was due to him. As I said before, a word
+from him and the slaughter would have ceased. But he refused to give
+that word. He insisted that the integrity of society was assailed; that
+he was not sufficiently a coward to desert his post; and that it was
+manifestly just that a few should be martyred for the ultimate welfare
+of the many. Nevertheless this blood was upon his head, and he sank into
+deeper and deeper gloom. I was likewise whelmed with the guilt of an
+accomplice. Babies were ruthlessly killed, children, aged men; and
+not only were these murders local, but they were distributed over
+the country. In the middle of February, one evening, as we sat in the
+library, there came a sharp knock at the door. On responding to it I
+found, lying on the carpet of the corridor, the following missive:
+
+OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., February 15, 1900.
+
+MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+
+Dear Sir,—Does not your soul cry out upon the red harvest it is
+reaping? Perhaps we have been too abstract in conducting our business.
+Let us now be concrete. Miss Adelaide Laidlaw is a talented young woman,
+as good, we understand, as she is beautiful. She is the daughter of your
+old friend, Judge Laidlaw, and we happen to know that you carried her in
+your arms when she was an infant. She is your daughter’s closest friend,
+and at present is visiting her. When your eyes have read thus far her
+visit will have terminated.
+
+Very cordially,
+
+THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+
+My God! did we not instantly realize the terrible import! We rushed
+through the dayrooms—she was not there—and on to her own apartments.
+The door was locked, but we crashed it down by hurling ourselves against
+it. There she lay, just as she had finished dressing for the opera,
+smothered with pillows torn from the couch, the flush of life yet on her
+flesh, the body still flexible and warm. Let me pass over the rest of
+this horror. You will surely remember, John, the newspaper accounts.
+
+Late that night Mr. Hale summoned me to him, and before God did pledge
+me most solemnly to stand by him and not to compromise, even if all kith
+and kin were destroyed.
+
+The next day I was surprised at his cheerfulness. I had thought he would
+be deeply shocked by this last tragedy—how deep I was soon to learn.
+All day he was light-hearted and high-spirited, as though at last he had
+found a way out of the frightful difficulty. The next morning we
+found him dead in his bed, a peaceful smile upon his careworn
+face—asphyxiation. Through the connivance of the police and the
+authorities, it was given out to the world as heart disease. We deemed
+it wise to withhold the truth; but little good has it done us, little
+good has anything done us.
+
+Barely had I left that chamber of death, when—but too late—the
+following extraordinary letter was received:
+
+OFFICE OF THE M. of M., February 17, 1900.
+
+MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+
+Dear Sir,—You will pardon our intrusion, we hope, so closely upon the
+sad event of day before yesterday; but what we wish to say may be of
+the utmost importance to you. It is in our mind that you may attempt
+to escape us. There is but one way, apparently, as you have ere this
+doubtless discovered. But we wish to inform you that even this one
+way is barred. You may die, but you die failing and acknowledging your
+failure. Note this: WE ARE PART AND PARCEL OF YOUR POSSESSIONS. WITH
+YOUR MILLIONS WE PASS DOWN TO YOUR HEIRS AND ASSIGNS FOREVER.
+
+We are the inevitable. We are the culmination of industrial and
+social wrong. We turn upon the society that has created us. We are the
+successful failures of the age, the scourges of a degraded civilization.
+
+We are the creatures of a perverse social selection. We meet force with
+force. Only the strong shall endure. We believe in the survival of the
+fittest. You have crushed your wage slaves into the dirt and you have
+survived. The captains of war, at your command, have shot down like
+dogs your employees in a score of bloody strikes. By such means you have
+endured. We do not grumble at the result, for we acknowledge and have
+our being in the same natural law. And now the question has arisen:
+UNDER THE PRESENT SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT, WHICH OF US SHALL SURVIVE? We
+believe we are the fittest. You believe you are the fittest. We leave
+the eventuality to time and law.
+
+Cordially yours,
+
+THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+
+John, do you wonder now that I shunned pleasure and avoided friends?
+But why explain? Surely this narrative will make everything clear. Three
+weeks ago Adelaide Laidlaw died. Since then I have waited in hope and
+fear. Yesterday the will was probated and made public. To-day I was
+notified that a woman of the middle class would be killed in Golden Gate
+Park, in faraway San Francisco. The despatches in to-night’s papers give
+the details of the brutal happening—details which correspond with those
+furnished me in advance.
+
+It is useless. I cannot struggle against the inevitable. I have been
+faithful to Mr. Hale and have worked hard. Why my faithfulness should
+have been thus rewarded I cannot understand. Yet I cannot be false to my
+trust, nor break my word by compromising. Still, I have resolved that
+no more deaths shall be upon my head. I have willed the many millions I
+lately received to their rightful owners. Let the stalwart sons of Eben
+Hale work out their own salvation. Ere you read this I shall have passed
+on. The Minions of Midas are all-powerful. The police are impotent.
+I have learned from them that other millionnaires have been likewise
+mulcted or persecuted—how many is not known, for when one yields to the
+M. of M., his mouth is thenceforth sealed. Those who have not yielded
+are even now reaping their scarlet harvest. The grim game is being
+played out. The Federal Government can do nothing. I also understand
+that similar branch organizations have made their appearance in Europe.
+Society is shaken to its foundations. Principalities and powers are as
+brands ripe for the burning. Instead of the masses against the classes,
+it is a class against the classes. We, the guardians of human progress,
+are being singled out and struck down. Law and order have failed.
+
+The officials have begged me to keep this secret. I have done so, but
+can do so no longer. It has become a question of public import, fraught
+with the direst consequences, and I shall do my duty before I leave this
+world by informing it of its peril. Do you, John, as my last request,
+make this public. Do not be frightened. The fate of humanity rests in
+your hand. Let the press strike off millions of copies; let the electric
+currents sweep it round the world; wherever men meet and speak, let them
+speak of it in fear and trembling. And then, when thoroughly aroused,
+let society arise in its might and cast out this abomination.
+
+Yours, in long farewell,
+
+WADE ATSHELER.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH
+
+
+When I look back, I realize what a peculiar friendship it was. First,
+there was Lloyd Inwood, tall, slender, and finely knit, nervous and
+dark. And then Paul Tichlorne, tall, slender, and finely knit, nervous
+and blond. Each was the replica of the other in everything except color.
+Lloyd’s eyes were black; Paul’s were blue. Under stress of excitement,
+the blood coursed olive in the face of Lloyd, crimson in the face of
+Paul. But outside this matter of coloring they were as like as two peas.
+Both were high-strung, prone to excessive tension and endurance, and
+they lived at concert pitch.
+
+But there was a trio involved in this remarkable friendship, and the
+third was short, and fat, and chunky, and lazy, and, loath to say, it
+was I. Paul and Lloyd seemed born to rivalry with each other, and I to
+be peacemaker between them. We grew up together, the three of us, and
+full often have I received the angry blows each intended for the other.
+They were always competing, striving to outdo each other, and when
+entered upon some such struggle there was no limit either to their
+endeavors or passions.
+
+This intense spirit of rivalry obtained in their studies and their
+games. If Paul memorized one canto of “Marmion,” Lloyd memorized two
+cantos, Paul came back with three, and Lloyd again with four, till each
+knew the whole poem by heart. I remember an incident that occurred
+at the swimming hole—an incident tragically significant of the
+life-struggle between them. The boys had a game of diving to the bottom
+of a ten-foot pool and holding on by submerged roots to see who could
+stay under the longest. Paul and Lloyd allowed themselves to be bantered
+into making the descent together. When I saw their faces, set and
+determined, disappear in the water as they sank swiftly down, I felt
+a foreboding of something dreadful. The moments sped, the ripples died
+away, the face of the pool grew placid and untroubled, and neither black
+nor golden head broke surface in quest of air. We above grew anxious.
+The longest record of the longest-winded boy had been exceeded, and
+still there was no sign. Air bubbles trickled slowly upward, showing
+that the breath had been expelled from their lungs, and after that the
+bubbles ceased to trickle upward. Each second became interminable, and,
+unable longer to endure the suspense, I plunged into the water.
+
+I found them down at the bottom, clutching tight to the roots, their
+heads not a foot apart, their eyes wide open, each glaring fixedly at
+the other. They were suffering frightful torment, writhing and twisting
+in the pangs of voluntary suffocation; for neither would let go and
+acknowledge himself beaten. I tried to break Paul’s hold on the root,
+but he resisted me fiercely. Then I lost my breath and came to the
+surface, badly scared. I quickly explained the situation, and half a
+dozen of us went down and by main strength tore them loose. By the
+time we got them out, both were unconscious, and it was only after much
+barrel-rolling and rubbing and pounding that they finally came to their
+senses. They would have drowned there, had no one rescued them.
+
+When Paul Tichlorne entered college, he let it be generally understood
+that he was going in for the social sciences. Lloyd Inwood, entering
+at the same time, elected to take the same course. But Paul had had
+it secretly in mind all the time to study the natural sciences,
+specializing on chemistry, and at the last moment he switched over.
+Though Lloyd had already arranged his year’s work and attended the first
+lectures, he at once followed Paul’s lead and went in for the natural
+sciences and especially for chemistry. Their rivalry soon became a noted
+thing throughout the university. Each was a spur to the other, and they
+went into chemistry deeper than did ever students before—so deep, in
+fact, that ere they took their sheepskins they could have stumped any
+chemistry or “cow college” professor in the institution, save “old”
+ Moss, head of the department, and even him they puzzled and edified more
+than once. Lloyd’s discovery of the “death bacillus” of the sea toad,
+and his experiments on it with potassium cyanide, sent his name and that
+of his university ringing round the world; nor was Paul a whit
+behind when he succeeded in producing laboratory colloids exhibiting
+amoeba-like activities, and when he cast new light upon the processes
+of fertilization through his startling experiments with simple sodium
+chlorides and magnesium solutions on low forms of marine life.
+
+It was in their undergraduate days, however, in the midst of their
+profoundest plunges into the mysteries of organic chemistry, that Doris
+Van Benschoten entered into their lives. Lloyd met her first, but within
+twenty-four hours Paul saw to it that he also made her acquaintance.
+Of course, they fell in love with her, and she became the only thing in
+life worth living for. They wooed her with equal ardor and fire, and so
+intense became their struggle for her that half the student-body took
+to wagering wildly on the result. Even “old” Moss, one day, after an
+astounding demonstration in his private laboratory by Paul, was
+guilty to the extent of a month’s salary of backing him to become the
+bridegroom of Doris Van Benschoten.
+
+In the end she solved the problem in her own way, to everybody’s
+satisfaction except Paul’s and Lloyd’s. Getting them together, she said
+that she really could not choose between them because she loved them
+both equally well; and that, unfortunately, since polyandry was not
+permitted in the United States she would be compelled to forego the
+honor and happiness of marrying either of them. Each blamed the other
+for this lamentable outcome, and the bitterness between them grew more
+bitter.
+
+But things came to a head enough. It was at my home, after they had
+taken their degrees and dropped out of the world’s sight, that the
+beginning of the end came to pass. Both were men of means, with little
+inclination and no necessity for professional life. My friendship and
+their mutual animosity were the two things that linked them in any
+way together. While they were very often at my place, they made it
+a fastidious point to avoid each other on such visits, though it was
+inevitable, under the circumstances, that they should come upon each
+other occasionally.
+
+On the day I have in recollection, Paul Tichlorne had been mooning all
+morning in my study over a current scientific review. This left me
+free to my own affairs, and I was out among my roses when Lloyd Inwood
+arrived. Clipping and pruning and tacking the climbers on the porch,
+with my mouth full of nails, and Lloyd following me about and lending a
+hand now and again, we fell to discussing the mythical race of invisible
+people, that strange and vagrant people the traditions of which have
+come down to us. Lloyd warmed to the talk in his nervous, jerky fashion,
+and was soon interrogating the physical properties and possibilities of
+invisibility. A perfectly black object, he contended, would elude and
+defy the acutest vision.
+
+“Color is a sensation,” he was saying. “It has no objective reality.
+Without light, we can see neither colors nor objects themselves. All
+objects are black in the dark, and in the dark it is impossible to see
+them. If no light strikes upon them, then no light is flung back from
+them to the eye, and so we have no vision-evidence of their being.”
+
+“But we see black objects in daylight,” I objected.
+
+“Very true,” he went on warmly. “And that is because they are not
+perfectly black. Were they perfectly black, absolutely black, as it
+were, we could not see them—ay, not in the blaze of a thousand suns
+could we see them! And so I say, with the right pigments, properly
+compounded, an absolutely black paint could be produced which would
+render invisible whatever it was applied to.”
+
+“It would be a remarkable discovery,” I said non-committally, for the
+whole thing seemed too fantastic for aught but speculative purposes.
+
+“Remarkable!” Lloyd slapped me on the shoulder. “I should say so. Why,
+old chap, to coat myself with such a paint would be to put the world at
+my feet. The secrets of kings and courts would be mine, the machinations
+of diplomats and politicians, the play of stock-gamblers, the plans
+of trusts and corporations. I could keep my hand on the inner pulse of
+things and become the greatest power in the world. And I—” He broke
+off shortly, then added, “Well, I have begun my experiments, and I don’t
+mind telling you that I’m right in line for it.”
+
+A laugh from the doorway startled us. Paul Tichlorne was standing there,
+a smile of mockery on his lips.
+
+“You forget, my dear Lloyd,” he said.
+
+“Forget what?”
+
+“You forget,” Paul went on—“ah, you forget the shadow.”
+
+I saw Lloyd’s face drop, but he answered sneeringly, “I can carry a
+sunshade, you know.” Then he turned suddenly and fiercely upon him.
+“Look here, Paul, you’ll keep out of this if you know what’s good for
+you.”
+
+A rupture seemed imminent, but Paul laughed good-naturedly. “I wouldn’t
+lay fingers on your dirty pigments. Succeed beyond your most sanguine
+expectations, yet you will always fetch up against the shadow. You can’t
+get away from it. Now I shall go on the very opposite tack. In the very
+nature of my proposition the shadow will be eliminated—”
+
+“Transparency!” ejaculated Lloyd, instantly. “But it can’t be achieved.”
+
+“Oh, no; of course not.” And Paul shrugged his shoulders and strolled
+off down the briar-rose path.
+
+This was the beginning of it. Both men attacked the problem with all
+the tremendous energy for which they were noted, and with a rancor and
+bitterness that made me tremble for the success of either. Each trusted
+me to the utmost, and in the long weeks of experimentation that followed
+I was made a party to both sides, listening to their theorizings and
+witnessing their demonstrations. Never, by word or sign, did I convey to
+either the slightest hint of the other’s progress, and they respected me
+for the seal I put upon my lips.
+
+Lloyd Inwood, after prolonged and unintermittent application, when the
+tension upon his mind and body became too great to bear, had a strange
+way of obtaining relief. He attended prize fights. It was at one of
+these brutal exhibitions, whither he had dragged me in order to tell his
+latest results, that his theory received striking confirmation.
+
+“Do you see that red-whiskered man?” he asked, pointing across the ring
+to the fifth tier of seats on the opposite side. “And do you see the
+next man to him, the one in the white hat? Well, there is quite a gap
+between them, is there not?”
+
+“Certainly,” I answered. “They are a seat apart. The gap is the
+unoccupied seat.”
+
+He leaned over to me and spoke seriously. “Between the red-whiskered
+man and the white-hatted man sits Ben Wasson. You have heard me speak
+of him. He is the cleverest pugilist of his weight in the country. He
+is also a Caribbean negro, full-blooded, and the blackest in the United
+States. He has on a black overcoat buttoned up. I saw him when he came
+in and took that seat. As soon as he sat down he disappeared. Watch
+closely; he may smile.”
+
+I was for crossing over to verify Lloyd’s statement, but he restrained
+me. “Wait,” he said.
+
+I waited and watched, till the red-whiskered man turned his head as
+though addressing the unoccupied seat; and then, in that empty space, I
+saw the rolling whites of a pair of eyes and the white double-crescent
+of two rows of teeth, and for the instant I could make out a negro’s
+face. But with the passing of the smile his visibility passed, and the
+chair seemed vacant as before.
+
+“Were he perfectly black, you could sit alongside him and not see him,”
+ Lloyd said; and I confess the illustration was apt enough to make me
+well-nigh convinced.
+
+I visited Lloyd’s laboratory a number of times after that, and found
+him always deep in his search after the absolute black. His experiments
+covered all sorts of pigments, such as lamp-blacks, tars, carbonized
+vegetable matters, soots of oils and fats, and the various carbonized
+animal substances.
+
+“White light is composed of the seven primary colors,” he argued to me.
+“But it is itself, of itself, invisible. Only by being reflected from
+objects do it and the objects become visible. But only that portion
+of it that is reflected becomes visible. For instance, here is a
+blue tobacco-box. The white light strikes against it, and, with one
+exception, all its component colors—violet, indigo, green, yellow,
+orange, and red—are absorbed. The one exception is BLUE. It is not
+absorbed, but reflected. Wherefore the tobacco-box gives us a sensation
+of blueness. We do not see the other colors because they are absorbed.
+We see only the blue. For the same reason grass is GREEN. The green
+waves of white light are thrown upon our eyes.”
+
+“When we paint our houses, we do not apply color to them,” he said at
+another time. “What we do is to apply certain substances that have the
+property of absorbing from white light all the colors except those
+that we would have our houses appear. When a substance reflects all the
+colors to the eye, it seems to us white. When it absorbs all the colors,
+it is black. But, as I said before, we have as yet no perfect black. All
+the colors are not absorbed. The perfect black, guarding against high
+lights, will be utterly and absolutely invisible. Look at that, for
+example.”
+
+He pointed to the palette lying on his work-table. Different shades of
+black pigments were brushed on it. One, in particular, I could hardly
+see. It gave my eyes a blurring sensation, and I rubbed them and looked
+again.
+
+“That,” he said impressively, “is the blackest black you or any mortal
+man ever looked upon. But just you wait, and I’ll have a black so black
+that no mortal man will be able to look upon it—and see it!”
+
+On the other hand, I used to find Paul Tichlorne plunged as deeply into
+the study of light polarization, diffraction, and interference, single
+and double refraction, and all manner of strange organic compounds.
+
+“Transparency: a state or quality of body which permits all rays of
+light to pass through,” he defined for me. “That is what I am seeking.
+Lloyd blunders up against the shadow with his perfect opaqueness. But I
+escape it. A transparent body casts no shadow; neither does it reflect
+light-waves—that is, the perfectly transparent does not. So, avoiding
+high lights, not only will such a body cast no shadow, but, since it
+reflects no light, it will also be invisible.”
+
+We were standing by the window at another time. Paul was engaged
+in polishing a number of lenses, which were ranged along the sill.
+Suddenly, after a pause in the conversation, he said, “Oh! I’ve dropped
+a lens. Stick your head out, old man, and see where it went to.”
+
+Out I started to thrust my head, but a sharp blow on the forehead
+caused me to recoil. I rubbed my bruised brow and gazed with reproachful
+inquiry at Paul, who was laughing in gleeful, boyish fashion.
+
+“Well?” he said.
+
+“Well?” I echoed.
+
+“Why don’t you investigate?” he demanded. And investigate I did. Before
+thrusting out my head, my senses, automatically active, had told
+me there was nothing there, that nothing intervened between me and
+out-of-doors, that the aperture of the window opening was utterly empty.
+I stretched forth my hand and felt a hard object, smooth and cool and
+flat, which my touch, out of its experience, told me to be glass. I
+looked again, but could see positively nothing.
+
+“White quartzose sand,” Paul rattled off, “sodic carbonate, slaked lime,
+cutlet, manganese peroxide—there you have it, the finest French plate
+glass, made by the great St. Gobain Company, who made the finest plate
+glass in the world, and this is the finest piece they ever made. It cost
+a king’s ransom. But look at it! You can’t see it. You don’t know it’s
+there till you run your head against it.
+
+“Eh, old boy! That’s merely an object-lesson—certain elements, in
+themselves opaque, yet so compounded as to give a resultant body which
+is transparent. But that is a matter of inorganic chemistry, you say.
+Very true. But I dare to assert, standing here on my two feet, that in
+the organic I can duplicate whatever occurs in the inorganic.
+
+“Here!” He held a test-tube between me and the light, and I noted the
+cloudy or muddy liquid it contained. He emptied the contents of another
+test-tube into it, and almost instantly it became clear and sparkling.
+
+“Or here!” With quick, nervous movements among his array of test-tubes,
+he turned a white solution to a wine color, and a light yellow solution
+to a dark brown. He dropped a piece of litmus paper into an acid, when
+it changed instantly to red, and on floating it in an alkali it turned
+as quickly to blue.
+
+“The litmus paper is still the litmus paper,” he enunciated in the
+formal manner of the lecturer. “I have not changed it into something
+else. Then what did I do? I merely changed the arrangement of its
+molecules. Where, at first, it absorbed all colors from the light but
+red, its molecular structure was so changed that it absorbed red and all
+colors except blue. And so it goes, ad infinitum. Now, what I purpose
+to do is this.” He paused for a space. “I purpose to seek—ay, and to
+find—the proper reagents, which, acting upon the living organism,
+will bring about molecular changes analogous to those you have just
+witnessed. But these reagents, which I shall find, and for that matter,
+upon which I already have my hands, will not turn the living body to
+blue or red or black, but they will turn it to transparency. All light
+will pass through it. It will be invisible. It will cast no shadow.”
+
+A few weeks later I went hunting with Paul. He had been promising me for
+some time that I should have the pleasure of shooting over a wonderful
+dog—the most wonderful dog, in fact, that ever man shot over, so he
+averred, and continued to aver till my curiosity was aroused. But on
+the morning in question I was disappointed, for there was no dog in
+evidence.
+
+“Don’t see him about,” Paul remarked unconcernedly, and we set off
+across the fields.
+
+I could not imagine, at the time, what was ailing me, but I had a
+feeling of some impending and deadly illness. My nerves were all awry,
+and, from the astounding tricks they played me, my senses seemed to have
+run riot. Strange sounds disturbed me. At times I heard the swish-swish
+of grass being shoved aside, and once the patter of feet across a patch
+of stony ground.
+
+“Did you hear anything, Paul?” I asked once.
+
+But he shook his head, and thrust his feet steadily forward.
+
+While climbing a fence, I heard the low, eager whine of a dog,
+apparently from within a couple of feet of me; but on looking about me I
+saw nothing.
+
+I dropped to the ground, limp and trembling.
+
+“Paul,” I said, “we had better return to the house. I am afraid I am
+going to be sick.”
+
+“Nonsense, old man,” he answered. “The sunshine has gone to your head
+like wine. You’ll be all right. It’s famous weather.”
+
+But, passing along a narrow path through a clump of cottonwoods, some
+object brushed against my legs and I stumbled and nearly fell. I looked
+with sudden anxiety at Paul.
+
+“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Tripping over your own feet?”
+
+I kept my tongue between my teeth and plodded on, though sore perplexed
+and thoroughly satisfied that some acute and mysterious malady had
+attacked my nerves. So far my eyes had escaped; but, when we got to the
+open fields again, even my vision went back on me. Strange flashes of
+vari-colored, rainbow light began to appear and disappear on the
+path before me. Still, I managed to keep myself in hand, till the
+vari-colored lights persisted for a space of fully twenty seconds,
+dancing and flashing in continuous play. Then I sat down, weak and
+shaky.
+
+“It’s all up with me,” I gasped, covering my eyes with my hands. “It has
+attacked my eyes. Paul, take me home.”
+
+But Paul laughed long and loud. “What did I tell you?—the most
+wonderful dog, eh? Well, what do you think?”
+
+He turned partly from me and began to whistle. I heard the patter of
+feet, the panting of a heated animal, and the unmistakable yelp of a
+dog. Then Paul stooped down and apparently fondled the empty air.
+
+“Here! Give me your fist.”
+
+And he rubbed my hand over the cold nose and jowls of a dog. A dog it
+certainly was, with the shape and the smooth, short coat of a pointer.
+
+Suffice to say, I speedily recovered my spirits and control. Paul put
+a collar about the animal’s neck and tied his handkerchief to its tail.
+And then was vouchsafed us the remarkable sight of an empty collar and
+a waving handkerchief cavorting over the fields. It was something to see
+that collar and handkerchief pin a bevy of quail in a clump of locusts
+and remain rigid and immovable till we had flushed the birds.
+
+Now and again the dog emitted the vari-colored light-flashes I have
+mentioned. The one thing, Paul explained, which he had not anticipated
+and which he doubted could be overcome.
+
+“They’re a large family,” he said, “these sun dogs, wind dogs, rainbows,
+halos, and parhelia. They are produced by refraction of light from
+mineral and ice crystals, from mist, rain, spray, and no end of things;
+and I am afraid they are the penalty I must pay for transparency. I
+escaped Lloyd’s shadow only to fetch up against the rainbow flash.”
+
+A couple of days later, before the entrance to Paul’s laboratory, I
+encountered a terrible stench. So overpowering was it that it was easy
+to discover the source—a mass of putrescent matter on the doorstep
+which in general outlines resembled a dog.
+
+Paul was startled when he investigated my find. It was his invisible
+dog, or rather, what had been his invisible dog, for it was now plainly
+visible. It had been playing about but a few minutes before in all
+health and strength. Closer examination revealed that the skull had been
+crushed by some heavy blow. While it was strange that the animal should
+have been killed, the inexplicable thing was that it should so quickly
+decay.
+
+“The reagents I injected into its system were harmless,” Paul explained.
+“Yet they were powerful, and it appears that when death comes they force
+practically instantaneous disintegration. Remarkable! Most remarkable!
+Well, the only thing is not to die. They do not harm so long as one
+lives. But I do wonder who smashed in that dog’s head.”
+
+Light, however, was thrown upon this when a frightened housemaid brought
+the news that Gaffer Bedshaw had that very morning, not more than an
+hour back, gone violently insane, and was strapped down at home, in
+the huntsman’s lodge, where he raved of a battle with a ferocious and
+gigantic beast that he had encountered in the Tichlorne pasture. He
+claimed that the thing, whatever it was, was invisible, that with his
+own eyes he had seen that it was invisible; wherefore his tearful wife
+and daughters shook their heads, and wherefore he but waxed the more
+violent, and the gardener and the coachman tightened the straps by
+another hole.
+
+Nor, while Paul Tichlorne was thus successfully mastering the problem of
+invisibility, was Lloyd Inwood a whit behind. I went over in answer to a
+message of his to come and see how he was getting on. Now his laboratory
+occupied an isolated situation in the midst of his vast grounds. It was
+built in a pleasant little glade, surrounded on all sides by a dense
+forest growth, and was to be gained by way of a winding and erratic
+path. But I have travelled that path so often as to know every foot of
+it, and conceive my surprise when I came upon the glade and found no
+laboratory. The quaint shed structure with its red sandstone chimney
+was not. Nor did it look as if it ever had been. There were no signs of
+ruin, no debris, nothing.
+
+I started to walk across what had once been its site. “This,” I said to
+myself, “should be where the step went up to the door.” Barely were the
+words out of my mouth when I stubbed my toe on some obstacle, pitched
+forward, and butted my head into something that FELT very much like a
+door. I reached out my hand. It WAS a door. I found the knob and turned
+it. And at once, as the door swung inward on its hinges, the whole
+interior of the laboratory impinged upon my vision. Greeting Lloyd, I
+closed the door and backed up the path a few paces. I could see nothing
+of the building. Returning and opening the door, at once all the
+furniture and every detail of the interior were visible. It was indeed
+startling, the sudden transition from void to light and form and color.
+
+“What do you think of it, eh?” Lloyd asked, wringing my hand. “I slapped
+a couple of coats of absolute black on the outside yesterday afternoon
+to see how it worked. How’s your head? you bumped it pretty solidly, I
+imagine.”
+
+“Never mind that,” he interrupted my congratulations. “I’ve something
+better for you to do.”
+
+While he talked he began to strip, and when he stood naked before me he
+thrust a pot and brush into my hand and said, “Here, give me a coat of
+this.”
+
+It was an oily, shellac-like stuff, which spread quickly and easily over
+the skin and dried immediately.
+
+“Merely preliminary and precautionary,” he explained when I had
+finished; “but now for the real stuff.”
+
+I picked up another pot he indicated, and glanced inside, but could see
+nothing.
+
+“It’s empty,” I said.
+
+“Stick your finger in it.”
+
+I obeyed, and was aware of a sensation of cool moistness. On withdrawing
+my hand I glanced at the forefinger, the one I had immersed, but it had
+disappeared. I moved and knew from the alternate tension and relaxation
+of the muscles that I moved it, but it defied my sense of sight. To all
+appearances I had been shorn of a finger; nor could I get any visual
+impression of it till I extended it under the skylight and saw its
+shadow plainly blotted on the floor.
+
+Lloyd chuckled. “Now spread it on, and keep your eyes open.”
+
+I dipped the brush into the seemingly empty pot, and gave him a long
+stroke across his chest. With the passage of the brush the living
+flesh disappeared from beneath. I covered his right leg, and he was
+a one-legged man defying all laws of gravitation. And so, stroke by
+stroke, member by member, I painted Lloyd Inwood into nothingness. It
+was a creepy experience, and I was glad when naught remained in sight
+but his burning black eyes, poised apparently unsupported in mid-air.
+
+“I have a refined and harmless solution for them,” he said. “A fine
+spray with an air-brush, and presto! I am not.”
+
+This deftly accomplished, he said, “Now I shall move about, and do you
+tell me what sensations you experience.”
+
+“In the first place, I cannot see you,” I said, and I could hear his
+gleeful laugh from the midst of the emptiness. “Of course,” I continued,
+“you cannot escape your shadow, but that was to be expected. When you
+pass between my eye and an object, the object disappears, but so unusual
+and incomprehensible is its disappearance that it seems to me as though
+my eyes had blurred. When you move rapidly, I experience a bewildering
+succession of blurs. The blurring sensation makes my eyes ache and my
+brain tired.”
+
+“Have you any other warnings of my presence?” he asked.
+
+“No, and yes,” I answered. “When you are near me I have feelings similar
+to those produced by dank warehouses, gloomy crypts, and deep mines. And
+as sailors feel the loom of the land on dark nights, so I think I feel
+the loom of your body. But it is all very vague and intangible.”
+
+Long we talked that last morning in his laboratory; and when I turned to
+go, he put his unseen hand in mine with nervous grip, and said, “Now
+I shall conquer the world!” And I could not dare to tell him of Paul
+Tichlorne’s equal success.
+
+At home I found a note from Paul, asking me to come up immediately, and
+it was high noon when I came spinning up the driveway on my wheel. Paul
+called me from the tennis court, and I dismounted and went over. But the
+court was empty. As I stood there, gaping open-mouthed, a tennis ball
+struck me on the arm, and as I turned about, another whizzed past my
+ear. For aught I could see of my assailant, they came whirling at me
+from out of space, and right well was I peppered with them. But when
+the balls already flung at me began to come back for a second whack, I
+realized the situation. Seizing a racquet and keeping my eyes open, I
+quickly saw a rainbow flash appearing and disappearing and darting over
+the ground. I took out after it, and when I laid the racquet upon it for
+a half-dozen stout blows, Paul’s voice rang out:
+
+“Enough! Enough! Oh! Ouch! Stop! You’re landing on my naked skin, you
+know! Ow! O-w-w! I’ll be good! I’ll be good! I only wanted you to see
+my metamorphosis,” he said ruefully, and I imagined he was rubbing his
+hurts.
+
+A few minutes later we were playing tennis—a handicap on my part, for I
+could have no knowledge of his position save when all the angles between
+himself, the sun, and me, were in proper conjunction. Then he
+flashed, and only then. But the flashes were more brilliant than the
+rainbow—purest blue, most delicate violet, brightest yellow, and all
+the intermediary shades, with the scintillant brilliancy of the diamond,
+dazzling, blinding, iridescent.
+
+But in the midst of our play I felt a sudden cold chill, reminding me
+of deep mines and gloomy crypts, such a chill as I had experienced that
+very morning. The next moment, close to the net, I saw a ball rebound in
+mid-air and empty space, and at the same instant, a score of feet away,
+Paul Tichlorne emitted a rainbow flash. It could not be he from whom
+the ball had rebounded, and with sickening dread I realized that Lloyd
+Inwood had come upon the scene. To make sure, I looked for his shadow,
+and there it was, a shapeless blotch the girth of his body, (the sun was
+overhead), moving along the ground. I remembered his threat, and felt
+sure that all the long years of rivalry were about to culminate in
+uncanny battle.
+
+I cried a warning to Paul, and heard a snarl as of a wild beast, and an
+answering snarl. I saw the dark blotch move swiftly across the court,
+and a brilliant burst of vari-colored light moving with equal swiftness
+to meet it; and then shadow and flash came together and there was the
+sound of unseen blows. The net went down before my frightened eyes. I
+sprang toward the fighters, crying:
+
+“For God’s sake!”
+
+But their locked bodies smote against my knees, and I was overthrown.
+
+“You keep out of this, old man!” I heard the voice of Lloyd Inwood from
+out of the emptiness. And then Paul’s voice crying, “Yes, we’ve had
+enough of peacemaking!”
+
+From the sound of their voices I knew they had separated. I could not
+locate Paul, and so approached the shadow that represented Lloyd. But
+from the other side came a stunning blow on the point of my jaw, and I
+heard Paul scream angrily, “Now will you keep away?”
+
+Then they came together again, the impact of their blows, their groans
+and gasps, and the swift flashings and shadow-movings telling plainly of
+the deadliness of the struggle.
+
+I shouted for help, and Gaffer Bedshaw came running into the court. I
+could see, as he approached, that he was looking at me strangely, but he
+collided with the combatants and was hurled headlong to the ground. With
+despairing shriek and a cry of “O Lord, I’ve got ‘em!” he sprang to his
+feet and tore madly out of the court.
+
+I could do nothing, so I sat up, fascinated and powerless, and watched
+the struggle. The noonday sun beat down with dazzling brightness on the
+naked tennis court. And it was naked. All I could see was the blotch of
+shadow and the rainbow flashes, the dust rising from the invisible feet,
+the earth tearing up from beneath the straining foot-grips, and the wire
+screen bulge once or twice as their bodies hurled against it. That was
+all, and after a time even that ceased. There were no more flashes, and
+the shadow had become long and stationary; and I remembered their set
+boyish faces when they clung to the roots in the deep coolness of the
+pool.
+
+They found me an hour afterward. Some inkling of what had happened got
+to the servants and they quitted the Tichlorne service in a body.
+Gaffer Bedshaw never recovered from the second shock he received, and
+is confined in a madhouse, hopelessly incurable. The secrets of their
+marvellous discoveries died with Paul and Lloyd, both laboratories being
+destroyed by grief-stricken relatives. As for myself, I no longer care
+for chemical research, and science is a tabooed topic in my household. I
+have returned to my roses. Nature’s colors are good enough for me.
+
+
+
+
+ALL GOLD CANYON
+
+
+It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from
+the rigid plan and relieved their harshness of line by making a little
+sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness
+and softness. Here all things rested. Even the narrow stream ceased its
+turbulent down-rush long enough to form a quiet pool. Knee-deep in the
+water, with drooping head and half-shut eyes, drowsed a red-coated,
+many-antlered buck.
+
+On one side, beginning at the very lip of the pool, was a tiny meadow,
+a cool, resilient surface of green that extended to the base of the
+frowning wall. Beyond the pool a gentle slope of earth ran up and up
+to meet the opposing wall. Fine grass covered the slope—grass that was
+spangled with flowers, with here and there patches of color, orange and
+purple and golden. Below, the canyon was shut in. There was no view. The
+walls leaned together abruptly and the canyon ended in a chaos of rocks,
+moss-covered and hidden by a green screen of vines and creepers and
+boughs of trees. Up the canyon rose far hills and peaks, the big
+foothills, pine-covered and remote. And far beyond, like clouds upon
+the border of the sky, towered minarets of white, where the Sierra’s
+eternal snows flashed austerely the blazes of the sun.
+
+There was no dust in the canyon. The leaves and flowers were clean and
+virginal. The grass was young velvet. Over the pool three cottonwoods
+sent their scurvy fluffs fluttering down the quiet air. On the slope
+the blossoms of the wine-wooded manzanita filled the air with springtime
+odors, while the leaves, wise with experience, were already beginning
+their vertical twist against the coming aridity of summer. In the open
+spaces on the slope, beyond the farthest shadow-reach of the manzanita,
+poised the mariposa lilies, like so many flights of jewelled moths
+suddenly arrested and on the verge of trembling into flight again. Here
+and there that woods harlequin, the madrone, permitting itself to
+be caught in the act of changing its pea-green trunk to madder-red,
+breathed its fragrance into the air from great clusters of waxen bells.
+Creamy white were these bells, shaped like lilies-of-the-valley, with
+the sweetness of perfume that is of the springtime.
+
+There was not a sigh of wind. The air was drowsy with its weight of
+perfume. It was a sweetness that would have been cloying had the
+air been heavy and humid. But the air was sharp and thin. It was
+as starlight transmuted into atmosphere, shot through and warmed by
+sunshine, and flower-drenched with sweetness.
+
+An occasional butterfly drifted in and out through the patches of light
+and shade. And from all about rose the low and sleepy hum of mountain
+bees—feasting Sybarites that jostled one another good-naturedly at the
+board, nor found time for rough discourtesy. So quietly did the little
+stream drip and ripple its way through the canyon that it spoke only in
+faint and occasional gurgles. The voice of the stream was as a drowsy
+whisper, ever interrupted by dozings and silences, ever lifted again in
+the awakenings.
+
+The motion of all things was a drifting in the heart of the canyon.
+Sunshine and butterflies drifted in and out among the trees. The hum of
+the bees and the whisper of the stream were a drifting of sound. And the
+drifting sound and drifting color seemed to weave together in the making
+of a delicate and intangible fabric which was the spirit of the place.
+It was a spirit of peace that was not of death, but of smooth-pulsing
+life, of quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action,
+of repose that was quick with existence without being violent with
+struggle and travail. The spirit of the place was the spirit of
+the peace of the living, somnolent with the easement and content of
+prosperity, and undisturbed by rumors of far wars.
+
+The red-coated, many-antlered buck acknowledged the lordship of the
+spirit of the place and dozed knee-deep in the cool, shaded pool. There
+seemed no flies to vex him and he was languid with rest. Sometimes his
+ears moved when the stream awoke and whispered; but they moved lazily,
+with, foreknowledge that it was merely the stream grown garrulous at
+discovery that it had slept.
+
+But there came a time when the buck’s ears lifted and tensed with swift
+eagerness for sound. His head was turned down the canyon. His sensitive,
+quivering nostrils scented the air. His eyes could not pierce the green
+screen through which the stream rippled away, but to his ears came the
+voice of a man. It was a steady, monotonous, singsong voice. Once the
+buck heard the harsh clash of metal upon rock. At the sound he snorted
+with a sudden start that jerked him through the air from water to
+meadow, and his feet sank into the young velvet, while he pricked his
+ears and again scented the air. Then he stole across the tiny meadow,
+pausing once and again to listen, and faded away out of the canyon like
+a wraith, soft-footed and without sound.
+
+The clash of steel-shod soles against the rocks began to be heard, and
+the man’s voice grew louder. It was raised in a sort of chant and became
+distinct with nearness, so that the words could be heard:
+
+    “Turn around an’ tu’n yo’ face
+    Untoe them sweet hills of grace
+      (D’ pow’rs of sin yo’ am scornin’!).
+    Look about an’ look aroun’,
+    Fling yo’ sin-pack on d’ groun’
+      (Yo’ will meet wid d’ Lord in d’ mornin’!).”
+
+A sound of scrambling accompanied the song, and the spirit of the place
+fled away on the heels of the red-coated buck. The green screen was
+burst asunder, and a man peered out at the meadow and the pool and the
+sloping side-hill. He was a deliberate sort of man. He took in the scene
+with one embracing glance, then ran his eyes over the details to verify
+the general impression. Then, and not until then, did he open his mouth
+in vivid and solemn approval:
+
+“Smoke of life an’ snakes of purgatory! Will you just look at that! Wood
+an’ water an’ grass an’ a side-hill! A pocket-hunter’s delight an’ a
+cayuse’s paradise! Cool green for tired eyes! Pink pills for pale people
+ain’t in it. A secret pasture for prospectors and a resting-place for
+tired burros, by damn!”
+
+He was a sandy-complexioned man in whose face geniality and humor seemed
+the salient characteristics. It was a mobile face, quick-changing to
+inward mood and thought. Thinking was in him a visible process. Ideas
+chased across his face like wind-flaws across the surface of a lake. His
+hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless
+as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had
+gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were
+laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naivete and wonder of
+the child; and yet, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm
+self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and
+experience of the world.
+
+From out the screen of vines and creepers he flung ahead of him a
+miner’s pick and shovel and gold-pan. Then he crawled out himself into
+the open. He was clad in faded overalls and black cotton shirt, with
+hobnailed brogans on his feet, and on his head a hat whose shapelessness
+and stains advertised the rough usage of wind and rain and sun and
+camp-smoke. He stood erect, seeing wide-eyed the secrecy of the scene
+and sensuously inhaling the warm, sweet breath of the canyon-garden
+through nostrils that dilated and quivered with delight. His eyes
+narrowed to laughing slits of blue, his face wreathed itself in joy, and
+his mouth curled in a smile as he cried aloud:
+
+“Jumping dandelions and happy hollyhocks, but that smells good to me!
+Talk about your attar o’ roses an’ cologne factories! They ain’t in it!”
+
+He had the habit of soliloquy. His quick-changing facial expressions
+might tell every thought and mood, but the tongue, perforce, ran hard
+after, repeating, like a second Boswell.
+
+The man lay down on the lip of the pool and drank long and deep of its
+water. “Tastes good to me,” he murmured, lifting his head and gazing
+across the pool at the side-hill, while he wiped his mouth with the back
+of his hand. The side-hill attracted his attention. Still lying on his
+stomach, he studied the hill formation long and carefully. It was a
+practised eye that travelled up the slope to the crumbling canyon-wall
+and back and down again to the edge of the pool. He scrambled to his
+feet and favored the side-hill with a second survey.
+
+“Looks good to me,” he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and
+gold-pan.
+
+He crossed the stream below the pool, stepping agilely from stone to
+stone. Where the sidehill touched the water he dug up a shovelful of
+dirt and put it into the gold-pan. He squatted down, holding the pan in
+his two hands, and partly immersing it in the stream. Then he imparted
+to the pan a deft circular motion that sent the water sluicing in and
+out through the dirt and gravel. The larger and the lighter particles
+worked to the surface, and these, by a skilful dipping movement of
+the pan, he spilled out and over the edge. Occasionally, to expedite
+matters, he rested the pan and with his fingers raked out the large
+pebbles and pieces of rock.
+
+The contents of the pan diminished rapidly until only fine dirt and the
+smallest bits of gravel remained. At this stage he began to work very
+deliberately and carefully. It was fine washing, and he washed fine and
+finer, with a keen scrutiny and delicate and fastidious touch. At
+last the pan seemed empty of everything but water; but with a quick
+semicircular flirt that sent the water flying over the shallow rim into
+the stream, he disclosed a layer of black sand on the bottom of the pan.
+So thin was this layer that it was like a streak of paint. He examined
+it closely. In the midst of it was a tiny golden speck. He dribbled a
+little water in over the depressed edge of the pan. With a quick flirt
+he sent the water sluicing across the bottom, turning the grains of
+black sand over and over. A second tiny golden speck rewarded his
+effort.
+
+The washing had now become very fine—fine beyond all need of ordinary
+placer-mining. He worked the black sand, a small portion at a time, up
+the shallow rim of the pan. Each small portion he examined sharply, so
+that his eyes saw every grain of it before he allowed it to slide over
+the edge and away. Jealously, bit by bit, he let the black sand slip
+away. A golden speck, no larger than a pin-point, appeared on the rim,
+and by his manipulation of the riveter it returned to the bottom of the
+pan. And in such fashion another speck was disclosed, and another. Great
+was his care of them. Like a shepherd he herded his flock of golden
+specks so that not one should be lost. At last, of the pan of dirt
+nothing remained but his golden herd. He counted it, and then, after all
+his labor, sent it flying out of the pan with one final swirl of water.
+
+But his blue eyes were shining with desire as he rose to his feet.
+“Seven,” he muttered aloud, asserting the sum of the specks for which he
+had toiled so hard and which he had so wantonly thrown away. “Seven,”
+ he repeated, with the emphasis of one trying to impress a number on his
+memory.
+
+He stood still a long while, surveying the hill-side. In his eyes was
+a curiosity, new-aroused and burning. There was an exultance about his
+bearing and a keenness like that of a hunting animal catching the fresh
+scent of game.
+
+He moved down the stream a few steps and took a second panful of dirt.
+
+Again came the careful washing, the jealous herding of the golden
+specks, and the wantonness with which he sent them flying into the
+stream when he had counted their number.
+
+“Five,” he muttered, and repeated, “five.”
+
+He could not forbear another survey of the hill before filling the pan
+farther down the stream. His golden herds diminished. “Four, three, two,
+two, one,” were his memory-tabulations as he moved down the stream. When
+but one speck of gold rewarded his washing, he stopped and built a fire
+of dry twigs. Into this he thrust the gold-pan and burned it till it
+was blue-black. He held up the pan and examined it critically. Then he
+nodded approbation. Against such a color-background he could defy the
+tiniest yellow speck to elude him.
+
+Still moving down the stream, he panned again. A single speck was his
+reward. A third pan contained no gold at all. Not satisfied with this,
+he panned three times again, taking his shovels of dirt within a foot
+of one another. Each pan proved empty of gold, and the fact, instead of
+discouraging him, seemed to give him satisfaction. His elation increased
+with each barren washing, until he arose, exclaiming jubilantly:
+
+“If it ain’t the real thing, may God knock off my head with sour
+apples!”
+
+Returning to where he had started operations, he began to pan up the
+stream. At first his golden herds increased—increased prodigiously.
+“Fourteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-six,” ran his memory
+tabulations. Just above the pool he struck his richest pan—thirty-five
+colors.
+
+“Almost enough to save,” he remarked regretfully as he allowed the water
+to sweep them away.
+
+The sun climbed to the top of the sky. The man worked on. Pan by pan, he
+went up the stream, the tally of results steadily decreasing.
+
+“It’s just booful, the way it peters out,” he exulted when a shovelful
+of dirt contained no more than a single speck of gold.
+
+And when no specks at all were found in several pans, he straightened up
+and favored the hillside with a confident glance.
+
+“Ah, ha! Mr. Pocket!” he cried out, as though to an auditor hidden
+somewhere above him beneath the surface of the slope. “Ah, ha! Mr.
+Pocket! I’m a-comin’, I’m a-comin’, an’ I’m shorely gwine to get yer!
+You heah me, Mr. Pocket? I’m gwine to get yer as shore as punkins ain’t
+cauliflowers!”
+
+He turned and flung a measuring glance at the sun poised above him in
+the azure of the cloudless sky. Then he went down the canyon, following
+the line of shovel-holes he had made in filling the pans. He crossed the
+stream below the pool and disappeared through the green screen. There
+was little opportunity for the spirit of the place to return with its
+quietude and repose, for the man’s voice, raised in ragtime song, still
+dominated the canyon with possession.
+
+After a time, with a greater clashing of steel-shod feet on rock, he
+returned. The green screen was tremendously agitated. It surged back and
+forth in the throes of a struggle. There was a loud grating and clanging
+of metal. The man’s voice leaped to a higher pitch and was sharp with
+imperativeness. A large body plunged and panted. There was a snapping
+and ripping and rending, and amid a shower of falling leaves a horse
+burst through the screen. On its back was a pack, and from this trailed
+broken vines and torn creepers. The animal gazed with astonished eyes at
+the scene into which it had been precipitated, then dropped its head to
+the grass and began contentedly to graze. A second horse scrambled into
+view, slipping once on the mossy rocks and regaining equilibrium
+when its hoofs sank into the yielding surface of the meadow. It was
+riderless, though on its back was a high-horned Mexican saddle, scarred
+and discolored by long usage.
+
+The man brought up the rear. He threw off pack and saddle, with an
+eye to camp location, and gave the animals their freedom to graze. He
+unpacked his food and got out frying-pan and coffee-pot. He gathered an
+armful of dry wood, and with a few stones made a place for his fire.
+
+“My!” he said, “but I’ve got an appetite. I could scoff iron-filings an’
+horseshoe nails an’ thank you kindly, ma’am, for a second helpin’.”
+
+He straightened up, and, while he reached for matches in the pocket of
+his overalls, his eyes travelled across the pool to the side-hill. His
+fingers had clutched the match-box, but they relaxed their hold and
+the hand came out empty. The man wavered perceptibly. He looked at his
+preparations for cooking and he looked at the hill.
+
+“Guess I’ll take another whack at her,” he concluded, starting to cross
+the stream.
+
+“They ain’t no sense in it, I know,” he mumbled apologetically. “But
+keepin’ grub back an hour ain’t goin’ to hurt none, I reckon.”
+
+A few feet back from his first line of test-pans he started a second
+line. The sun dropped down the western sky, the shadows lengthened,
+but the man worked on. He began a third line of test-pans. He was
+cross-cutting the hillside, line by line, as he ascended. The centre of
+each line produced the richest pans, while the ends came where no
+colors showed in the pan. And as he ascended the hillside the lines grew
+perceptibly shorter. The regularity with which their length diminished
+served to indicate that somewhere up the slope the last line would be so
+short as to have scarcely length at all, and that beyond could come only
+a point. The design was growing into an inverted “V.” The converging
+sides of this “V” marked the boundaries of the gold-bearing dirt.
+
+The apex of the “V” was evidently the man’s goal. Often he ran his eye
+along the converging sides and on up the hill, trying to divine the
+apex, the point where the gold-bearing dirt must cease. Here resided
+“Mr. Pocket”—for so the man familiarly addressed the imaginary point
+above him on the slope, crying out:
+
+“Come down out o’ that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an’ agreeable, an’
+come down!”
+
+“All right,” he would add later, in a voice resigned to determination.
+“All right, Mr. Pocket. It’s plain to me I got to come right up an’
+snatch you out bald-headed. An’ I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” he would
+threaten still later.
+
+Each pan he carried down to the water to wash, and as he went higher
+up the hill the pans grew richer, until he began to save the gold in an
+empty baking-powder can which he carried carelessly in his hip-pocket.
+So engrossed was he in his toil that he did not notice the long twilight
+of oncoming night. It was not until he tried vainly to see the gold
+colors in the bottom of the pan that he realized the passage of time. He
+straightened up abruptly. An expression of whimsical wonderment and awe
+overspread his face as he drawled:
+
+“Gosh darn my buttons! if I didn’t plumb forget dinner!”
+
+He stumbled across the stream in the darkness and lighted his
+long-delayed fire. Flapjacks and bacon and warmed-over beans constituted
+his supper. Then he smoked a pipe by the smouldering coals, listening to
+the night noises and watching the moonlight stream through the canyon.
+After that he unrolled his bed, took off his heavy shoes, and pulled the
+blankets up to his chin. His face showed white in the moonlight, like
+the face of a corpse. But it was a corpse that knew its resurrection,
+for the man rose suddenly on one elbow and gazed across at his hillside.
+
+“Good night, Mr. Pocket,” he called sleepily. “Good night.”
+
+He slept through the early gray of morning until the direct rays of
+the sun smote his closed eyelids, when he awoke with a start and looked
+about him until he had established the continuity of his existence and
+identified his present self with the days previously lived.
+
+To dress, he had merely to buckle on his shoes. He glanced at his
+fireplace and at his hillside, wavered, but fought down the temptation
+and started the fire.
+
+“Keep yer shirt on, Bill; keep yer shirt on,” he admonished himself.
+“What’s the good of rushin’? No use in gettin’ all het up an’ sweaty.
+Mr. Pocket’ll wait for you. He ain’t a-runnin’ away before you can get
+yer breakfast. Now, what you want, Bill, is something fresh in yer bill
+o’ fare. So it’s up to you to go an’ get it.”
+
+He cut a short pole at the water’s edge and drew from one of his pockets
+a bit of line and a draggled fly that had once been a royal coachman.
+
+“Mebbe they’ll bite in the early morning,” he muttered, as he made his
+first cast into the pool. And a moment later he was gleefully crying:
+“What’d I tell you, eh? What’d I tell you?”
+
+He had no reel, nor any inclination to waste time, and by main strength,
+and swiftly, he drew out of the water a flashing ten-inch trout. Three
+more, caught in rapid succession, furnished his breakfast. When he came
+to the stepping-stones on his way to his hillside, he was struck by a
+sudden thought, and paused.
+
+“I’d just better take a hike down-stream a ways,” he said. “There’s no
+tellin’ what cuss may be snoopin’ around.”
+
+But he crossed over on the stones, and with a “I really oughter take
+that hike,” the need of the precaution passed out of his mind and he
+fell to work.
+
+At nightfall he straightened up. The small of his back was stiff
+from stooping toil, and as he put his hand behind him to soothe the
+protesting muscles, he said:
+
+“Now what d’ye think of that, by damn? I clean forgot my dinner again!
+If I don’t watch out, I’ll sure be degeneratin’ into a two-meal-a-day
+crank.”
+
+“Pockets is the damnedest things I ever see for makin’ a man
+absent-minded,” he communed that night, as he crawled into his blankets.
+Nor did he forget to call up the hillside, “Good night, Mr. Pocket! Good
+night!”
+
+Rising with the sun, and snatching a hasty breakfast, he was early
+at work. A fever seemed to be growing in him, nor did the increasing
+richness of the test-pans allay this fever. There was a flush in his
+cheek other than that made by the heat of the sun, and he was oblivious
+to fatigue and the passage of time. When he filled a pan with dirt, he
+ran down the hill to wash it; nor could he forbear running up the hill
+again, panting and stumbling profanely, to refill the pan.
+
+He was now a hundred yards from the water, and the inverted “V” was
+assuming definite proportions. The width of the pay-dirt steadily
+decreased, and the man extended in his mind’s eye the sides of the “V”
+ to their meeting-place far up the hill. This was his goal, the apex of
+the “V,” and he panned many times to locate it.
+
+“Just about two yards above that manzanita bush an’ a yard to the
+right,” he finally concluded.
+
+Then the temptation seized him. “As plain as the nose on your face,”
+ he said, as he abandoned his laborious cross-cutting and climbed to the
+indicated apex. He filled a pan and carried it down the hill to wash. It
+contained no trace of gold. He dug deep, and he dug shallow, filling
+and washing a dozen pans, and was unrewarded even by the tiniest golden
+speck. He was enraged at having yielded to the temptation, and cursed
+himself blasphemously and pridelessly. Then he went down the hill and
+took up the cross-cutting.
+
+“Slow an’ certain, Bill; slow an’ certain,” he crooned. “Short-cuts to
+fortune ain’t in your line, an’ it’s about time you know it. Get wise,
+Bill; get wise. Slow an’ certain’s the only hand you can play; so go to
+it, an’ keep to it, too.”
+
+As the cross-cuts decreased, showing that the sides of the “V” were
+converging, the depth of the “V” increased. The gold-trace was dipping
+into the hill. It was only at thirty inches beneath the surface that
+he could get colors in his pan. The dirt he found at twenty-five inches
+from the surface, and at thirty-five inches, yielded barren pans. At the
+base of the “V,” by the water’s edge, he had found the gold colors at
+the grass roots. The higher he went up the hill, the deeper the gold
+dipped.
+
+To dig a hole three feet deep in order to get one test-pan was a task
+of no mean magnitude; while between the man and the apex intervened
+an untold number of such holes to be. “An’ there’s no tellin’ how much
+deeper it’ll pitch,” he sighed, in a moment’s pause, while his fingers
+soothed his aching back.
+
+Feverish with desire, with aching back and stiffening muscles, with pick
+and shovel gouging and mauling the soft brown earth, the man toiled up
+the hill. Before him was the smooth slope, spangled with flowers and
+made sweet with their breath. Behind him was devastation. It looked like
+some terrible eruption breaking out on the smooth skin of the hill. His
+slow progress was like that of a slug, befouling beauty with a monstrous
+trail.
+
+Though the dipping gold-trace increased the man’s work, he found
+consolation in the increasing richness of the pans. Twenty cents, thirty
+cents, fifty cents, sixty cents, were the values of the gold found in
+the pans, and at nightfall he washed his banner pan, which gave him a
+dollar’s worth of gold-dust from a shovelful of dirt.
+
+“I’ll just bet it’s my luck to have some inquisitive cuss come buttin’
+in here on my pasture,” he mumbled sleepily that night as he pulled the
+blankets up to his chin.
+
+Suddenly he sat upright. “Bill!” he called sharply. “Now, listen to me,
+Bill; d’ye hear! It’s up to you, to-morrow mornin’, to mosey round an’
+see what you can see. Understand? To-morrow morning, an’ don’t you forget
+it!”
+
+He yawned and glanced across at his side-hill. “Good night, Mr. Pocket,”
+ he called.
+
+In the morning he stole a march on the sun, for he had finished
+breakfast when its first rays caught him, and he was climbing the wall
+of the canyon where it crumbled away and gave footing. From the outlook
+at the top he found himself in the midst of loneliness. As far as he
+could see, chain after chain of mountains heaved themselves into his
+vision. To the east his eyes, leaping the miles between range and range
+and between many ranges, brought up at last against the white-peaked
+Sierras—the main crest, where the backbone of the Western world
+reared itself against the sky. To the north and south he could see more
+distinctly the cross-systems that broke through the main trend of the
+sea of mountains. To the west the ranges fell away, one behind the
+other, diminishing and fading into the gentle foothills that, in turn,
+descended into the great valley which he could not see.
+
+And in all that mighty sweep of earth he saw no sign of man nor of the
+handiwork of man—save only the torn bosom of the hillside at his feet.
+The man looked long and carefully. Once, far down his own canyon, he
+thought he saw in the air a faint hint of smoke. He looked again
+and decided that it was the purple haze of the hills made dark by a
+convolution of the canyon wall at its back.
+
+“Hey, you, Mr. Pocket!” he called down into the canyon. “Stand out from
+under! I’m a-comin’, Mr. Pocket! I’m a-comin’!”
+
+The heavy brogans on the man’s feet made him appear clumsy-footed, but
+he swung down from the giddy height as lightly and airily as a mountain
+goat. A rock, turning under his foot on the edge of the precipice, did
+not disconcert him. He seemed to know the precise time required for the
+turn to culminate in disaster, and in the meantime he utilized the false
+footing itself for the momentary earth-contact necessary to carry him on
+into safety. Where the earth sloped so steeply that it was impossible to
+stand for a second upright, the man did not hesitate. His foot pressed
+the impossible surface for but a fraction of the fatal second and gave
+him the bound that carried him onward. Again, where even the fraction of
+a second’s footing was out of the question, he would swing his body
+past by a moment’s hand-grip on a jutting knob of rock, a crevice, or
+a precariously rooted shrub. At last, with a wild leap and yell, he
+exchanged the face of the wall for an earth-slide and finished the
+descent in the midst of several tons of sliding earth and gravel.
+
+His first pan of the morning washed out over two dollars in coarse gold.
+It was from the centre of the “V.” To either side the diminution in
+the values of the pans was swift. His lines of crosscutting holes were
+growing very short. The converging sides of the inverted “V” were only a
+few yards apart. Their meeting-point was only a few yards above him. But
+the pay-streak was dipping deeper and deeper into the earth. By early
+afternoon he was sinking the test-holes five feet before the pans could
+show the gold-trace.
+
+For that matter, the gold-trace had become something more than a trace;
+it was a placer mine in itself, and the man resolved to come back after
+he had found the pocket and work over the ground. But the increasing
+richness of the pans began to worry him. By late afternoon the worth of
+the pans had grown to three and four dollars. The man scratched his head
+perplexedly and looked a few feet up the hill at the manzanita bush that
+marked approximately the apex of the “V.” He nodded his head and said
+oracularly:
+
+“It’s one o’ two things, Bill; one o’ two things. Either Mr. Pocket’s
+spilled himself all out an’ down the hill, or else Mr. Pocket’s that
+damned rich you maybe won’t be able to carry him all away with you. And
+that’d be hell, wouldn’t it, now?” He chuckled at contemplation of so
+pleasant a dilemma.
+
+Nightfall found him by the edge of the stream his eyes wrestling with
+the gathering darkness over the washing of a five-dollar pan.
+
+“Wisht I had an electric light to go on working,” he said.
+
+He found sleep difficult that night. Many times he composed himself and
+closed his eyes for slumber to overtake him; but his blood pounded with
+too strong desire, and as many times his eyes opened and he murmured
+wearily, “Wisht it was sun-up.”
+
+Sleep came to him in the end, but his eyes were open with the first
+paling of the stars, and the gray of dawn caught him with breakfast
+finished and climbing the hillside in the direction of the secret
+abiding-place of Mr. Pocket.
+
+The first cross-cut the man made, there was space for only three
+holes, so narrow had become the pay-streak and so close was he to the
+fountainhead of the golden stream he had been following for four days.
+
+“Be ca’m, Bill; be ca’m,” he admonished himself, as he broke ground for
+the final hole where the sides of the “V” had at last come together in a
+point.
+
+“I’ve got the almighty cinch on you, Mr. Pocket, an’ you can’t lose me,”
+ he said many times as he sank the hole deeper and deeper.
+
+Four feet, five feet, six feet, he dug his way down into the earth. The
+digging grew harder. His pick grated on broken rock. He examined the
+rock. “Rotten quartz,” was his conclusion as, with the shovel, he
+cleared the bottom of the hole of loose dirt. He attacked the crumbling
+quartz with the pick, bursting the disintegrating rock asunder with
+every stroke.
+
+He thrust his shovel into the loose mass. His eye caught a gleam of
+yellow. He dropped the shovel and squatted suddenly on his heels. As a
+farmer rubs the clinging earth from fresh-dug potatoes, so the man, a
+piece of rotten quartz held in both hands, rubbed the dirt away.
+
+“Sufferin’ Sardanopolis!” he cried. “Lumps an’ chunks of it! Lumps an’
+chunks of it!”
+
+It was only half rock he held in his hand. The other half was virgin
+gold. He dropped it into his pan and examined another piece. Little
+yellow was to be seen, but with his strong fingers he crumbled the
+rotten quartz away till both hands were filled with glowing yellow. He
+rubbed the dirt away from fragment after fragment, tossing them into
+the gold-pan. It was a treasure-hole. So much had the quartz rotted away
+that there was less of it than there was of gold. Now and again he found
+a piece to which no rock clung—a piece that was all gold. A chunk,
+where the pick had laid open the heart of the gold, glittered like a
+handful of yellow jewels, and he cocked his head at it and slowly turned
+it around and over to observe the rich play of the light upon it.
+
+“Talk about yer Too Much Gold diggin’s!” the man snorted contemptuously.
+“Why, this diggin’ ‘d make it look like thirty cents. This diggin’
+is All Gold. An’ right here an’ now I name this yere canyon ‘All Gold
+Canyon,’ b’ gosh!”
+
+Still squatting on his heels, he continued examining the fragments and
+tossing them into the pan. Suddenly there came to him a premonition of
+danger. It seemed a shadow had fallen upon him. But there was no shadow.
+His heart had given a great jump up into his throat and was choking him.
+Then his blood slowly chilled and he felt the sweat of his shirt cold
+against his flesh.
+
+He did not spring up nor look around. He did not move. He was
+considering the nature of the premonition he had received, trying to
+locate the source of the mysterious force that had warned him, striving
+to sense the imperative presence of the unseen thing that threatened
+him. There is an aura of things hostile, made manifest by messengers
+refined for the senses to know; and this aura he felt, but knew not how
+he felt it. His was the feeling as when a cloud passes over the sun.
+It seemed that between him and life had passed something dark and
+smothering and menacing; a gloom, as it were, that swallowed up life and
+made for death—his death.
+
+Every force of his being impelled him to spring up and confront the
+unseen danger, but his soul dominated the panic, and he remained
+squatting on his heels, in his hands a chunk of gold. He did not dare to
+look around, but he knew by now that there was something behind him and
+above him. He made believe to be interested in the gold in his hand.
+He examined it critically, turned it over and over, and rubbed the dirt
+from it. And all the time he knew that something behind him was looking
+at the gold over his shoulder.
+
+Still feigning interest in the chunk of gold in his hand, he listened
+intently and he heard the breathing of the thing behind him. His eyes
+searched the ground in front of him for a weapon, but they saw only
+the uprooted gold, worthless to him now in his extremity. There was his
+pick, a handy weapon on occasion; but this was not such an occasion.
+The man realized his predicament. He was in a narrow hole that was seven
+feet deep. His head did not come to the surface of the ground. He was in
+a trap.
+
+He remained squatting on his heels. He was quite cool and collected; but
+his mind, considering every factor, showed him only his helplessness.
+He continued rubbing the dirt from the quartz fragments and throwing
+the gold into the pan. There was nothing else for him to do. Yet he knew
+that he would have to rise up, sooner or later, and face the danger that
+breathed at his back.
+
+The minutes passed, and with the passage of each minute he knew that by
+so much he was nearer the time when he must stand up, or else—and his
+wet shirt went cold against his flesh again at the thought—or else he
+might receive death as he stooped there over his treasure.
+
+Still he squatted on his heels, rubbing dirt from gold and debating in
+just what manner he should rise up. He might rise up with a rush and
+claw his way out of the hole to meet whatever threatened on the even
+footing above ground. Or he might rise up slowly and carelessly, and
+feign casually to discover the thing that breathed at his back. His
+instinct and every fighting fibre of his body favored the mad, clawing
+rush to the surface. His intellect, and the craft thereof, favored the
+slow and cautious meeting with the thing that menaced and which he could
+not see. And while he debated, a loud, crashing noise burst on his ear.
+At the same instant he received a stunning blow on the left side of
+the back, and from the point of impact felt a rush of flame through his
+flesh. He sprang up in the air, but halfway to his feet collapsed. His
+body crumpled in like a leaf withered in sudden heat, and he came down,
+his chest across his pan of gold, his face in the dirt and rock, his
+legs tangled and twisted because of the restricted space at the bottom
+of the hole. His legs twitched convulsively several times. His body was
+shaken as with a mighty ague. There was a slow expansion of the lungs,
+accompanied by a deep sigh. Then the air was slowly, very slowly,
+exhaled, and his body as slowly flattened itself down into inertness.
+
+Above, revolver in hand, a man was peering down over the edge of the
+hole. He peered for a long time at the prone and motionless body beneath
+him. After a while the stranger sat down on the edge of the hole so that
+he could see into it, and rested the revolver on his knee. Reaching
+his hand into a pocket, he drew out a wisp of brown paper. Into this
+he dropped a few crumbs of tobacco. The combination became a cigarette,
+brown and squat, with the ends turned in. Not once did he take his eyes
+from the body at the bottom of the hole. He lighted the cigarette and
+drew its smoke into his lungs with a caressing intake of the breath. He
+smoked slowly. Once the cigarette went out and he relighted it. And all
+the while he studied the body beneath him.
+
+In the end he tossed the cigarette stub away and rose to his feet. He
+moved to the edge of the hole. Spanning it, a hand resting on each edge,
+and with the revolver still in the right hand, he muscled his body
+down into the hole. While his feet were yet a yard from the bottom he
+released his hands and dropped down.
+
+At the instant his feet struck bottom he saw the pocket-miner’s arm leap
+out, and his own legs knew a swift, jerking grip that overthrew him. In
+the nature of the jump his revolver-hand was above his head. Swiftly
+as the grip had flashed about his legs, just as swiftly he brought
+the revolver down. He was still in the air, his fall in process of
+completion, when he pulled the trigger. The explosion was deafening
+in the confined space. The smoke filled the hole so that he could
+see nothing. He struck the bottom on his back, and like a cat’s the
+pocket-miner’s body was on top of him. Even as the miner’s body passed
+on top, the stranger crooked in his right arm to fire; and even in that
+instant the miner, with a quick thrust of elbow, struck his wrist. The
+muzzle was thrown up and the bullet thudded into the dirt of the side of
+the hole.
+
+The next instant the stranger felt the miner’s hand grip his wrist. The
+struggle was now for the revolver. Each man strove to turn it against
+the other’s body. The smoke in the hole was clearing. The stranger,
+lying on his back, was beginning to see dimly. But suddenly he was
+blinded by a handful of dirt deliberately flung into his eyes by his
+antagonist. In that moment of shock his grip on the revolver was broken.
+In the next moment he felt a smashing darkness descend upon his brain,
+and in the midst of the darkness even the darkness ceased.
+
+But the pocket-miner fired again and again, until the revolver was
+empty. Then he tossed it from him and, breathing heavily, sat down on
+the dead man’s legs.
+
+The miner was sobbing and struggling for breath. “Measly skunk!” he
+panted; “a-campin’ on my trail an’ lettin’ me do the work, an’ then
+shootin’ me in the back!”
+
+He was half crying from anger and exhaustion. He peered at the face of
+the dead man. It was sprinkled with loose dirt and gravel, and it was
+difficult to distinguish the features.
+
+“Never laid eyes on him before,” the miner concluded his scrutiny. “Just
+a common an’ ordinary thief, damn him! An’ he shot me in the back! He
+shot me in the back!”
+
+He opened his shirt and felt himself, front and back, on his left side.
+
+“Went clean through, and no harm done!” he cried jubilantly. “I’ll bet
+he aimed right all right, but he drew the gun over when he pulled the
+trigger—the cuss! But I fixed ‘m! Oh, I fixed ‘m!”
+
+His fingers were investigating the bullet-hole in his side, and a shade
+of regret passed over his face. “It’s goin’ to be stiffer’n hell,” he
+said. “An’ it’s up to me to get mended an’ get out o’ here.”
+
+He crawled out of the hole and went down the hill to his camp. Half an
+hour later he returned, leading his pack-horse. His open shirt disclosed
+the rude bandages with which he had dressed his wound. He was slow and
+awkward with his left-hand movements, but that did not prevent his using
+the arm.
+
+The bight of the pack-rope under the dead man’s shoulders enabled him
+to heave the body out of the hole. Then he set to work gathering up his
+gold. He worked steadily for several hours, pausing often to rest his
+stiffening shoulder and to exclaim:
+
+“He shot me in the back, the measly skunk! He shot me in the back!”
+
+When his treasure was quite cleaned up and wrapped securely into a
+number of blanket-covered parcels, he made an estimate of its value.
+
+“Four hundred pounds, or I’m a Hottentot,” he concluded. “Say two
+hundred in quartz an’ dirt—that leaves two hundred pounds of gold.
+Bill! Wake up! Two hundred pounds of gold! Forty thousand dollars! An’
+it’s yourn—all yourn!”
+
+He scratched his head delightedly and his fingers blundered into an
+unfamiliar groove. They quested along it for several inches. It was a
+crease through his scalp where the second bullet had ploughed.
+
+He walked angrily over to the dead man.
+
+“You would, would you?” he bullied. “You would, eh? Well, I fixed you
+good an’ plenty, an’ I’ll give you decent burial, too. That’s more’n
+you’d have done for me.”
+
+He dragged the body to the edge of the hole and toppled it in. It struck
+the bottom with a dull crash, on its side, the face twisted up to the
+light. The miner peered down at it.
+
+“An’ you shot me in the back!” he said accusingly.
+
+With pick and shovel he filled the hole. Then he loaded the gold on his
+horse. It was too great a load for the animal, and when he had gained
+his camp he transferred part of it to his saddle-horse. Even so, he
+was compelled to abandon a portion of his outfit—pick and shovel and
+gold-pan, extra food and cooking utensils, and divers odds and ends.
+
+The sun was at the zenith when the man forced the horses at the screen
+of vines and creepers. To climb the huge boulders the animals were
+compelled to uprear and struggle blindly through the tangled mass of
+vegetation. Once the saddle-horse fell heavily and the man removed the
+pack to get the animal on its feet. After it started on its way again
+the man thrust his head out from among the leaves and peered up at the
+hillside.
+
+“The measly skunk!” he said, and disappeared.
+
+There was a ripping and tearing of vines and boughs. The trees surged
+back and forth, marking the passage of the animals through the midst
+of them. There was a clashing of steel-shod hoofs on stone, and now and
+again an oath or a sharp cry of command. Then the voice of the man was
+raised in song:—
+
+    “Tu’n around an’ tu’n yo’ face
+    Untoe them sweet hills of grace
+      (D’ pow’rs of sin yo’ am scornin’!).
+    Look about an, look aroun’,
+    Fling yo’ sin-pack on d’ groun’
+      (Yo’ will meet wid d’ Lord in d’ mornin’!).”
+
+The song grew faint and fainter, and through the silence crept back the
+spirit of the place. The stream once more drowsed and whispered; the hum
+of the mountain bees rose sleepily. Down through the perfume-weighted
+air fluttered the snowy fluffs of the cottonwoods. The butterflies
+drifted in and out among the trees, and over all blazed the quiet
+sunshine. Only remained the hoof-marks in the meadow and the torn
+hillside to mark the boisterous trail of the life that had broken the
+peace of the place and passed on.
+
+
+
+
+PLANCHETTE
+
+
+“It is my right to know,” the girl said.
+
+Her voice was firm-fibred with determination. There was no hint of
+pleading in it, yet it was the determination that is reached through a
+long period of pleading. But in her case it had been pleading, not of
+speech, but of personality. Her lips had been ever mute, but her face
+and eyes, and the very attitude of her soul, had been for a long time
+eloquent with questioning. This the man had known, but he had never
+answered; and now she was demanding by the spoken word that he answer.
+
+“It is my right,” the girl repeated.
+
+“I know it,” he answered, desperately and helplessly.
+
+She waited, in the silence which followed, her eyes fixed upon the light
+that filtered down through the lofty boughs and bathed the great redwood
+trunks in mellow warmth. This light, subdued and colored, seemed almost
+a radiation from the trunks themselves, so strongly did they saturate
+it with their hue. The girl saw without seeing, as she heard, without
+hearing, the deep gurgling of the stream far below on the canyon bottom.
+
+She looked down at the man. “Well?” she asked, with the firmness which
+feigns belief that obedience will be forthcoming.
+
+She was sitting upright, her back against a fallen tree-trunk, while
+he lay near to her, on his side, an elbow on the ground and the hand
+supporting his head.
+
+“Dear, dear Lute,” he murmured.
+
+She shivered at the sound of his voice—not from repulsion, but from
+struggle against the fascination of its caressing gentleness. She had
+come to know well the lure of the man—the wealth of easement and rest
+that was promised by every caressing intonation of his voice, by the
+mere touch of hand on hand or the faint impact of his breath on neck
+or cheek. The man could not express himself by word nor look nor touch
+without weaving into the expression, subtly and occultly, the feeling as
+of a hand that passed and that in passing stroked softly and soothingly.
+Nor was this all-pervading caress a something that cloyed with too great
+sweetness; nor was it sickly sentimental; nor was it maudlin with love’s
+madness. It was vigorous, compelling, masculine. For that matter, it was
+largely unconscious on the man’s part. He was only dimly aware of it.
+It was a part of him, the breath of his soul as it were, involuntary and
+unpremeditated.
+
+But now, resolved and desperate, she steeled herself against him. He
+tried to face her, but her gray eyes looked out to him, steadily, from
+under cool, level brows, and he dropped his head upon her knee. Her hand
+strayed into his hair softly, and her face melted into solicitude and
+tenderness. But when he looked up again, her gray eyes were steady, her
+brows cool and level.
+
+“What more can I tell you?” the man said. He raised his head and met
+her gaze. “I cannot marry you. I cannot marry any woman. I love you—you
+know that—better than my own life. I weigh you in the scales against
+all the dear things of living, and you outweigh everything. I would
+give everything to possess you, yet I may not. I cannot marry you. I can
+never marry you.”
+
+Her lips were compressed with the effort of control. His head was
+sinking back to her knee, when she checked him.
+
+“You are already married, Chris?”
+
+“No! no!” he cried vehemently. “I have never been married. I want to
+marry only you, and I cannot!”
+
+“Then—”
+
+“Don’t!” he interrupted. “Don’t ask me!”
+
+“It is my right to know,” she repeated.
+
+“I know it,” he again interrupted. “But I cannot tell you.”
+
+“You have not considered me, Chris,” she went on gently.
+
+“I know, I know,” he broke in.
+
+“You cannot have considered me. You do not know what I have to bear from
+my people because of you.”
+
+“I did not think they felt so very unkindly toward me,” he said
+bitterly.
+
+“It is true. They can scarcely tolerate you. They do not show it to you,
+but they almost hate you. It is I who have had to bear all this. It was
+not always so, though. They liked you at first as ... as I liked you. But
+that was four years ago. The time passed by—a year, two years; and then
+they began to turn against you. They are not to be blamed. You spoke no
+word. They felt that you were destroying my life. It is four years, now,
+and you have never once mentioned marriage to them. What were they to
+think? What they have thought, that you were destroying my life.”
+
+As she talked, she continued to pass her fingers caressingly through his
+hair, sorrowful for the pain that she was inflicting.
+
+“They did like you at first. Who can help liking you? You seem to draw
+affection from all living things, as the trees draw the moisture from
+the ground. It comes to you as it were your birthright. Aunt Mildred and
+Uncle Robert thought there was nobody like you. The sun rose and set in
+you. They thought I was the luckiest girl alive to win the love of a man
+like you. ‘For it looks very much like it,’ Uncle Robert used to say,
+wagging his head wickedly at me. Of course they liked you. Aunt Mildred
+used to sigh, and look across teasingly at Uncle, and say, ‘When I think
+of Chris, it almost makes me wish I were younger myself.’ And Uncle
+would answer, ‘I don’t blame you, my dear, not in the least.’ And then
+the pair of them would beam upon me their congratulations that I had won
+the love of a man like you.
+
+“And they knew I loved you as well. How could I hide it?—this great,
+wonderful thing that had entered into my life and swallowed up all my
+days! For four years, Chris, I have lived only for you. Every moment was
+yours. Waking, I loved you. Sleeping, I dreamed of you. Every act I have
+performed was shaped by you, by the thought of you. Even my thoughts
+were moulded by you, by the invisible presence of you. I had no end,
+petty or great, that you were not there for me.”
+
+“I had no idea of imposing such slavery,” he muttered.
+
+“You imposed nothing. You always let me have my own way. It was you
+who were the obedient slave. You did for me without offending me. You
+forestalled my wishes without the semblance of forestalling them, so
+natural and inevitable was everything you did for me. I said, without
+offending me. You were no dancing puppet. You made no fuss. Don’t you
+see? You did not seem to do things at all. Somehow they were always
+there, just done, as a matter of course.
+
+“The slavery was love’s slavery. It was just my love for you that made
+you swallow up all my days. You did not force yourself into my thoughts.
+You crept in, always, and you were there always—how much, you will
+never know.
+
+“But as time went by, Aunt Mildred and Uncle grew to dislike you. They
+grew afraid. What was to become of me? You were destroying my life. My
+music? You know how my dream of it has dimmed away. That spring, when I
+first met you—I was twenty, and I was about to start for Germany. I
+was going to study hard. That was four years ago, and I am still here in
+California.
+
+“I had other lovers. You drove them away—No! no! I don’t mean that. It
+was I that drove them away. What did I care for lovers, for anything,
+when you were near? But as I said, Aunt Mildred and Uncle grew afraid.
+There has been talk—friends, busybodies, and all the rest. The time
+went by. You did not speak. I could only wonder, wonder. I knew you
+loved me. Much was said against you by Uncle at first, and then by Aunt
+Mildred. They were father and mother to me, you know. I could not defend
+you. Yet I was loyal to you. I refused to discuss you. I closed up.
+There was half-estrangement in my home—Uncle Robert with a face like
+an undertaker, and Aunt Mildred’s heart breaking. But what could I do,
+Chris? What could I do?”
+
+The man, his head resting on her knee again, groaned, but made no other
+reply.
+
+“Aunt Mildred was mother to me, yet I went to her no more with my
+confidences. My childhood’s book was closed. It was a sweet book, Chris.
+The tears come into my eyes sometimes when I think of it. But never
+mind that. Great happiness has been mine as well. I am glad I can talk
+frankly of my love for you. And the attaining of such frankness has been
+very sweet. I do love you, Chris. I love you ... I cannot tell you how.
+You are everything to me, and more besides. You remember that Christmas
+tree of the children?—when we played blindman’s buff? and you caught
+me by the arm so, with such a clutching of fingers that I cried out
+with the hurt? I never told you, but the arm was badly bruised. And such
+sweet I got of it you could never guess. There, black and blue, was the
+imprint of your fingers—your fingers, Chris, your fingers. It was
+the touch of you made visible. It was there a week, and I kissed the
+marks—oh, so often! I hated to see them go; I wanted to rebruise the
+arm and make them linger. I was jealous of the returning white that
+drove the bruise away. Somehow,—oh! I cannot explain, but I loved you
+so!”
+
+In the silence that fell, she continued her caressing of his hair, while
+she idly watched a great gray squirrel, boisterous and hilarious, as
+it scampered back and forth in a distant vista of the redwoods. A
+crimson-crested woodpecker, energetically drilling a fallen trunk,
+caught and transferred her gaze. The man did not lift his head. Rather,
+he crushed his face closer against her knee, while his heaving shoulders
+marked the hardness with which he breathed.
+
+“You must tell me, Chris,” the girl said gently. “This mystery—it is
+killing me. I must know why we cannot be married. Are we always to be
+this way?—merely lovers, meeting often, it is true, and yet with the
+long absences between the meetings? Is it all the world holds for you
+and me, Chris? Are we never to be more to each other? Oh, it is good
+just to love, I know—you have made me madly happy; but one does get so
+hungry at times for something more! I want more and more of you, Chris.
+I want all of you. I want all our days to be together. I want all the
+companionship, the comradeship, which cannot be ours now, and which will
+be ours when we are married—” She caught her breath quickly. “But we
+are never to be married. I forgot. And you must tell me why.”
+
+The man raised his head and looked her in the eyes. It was a way he had
+with whomever he talked, of looking them in the eyes.
+
+“I have considered you, Lute,” he began doggedly. “I did consider you at
+the very first. I should never have gone on with it. I should have gone
+away. I knew it. And I considered you in the light of that knowledge,
+and yet ... I did not go away. My God! what was I to do? I loved you.
+I could not go away. I could not help it. I stayed. I resolved, but
+I broke my resolves. I was like a drunkard. I was drunk of you. I was
+weak, I know. I failed. I could not go away. I tried. I went away—you
+will remember, though you did not know why. You know now. I went away,
+but I could not remain away. Knowing that we could never marry, I came
+back to you. I am here, now, with you. Send me away, Lute. I have not
+the strength to go myself.”
+
+“But why should you go away?” she asked. “Besides, I must know why,
+before I can send you away.”
+
+“Don’t ask me.”
+
+“Tell me,” she said, her voice tenderly imperative.
+
+“Don’t, Lute; don’t force me,” the man pleaded, and there was appeal in
+his eyes and voice.
+
+“But you must tell me,” she insisted. “It is justice you owe me.”
+
+The man wavered. “If I do ...” he began. Then he ended with
+determination, “I should never be able to forgive myself. No, I cannot
+tell you. Don’t try to compel me, Lute. You would be as sorry as I.”
+
+“If there is anything ... if there are obstacles ... if this mystery does
+really prevent....” She was speaking slowly, with long pauses, seeking
+the more delicate ways of speech for the framing of her thought. “Chris,
+I do love you. I love you as deeply as it is possible for any woman to
+love, I am sure. If you were to say to me now ‘Come,’ I would go with
+you. I would follow wherever you led. I would be your page, as in the
+days of old when ladies went with their knights to far lands. You are my
+knight, Chris, and you can do no wrong. Your will is my wish. I was once
+afraid of the censure of the world. Now that you have come into my life
+I am no longer afraid. I would laugh at the world and its censure for
+your sake—for my sake too. I would laugh, for I should have you, and
+you are more to me than the good will and approval of the world. If you
+say ‘Come,’ I will—”
+
+“Don’t! Don’t!” he cried. “It is impossible! Marriage or not, I cannot
+even say ‘Come.’ I dare not. I’ll show you. I’ll tell you.”
+
+He sat up beside her, the action stamped with resolve. He took her hand
+in his and held it closely. His lips moved to the verge of speech. The
+mystery trembled for utterance. The air was palpitant with its presence.
+As if it were an irrevocable decree, the girl steeled herself to hear.
+But the man paused, gazing straight out before him. She felt his hand
+relax in hers, and she pressed it sympathetically, encouragingly. But
+she felt the rigidity going out of his tensed body, and she knew that
+spirit and flesh were relaxing together. His resolution was ebbing. He
+would not speak—she knew it; and she knew, likewise, with the sureness
+of faith, that it was because he could not.
+
+She gazed despairingly before her, a numb feeling at her heart, as
+though hope and happiness had died. She watched the sun flickering down
+through the warm-trunked redwoods. But she watched in a mechanical,
+absent way. She looked at the scene as from a long way off, without
+interest, herself an alien, no longer an intimate part of the earth and
+trees and flowers she loved so well.
+
+So far removed did she seem, that she was aware of a curiosity,
+strangely impersonal, in what lay around her. Through a near vista she
+looked at a buckeye tree in full blossom as though her eyes encountered
+it for the first time. Her eyes paused and dwelt upon a yellow cluster
+of Diogenes’ lanterns that grew on the edge of an open space. It was the
+way of flowers always to give her quick pleasure-thrills, but no thrill
+was hers now. She pondered the flower slowly and thoughtfully, as a
+hasheesh-eater, heavy with the drug, might ponder some whim-flower
+that obtruded on his vision. In her ears was the voice of the stream—a
+hoarse-throated, sleepy old giant, muttering and mumbling his somnolent
+fancies. But her fancy was not in turn aroused, as was its wont; she
+knew the sound merely for water rushing over the rocks of the deep
+canyon-bottom, that and nothing more.
+
+Her gaze wandered on beyond the Diogenes’ lanterns into the open
+space. Knee-deep in the wild oats of the hillside grazed two horses,
+chestnut-sorrels the pair of them, perfectly matched, warm and golden
+in the sunshine, their spring-coats a sheen of high-lights shot through
+with color-flashes that glowed like fiery jewels. She recognized, almost
+with a shock, that one of them was hers, Dolly, the companion of her
+girlhood and womanhood, on whose neck she had sobbed her sorrows and
+sung her joys. A moistness welled into her eyes at the sight, and
+she came back from the remoteness of her mood, quick with passion and
+sorrow, to be part of the world again.
+
+The man sank forward from the hips, relaxing entirely, and with a groan
+dropped his head on her knee. She leaned over him and pressed her lips
+softly and lingeringly to his hair.
+
+“Come, let us go,” she said, almost in a whisper.
+
+She caught her breath in a half-sob, then tightened her lips as she
+rose. His face was white to ghastliness, so shaken was he by the
+struggle through which he had passed. They did not look at each other,
+but walked directly to the horses. She leaned against Dolly’s neck while
+he tightened the girths. Then she gathered the reins in her hand and
+waited. He looked at her as he bent down, an appeal for forgiveness in
+his eyes; and in that moment her own eyes answered. Her foot rested in
+his hands, and from there she vaulted into the saddle. Without speaking,
+without further looking at each other, they turned the horses’ heads and
+took the narrow trail that wound down through the sombre redwood aisles
+and across the open glades to the pasture-lands below. The trail became
+a cow-path, the cow-path became a wood-road, which later joined with a
+hay-road; and they rode down through the low-rolling, tawny California
+hills to where a set of bars let out on the county road which ran
+along the bottom of the valley. The girl sat her horse while the man
+dismounted and began taking down the bars.
+
+“No—wait!” she cried, before he had touched the two lower bars.
+
+She urged the mare forward a couple of strides, and then the animal
+lifted over the bars in a clean little jump. The man’s eyes sparkled,
+and he clapped his hands.
+
+“You beauty! you beauty!” the girl cried, leaning forward impulsively
+in the saddle and pressing her cheek to the mare’s neck where it burned
+flame-color in the sun.
+
+“Let’s trade horses for the ride in,” she suggested, when he had led
+his horse through and finished putting up the bars. “You’ve never
+sufficiently appreciated Dolly.”
+
+“No, no,” he protested.
+
+“You think she is too old, too sedate,” Lute insisted. “She’s only
+sixteen, and she can outrun nine colts out of ten. Only she never cuts
+up. She’s too steady, and you don’t approve of her—no, don’t deny it,
+sir. I know. And I know also that she can outrun your vaunted Washoe
+Ban. There! I challenge you! And furthermore, you may ride her yourself.
+You know what Ban can do; so you must ride Dolly and see for yourself
+what she can do.”
+
+They proceeded to exchange the saddles on the horses, glad of the
+diversion and making the most of it.
+
+“I’m glad I was born in California,” Lute remarked, as she swung
+astride of Ban. “It’s an outrage both to horse and woman to ride in a
+sidesaddle.”
+
+“You look like a young Amazon,” the man said approvingly, his eyes
+passing tenderly over the girl as she swung the horse around.
+
+“Are you ready?” she asked.
+
+“All ready!”
+
+“To the old mill,” she called, as the horses sprang forward. “That’s
+less than a mile.”
+
+“To a finish?” he demanded.
+
+She nodded, and the horses, feeling the urge of the reins, caught the
+spirit of the race. The dust rose in clouds behind as they tore along
+the level road. They swung around the bend, horses and riders tilted at
+sharp angles to the ground, and more than once the riders ducked low to
+escape the branches of outreaching and overhanging trees. They clattered
+over the small plank bridges, and thundered over the larger iron ones to
+an ominous clanking of loose rods.
+
+They rode side by side, saving the animals for the rush at the finish,
+yet putting them at a pace that drew upon vitality and staying power.
+Curving around a clump of white oaks, the road straightened out before
+them for several hundred yards, at the end of which they could see the
+ruined mill.
+
+“Now for it!” the girl cried.
+
+She urged the horse by suddenly leaning forward with her body, at the
+same time, for an instant, letting the rein slack and touching the neck
+with her bridle hand. She began to draw away from the man.
+
+“Touch her on the neck!” she cried to him.
+
+With this, the mare pulled alongside and began gradually to pass the
+girl. Chris and Lute looked at each other for a moment, the mare still
+drawing ahead, so that Chris was compelled slowly to turn his head. The
+mill was a hundred yards away.
+
+“Shall I give him the spurs?” Lute shouted.
+
+The man nodded, and the girl drove the spurs in sharply and quickly,
+calling upon the horse for its utmost, but watched her own horse forge
+slowly ahead of her.
+
+“Beaten by three lengths!” Lute beamed triumphantly, as they pulled into
+a walk. “Confess, sir, confess! You didn’t think the old mare had it in
+her.”
+
+Lute leaned to the side and rested her hand for a moment on Dolly’s wet
+neck.
+
+“Ban’s a sluggard alongside of her,” Chris affirmed. “Dolly’s all right,
+if she is in her Indian Summer.”
+
+Lute nodded approval. “That’s a sweet way of putting it—Indian Summer.
+It just describes her. But she’s not lazy. She has all the fire and none
+of the folly. She is very wise, what of her years.”
+
+“That accounts for it,” Chris demurred. “Her folly passed with her
+youth. Many’s the lively time she’s given you.”
+
+“No,” Lute answered. “I never knew her really to cut up. I think the
+only trouble she ever gave me was when I was training her to open gates.
+She was afraid when they swung back upon her—the animal’s fear of the
+trap, perhaps. But she bravely got over it. And she never was vicious.
+She never bolted, nor bucked, nor cut up in all her life—never, not
+once.”
+
+The horses went on at a walk, still breathing heavily from their run.
+The road wound along the bottom of the valley, now and again crossing
+the stream. From either side rose the drowsy purr of mowing-machines,
+punctuated by occasional sharp cries of the men who were gathering the
+hay-crop. On the western side of the valley the hills rose green and
+dark, but the eastern side was already burned brown and tan by the sun.
+
+“There is summer, here is spring,” Lute said. “Oh, beautiful Sonoma
+Valley!”
+
+Her eyes were glistening and her face was radiant with love of the
+land. Her gaze wandered on across orchard patches and sweeping vineyard
+stretches, seeking out the purple which seemed to hang like a dim smoke
+in the wrinkles of the hills and in the more distant canyon gorges. Far
+up, among the more rugged crests, where the steep slopes were covered
+with manzanita, she caught a glimpse of a clear space where the wild
+grass had not yet lost its green.
+
+“Have you ever heard of the secret pasture?” she asked, her eyes still
+fixed on the remote green.
+
+A snort of fear brought her eyes back to the man beside her. Dolly,
+upreared, with distended nostrils and wild eyes, was pawing the air
+madly with her fore legs. Chris threw himself forward against her neck
+to keep her from falling backward, and at the same time touched her with
+the spurs to compel her to drop her fore feet to the ground in order to
+obey the go-ahead impulse of the spurs.
+
+“Why, Dolly, this is most remarkable,” Lute began reprovingly.
+
+But, to her surprise, the mare threw her head down, arched her back as
+she went up in the air, and, returning, struck the ground stiff-legged
+and bunched.
+
+“A genuine buck!” Chris called out, and the next moment the mare was
+rising under him in a second buck.
+
+Lute looked on, astounded at the unprecedented conduct of her mare, and
+admiring her lover’s horsemanship. He was quite cool, and was himself
+evidently enjoying the performance. Again and again, half a dozen times,
+Dolly arched herself into the air and struck, stiffly bunched. Then she
+threw her head straight up and rose on her hind legs, pivoting about and
+striking with her fore feet. Lute whirled into safety the horse she was
+riding, and as she did so caught a glimpse of Dolly’s eyes, with the
+look in them of blind brute madness, bulging until it seemed they must
+burst from her head. The faint pink in the white of the eyes was gone,
+replaced by a white that was like dull marble and that yet flashed as
+from some inner fire.
+
+A faint cry of fear, suppressed in the instant of utterance, slipped
+past Lute’s lips. One hind leg of the mare seemed to collapse, and for a
+moment the whole quivering body, upreared and perpendicular, swayed back
+and forth, and there was uncertainty as to whether it would fall forward
+or backward. The man, half-slipping sidewise from the saddle, so as to
+fall clear if the mare toppled backward, threw his weight to the front
+and alongside her neck. This overcame the dangerous teetering balance,
+and the mare struck the ground on her feet again.
+
+But there was no let-up. Dolly straightened out so that the line of the
+face was almost a continuation of the line of the stretched neck;
+this position enabled her to master the bit, which she did by bolting
+straight ahead down the road.
+
+For the first time Lute became really frightened. She spurred Washoe Ban
+in pursuit, but he could not hold his own with the mad mare, and dropped
+gradually behind. Lute saw Dolly check and rear in the air again, and
+caught up just as the mare made a second bolt. As Dolly dashed around a
+bend, she stopped suddenly, stiff-legged. Lute saw her lover torn out of
+the saddle, his thigh-grip broken by the sudden jerk. Though he had lost
+his seat, he had not been thrown, and as the mare dashed on Lute saw him
+clinging to the side of the horse, a hand in the mane and a leg across
+the saddle. With a quick cavort he regained his seat and proceeded to
+fight with the mare for control.
+
+But Dolly swerved from the road and dashed down a grassy slope yellowed
+with innumerable mariposa lilies. An ancient fence at the bottom was
+no obstacle. She burst through as though it were filmy spider-web and
+disappeared in the underbrush. Lute followed unhesitatingly, putting Ban
+through the gap in the fence and plunging on into the thicket. She lay
+along his neck, closely, to escape the ripping and tearing of the trees
+and vines. She felt the horse drop down through leafy branches and into
+the cool gravel of a stream’s bottom. From ahead came a splashing of
+water, and she caught a glimpse of Dolly, dashing up the small bank and
+into a clump of scrub-oaks, against the trunks of which she was trying
+to scrape off her rider.
+
+Lute almost caught up amongst the trees, but was hopelessly outdistanced
+on the fallow field adjoining, across which the mare tore with a fine
+disregard for heavy ground and gopher-holes. When she turned at a sharp
+angle into the thicket-land beyond, Lute took the long diagonal, skirted
+the ticket, and reined in Ban at the other side. She had arrived first.
+From within the thicket she could hear a tremendous crashing of brush
+and branches. Then the mare burst through and into the open, falling
+to her knees, exhausted, on the soft earth. She arose and staggered
+forward, then came limply to a halt. She was in lather-sweat of fear,
+and stood trembling pitiably.
+
+Chris was still on her back. His shirt was in ribbons. The backs of his
+hands were bruised and lacerated, while his face was streaming blood
+from a gash near the temple. Lute had controlled herself well, but now
+she was aware of a quick nausea and a trembling of weakness.
+
+“Chris!” she said, so softly that it was almost a whisper. Then she
+sighed, “Thank God.”
+
+“Oh, I’m all right,” he cried to her, putting into his voice all the
+heartiness he could command, which was not much, for he had himself been
+under no mean nervous strain.
+
+He showed the reaction he was undergoing, when he swung down out of
+the saddle. He began with a brave muscular display as he lifted his
+leg over, but ended, on his feet, leaning against the limp Dolly for
+support. Lute flashed out of her saddle, and her arms were about him in
+an embrace of thankfulness.
+
+“I know where there is a spring,” she said, a moment later.
+
+They left the horses standing untethered, and she led her lover into the
+cool recesses of the thicket to where crystal water bubbled from out the
+base of the mountain.
+
+“What was that you said about Dolly’s never cutting up?” he asked, when
+the blood had been stanched and his nerves and pulse-beats were normal
+again.
+
+“I am stunned,” Lute answered. “I cannot understand it. She never did
+anything like it in all her life. And all animals like you so—it’s not
+because of that. Why, she is a child’s horse. I was only a little girl
+when I first rode her, and to this day—”
+
+“Well, this day she was everything but a child’s horse,” Chris broke in.
+“She was a devil. She tried to scrape me off against the trees, and to
+batter my brains out against the limbs. She tried all the lowest and
+narrowest places she could find. You should have seen her squeeze
+through. And did you see those bucks?”
+
+Lute nodded.
+
+“Regular bucking-bronco proposition.”
+
+“But what should she know about bucking?” Lute demanded. “She was never
+known to buck—never.”
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. “Some forgotten instinct, perhaps,
+long-lapsed and come to life again.”
+
+The girl rose to her feet determinedly. “I’m going to find out,” she
+said.
+
+They went back to the horses, where they subjected Dolly to a
+rigid examination that disclosed nothing. Hoofs, legs, bit, mouth,
+body—everything was as it should be. The saddle and saddle-cloth were
+innocent of bur or sticker; the back was smooth and unbroken. They
+searched for sign of snake-bite and sting of fly or insect, but found
+nothing.
+
+“Whatever it was, it was subjective, that much is certain,” Chris said.
+
+“Obsession,” Lute suggested.
+
+They laughed together at the idea, for both were twentieth-century
+products, healthy-minded and normal, with souls that delighted in
+the butterfly-chase of ideals but that halted before the brink where
+superstition begins.
+
+“An evil spirit,” Chris laughed; “but what evil have I done that I
+should be so punished?”
+
+“You think too much of yourself, sir,” she rejoined. “It is more likely
+some evil, I don’t know what, that Dolly has done. You were a mere
+accident. I might have been on her back at the time, or Aunt Mildred, or
+anybody.”
+
+As she talked, she took hold of the stirrup-strap and started to shorten
+it.
+
+“What are you doing?” Chris demanded.
+
+“I’m going to ride Dolly in.”
+
+“No, you’re not,” he announced. “It would be bad discipline. After what
+has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.”
+
+But it was a very weak and very sick mare he rode, stumbling and
+halting, afflicted with nervous jerks and recurring muscular spasms—the
+aftermath of the tremendous orgasm through which she had passed.
+
+“I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has
+happened,” Lute said, as they rode into camp.
+
+It was a summer camp of city-tired people, pitched in a grove of
+towering redwoods through whose lofty boughs the sunshine trickled down,
+broken and subdued to soft light and cool shadow. Apart from the main
+camp were the kitchen and the servants’ tents; and midway between was
+the great dining hall, walled by the living redwood columns, where fresh
+whispers of air were always to be found, and where no canopy was needed
+to keep the sun away.
+
+“Poor Dolly, she is really sick,” Lute said that evening, when they had
+returned from a last look at the mare. “But you weren’t hurt, Chris, and
+that’s enough for one small woman to be thankful for. I thought I knew,
+but I really did not know till to-day, how much you meant to me. I could
+hear only the plunging and struggle in the thicket. I could not see you,
+nor know how it went with you.”
+
+“My thoughts were of you,” Chris answered, and felt the responsive
+pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.
+
+She turned her face up to his and met his lips.
+
+“Good night,” she said.
+
+“Dear Lute, dear Lute,” he caressed her with his voice as she moved away
+among the shadows.
+
+    *       *       *
+
+“Who’s going for the mail?” called a woman’s voice through the trees.
+
+Lute closed the book from which they had been reading, and sighed.
+
+“We weren’t going to ride to-day,” she said.
+
+“Let me go,” Chris proposed. “You stay here. I’ll be down and back in no
+time.”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“Who’s going for the mail?” the voice insisted.
+
+“Where’s Martin?” Lute called, lifting her voice in answer.
+
+“I don’t know,” came the voice. “I think Robert took him along
+somewhere—horse-buying, or fishing, or I don’t know what. There’s
+really nobody left but Chris and you. Besides, it will give you an
+appetite for dinner. You’ve been lounging in the hammock all day. And
+Uncle Robert must have his newspaper.”
+
+“All right, Aunty, we’re starting,” Lute called back, getting out of the
+hammock.
+
+A few minutes later, in riding-clothes, they were saddling the horses.
+They rode out on to the county road, where blazed the afternoon sun,
+and turned toward Glen Ellen. The little town slept in the sun, and the
+somnolent storekeeper and postmaster scarcely kept his eyes open long
+enough to make up the packet of letters and newspapers.
+
+An hour later Lute and Chris turned aside from the road and dipped along
+a cow-path down the high bank to water the horses, before going into
+camp.
+
+“Dolly looks as though she’d forgotten all about yesterday,” Chris said,
+as they sat their horses knee-deep in the rushing water. “Look at her.”
+
+The mare had raised her head and cocked her ears at the rustling of
+a quail in the thicket. Chris leaned over and rubbed around her ears.
+Dolly’s enjoyment was evident, and she drooped her head over against the
+shoulder of his own horse.
+
+“Like a kitten,” was Lute’s comment.
+
+“Yet I shall never be able wholly to trust her again,” Chris said. “Not
+after yesterday’s mad freak.”
+
+“I have a feeling myself that you are safer on Ban,” Lute laughed. “It
+is strange. My trust in Dolly is as implicit as ever. I feel confident
+so far as I am concerned, but I should never care to see you on her
+back again. Now with Ban, my faith is still unshaken. Look at that neck!
+Isn’t he handsome! He’ll be as wise as Dolly when he is as old as she.”
+
+“I feel the same way,” Chris laughed back. “Ban could never possibly
+betray me.”
+
+They turned their horses out of the stream. Dolly stopped to brush a fly
+from her knee with her nose, and Ban urged past into the narrow way of
+the path. The space was too restricted to make him return, save with
+much trouble, and Chris allowed him to go on. Lute, riding behind, dwelt
+with her eyes upon her lover’s back, pleasuring in the lines of the bare
+neck and the sweep out to the muscular shoulders.
+
+Suddenly she reined in her horse. She could do nothing but look, so
+brief was the duration of the happening. Beneath and above was the
+almost perpendicular bank. The path itself was barely wide enough for
+footing. Yet Washoe Ban, whirling and rearing at the same time, toppled
+for a moment in the air and fell backward off the path.
+
+So unexpected and so quick was it, that the man was involved in the
+fall. There had been no time for him to throw himself to the path. He
+was falling ere he knew it, and he did the only thing possible—slipped
+the stirrups and threw his body into the air, to the side, and at the
+same time down. It was twelve feet to the rocks below. He maintained an
+upright position, his head up and his eyes fixed on the horse above him
+and falling upon him.
+
+Chris struck like a cat, on his feet, on the instant making a leap
+to the side. The next instant Ban crashed down beside him. The animal
+struggled little, but sounded the terrible cry that horses sometimes
+sound when they have received mortal hurt. He had struck almost squarely
+on his back, and in that position he remained, his head twisted partly
+under, his hind legs relaxed and motionless, his fore legs futilely
+striking the air.
+
+Chris looked up reassuringly.
+
+“I am getting used to it,” Lute smiled down to him. “Of course I need
+not ask if you are hurt. Can I do anything?”
+
+He smiled back and went over to the fallen beast, letting go the girths
+of the saddle and getting the head straightened out.
+
+“I thought so,” he said, after a cursory examination. “I thought so at
+the time. Did you hear that sort of crunching snap?”
+
+She shuddered.
+
+“Well, that was the punctuation of life, the final period dropped at
+the end of Ban’s usefulness.” He started around to come up by the path.
+“I’ve been astride of Ban for the last time. Let us go home.”
+
+At the top of the bank Chris turned and looked down.
+
+“Good-by, Washoe Ban!” he called out. “Good-by, old fellow.”
+
+The animal was struggling to lift its head. There were tears in Chris’s
+eyes as he turned abruptly away, and tears in Lute’s eyes as they met
+his. She was silent in her sympathy, though the pressure of her hand was
+firm in his as he walked beside her horse down the dusty road.
+
+“It was done deliberately,” Chris burst forth suddenly. “There was no
+warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.”
+
+“There was no warning,” Lute concurred. “I was looking. I saw him. He
+whirled and threw himself at the same time, just as if you had done it
+yourself, with a tremendous jerk and backward pull on the bit.”
+
+“It was not my hand, I swear it. I was not even thinking of him. He was
+going up with a fairly loose rein, as a matter of course.”
+
+“I should have seen it, had you done it,” Lute said. “But it was all
+done before you had a chance to do anything. It was not your hand, not
+even your unconscious hand.”
+
+“Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don’t know where.”
+
+He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.
+
+Martin stepped forward to receive Dolly, when they came into the stable
+end of the grove, but his face expressed no surprise at sight of Chris
+coming in on foot. Chris lingered behind Lute for moment.
+
+“Can you shoot a horse?” he asked.
+
+The groom nodded, then added, “Yes, sir,” with a second and deeper nod.
+
+“How do you do it?”
+
+“Draw a line from the eyes to the ears—I mean the opposite ears, sir.
+And where the lines cross—”
+
+“That will do,” Chris interrupted. “You know the watering place at the
+second bend. You’ll find Ban there with a broken back.”
+
+    *       *       *
+
+“Oh, here you are, sir. I have been looking for you everywhere since
+dinner. You are wanted immediately.”
+
+Chris tossed his cigar away, then went over and pressed his foot on its
+glowing fire.
+
+“You haven’t told anybody about it?—Ban?” he queried.
+
+Lute shook her head. “They’ll learn soon enough. Martin will mention it
+to Uncle Robert to-morrow.”
+
+“But don’t feel too bad about it,” she said, after a moment’s pause,
+slipping her hand into his.
+
+“He was my colt,” he said. “Nobody has ridden him but you. I broke him
+myself. I knew him from the time he was born. I knew every bit of him,
+every trick, every caper, and I would have staked my life that it was
+impossible for him to do a thing like this. There was no warning, no
+fighting for the bit, no previous unruliness. I have been thinking it
+over. He didn’t fight for the bit, for that matter. He wasn’t unruly,
+nor disobedient. There wasn’t time. It was an impulse, and he acted upon
+it like lightning. I am astounded now at the swiftness with which it
+took place. Inside the first second we were over the edge and falling.
+
+“It was deliberate—deliberate suicide. And attempted murder. It was a
+trap. I was the victim. He had me, and he threw himself over with me.
+Yet he did not hate me. He loved me ... as much as it is possible for a
+horse to love. I am confounded. I cannot understand it any more than you
+can understand Dolly’s behavior yesterday.”
+
+“But horses go insane, Chris,” Lute said. “You know that. It’s merely
+coincidence that two horses in two days should have spells under you.”
+
+“That’s the only explanation,” he answered, starting off with her. “But
+why am I wanted urgently?”
+
+“Planchette.”
+
+“Oh, I remember. It will be a new experience to me. Somehow I missed it
+when it was all the rage long ago.”
+
+“So did all of us,” Lute replied, “except Mrs. Grantly. It is her
+favorite phantom, it seems.”
+
+“A weird little thing,” he remarked. “Bundle of nerves and black
+eyes. I’ll wager she doesn’t weigh ninety pounds, and most of that’s
+magnetism.”
+
+“Positively uncanny ... at times.” Lute shivered involuntarily. “She
+gives me the creeps.”
+
+“Contact of the healthy with the morbid,” he explained dryly. “You will
+notice it is the healthy that always has the creeps. The morbid never
+has the creeps. It gives the creeps. That’s its function. Where did you
+people pick her up, anyway?”
+
+“I don’t know—yes, I do, too. Aunt Mildred met her in Boston, I
+think—oh, I don’t know. At any rate, Mrs. Grantly came to California,
+and of course had to visit Aunt Mildred. You know the open house we
+keep.”
+
+They halted where a passageway between two great redwood trunks gave
+entrance to the dining room. Above, through lacing boughs, could be seen
+the stars. Candles lighted the tree-columned space. About the table,
+examining the Planchette contrivance, were four persons. Chris’s gaze
+roved over them, and he was aware of a guilty sorrow-pang as he paused
+for a moment on Lute’s Aunt Mildred and Uncle Robert, mellow with ripe
+middle age and genial with the gentle buffets life had dealt them. He
+passed amusedly over the black-eyed, frail-bodied Mrs. Grantly, and
+halted on the fourth person, a portly, massive-headed man, whose gray
+temples belied the youthful solidity of his face.
+
+“Who’s that?” Chris whispered.
+
+“A Mr. Barton. The train was late. That’s why you didn’t see him at
+dinner. He’s only a capitalist—water-power-long-distance-electricity
+transmitter, or something like that.”
+
+“Doesn’t look as though he could give an ox points on imagination.”
+
+“He can’t. He inherited his money. But he knows enough to hold on to it
+and hire other men’s brains. He is very conservative.”
+
+“That is to be expected,” was Chris’s comment. His gaze went back to the
+man and woman who had been father and mother to the girl beside him. “Do
+you know,” he said, “it came to me with a shock yesterday when you told
+me that they had turned against me and that I was scarcely tolerated. I
+met them afterwards, last evening, guiltily, in fear and trembling—and
+to-day, too. And yet I could see no difference from of old.”
+
+“Dear man,” Lute sighed. “Hospitality is as natural to them as the act
+of breathing. But it isn’t that, after all. It is all genuine in their
+dear hearts. No matter how severe the censure they put upon you when
+you are absent, the moment they are with you they soften and are all
+kindness and warmth. As soon as their eyes rest on you, affection and
+love come bubbling up. You are so made. Every animal likes you.
+All people like you. They can’t help it. You can’t help it. You are
+universally lovable, and the best of it is that you don’t know it. You
+don’t know it now. Even as I tell it to you, you don’t realize it, you
+won’t realize it—and that very incapacity to realize it is one of the
+reasons why you are so loved. You are incredulous now, and you shake
+your head; but I know, who am your slave, as all people know, for they
+likewise are your slaves.
+
+“Why, in a minute we shall go in and join them. Mark the affection,
+almost maternal, that will well up in Aunt Mildred’s eyes. Listen to the
+tones of Uncle Robert’s voice when he says, ‘Well, Chris, my boy?’ Watch
+Mrs. Grantly melt, literally melt, like a dewdrop in the sun.
+
+“Take Mr. Barton, there. You have never seen him before. Why, you will
+invite him out to smoke a cigar with you when the rest of us have gone
+to bed—you, a mere nobody, and he a man of many millions, a man of
+power, a man obtuse and stupid like the ox; and he will follow you
+about, smoking; the cigar, like a little dog, your little dog, trotting
+at your back. He will not know he is doing it, but he will be doing it
+just the same. Don’t I know, Chris? Oh, I have watched you, watched you,
+so often, and loved you for it, and loved you again for it, because you
+were so delightfully and blindly unaware of what you were doing.”
+
+“I’m almost bursting with vanity from listening to you,” he laughed,
+passing his arm around her and drawing her against him.
+
+“Yes,” she whispered, “and in this very moment, when you are laughing at
+all that I have said, you, the feel of you, your soul,—call it what you
+will, it is you,—is calling for all the love that is in me.”
+
+She leaned more closely against him, and sighed as with fatigue. He
+breathed a kiss into her hair and held her with firm tenderness.
+
+Aunt Mildred stirred briskly and looked up from the Planchette board.
+
+“Come, let us begin,” she said. “It will soon grow chilly. Robert, where
+are those children?”
+
+“Here we are,” Lute called out, disengaging herself.
+
+“Now for a bundle of creeps,” Chris whispered, as they started in.
+
+Lute’s prophecy of the manner in which her lover would be received
+was realized. Mrs. Grantly, unreal, unhealthy, scintillant with frigid
+magnetism, warmed and melted as though of truth she were dew and he sun.
+Mr. Barton beamed broadly upon him, and was colossally gracious. Aunt
+Mildred greeted him with a glow of fondness and motherly kindness, while
+Uncle Robert genially and heartily demanded, “Well, Chris, my boy, and
+what of the riding?”
+
+But Aunt Mildred drew her shawl more closely around her and hastened
+them to the business in hand. On the table was a sheet of paper. On the
+paper, rifling on three supports, was a small triangular board. Two of
+the supports were easily moving casters. The third support, placed at
+the apex of the triangle, was a lead pencil.
+
+“Who’s first?” Uncle Robert demanded.
+
+There was a moment’s hesitancy, then Aunt Mildred placed her hand on the
+board, and said: “Some one has always to be the fool for the delectation
+of the rest.”
+
+“Brave woman,” applauded her husband. “Now, Mrs. Grantly, do your
+worst.”
+
+“I?” that lady queried. “I do nothing. The power, or whatever you care
+to think it, is outside of me, as it is outside of all of you. As to
+what that power is, I will not dare to say. There is such a power. I
+have had evidences of it. And you will undoubtedly have evidences of
+it. Now please be quiet, everybody. Touch the board very lightly, but
+firmly, Mrs. Story; but do nothing of your own volition.”
+
+Aunt Mildred nodded, and stood with her hand on Planchette; while the
+rest formed about her in a silent and expectant circle. But nothing
+happened. The minutes ticked away, and Planchette remained motionless.
+
+“Be patient,” Mrs. Grantly counselled. “Do not struggle against any
+influences you may feel working on you. But do not do anything yourself.
+The influence will take care of that. You will feel impelled to do
+things, and such impulses will be practically irresistible.”
+
+“I wish the influence would hurry up,” Aunt Mildred protested at the end
+of five motionless minutes.
+
+“Just a little longer, Mrs. Story, just a little longer,” Mrs. Grantly
+said soothingly.
+
+Suddenly Aunt Mildred’s hand began to twitch into movement. A mild
+concern showed in her face as she observed the movement of her hand and
+heard the scratching of the pencil-point at the apex of Planchette.
+
+For another five minutes this continued, when Aunt Mildred withdrew her
+hand with an effort, and said, with a nervous laugh:
+
+“I don’t know whether I did it myself or not. I do know that I was
+growing nervous, standing there like a psychic fool with all your solemn
+faces turned upon me.”
+
+“Hen-scratches,” was Uncle Robert’s judgement, when he looked over the
+paper upon which she had scrawled.
+
+“Quite illegible,” was Mrs. Grantly’s dictum. “It does not resemble
+writing at all. The influences have not got to working yet. Do you try
+it, Mr. Barton.”
+
+That gentleman stepped forward, ponderously willing to please, and
+placed his hand on the board. And for ten solid, stolid minutes he stood
+there, motionless, like a statue, the frozen personification of the
+commercial age. Uncle Robert’s face began to work. He blinked, stiffened
+his mouth, uttered suppressed, throaty sounds, deep down; finally he
+snorted, lost his self-control, and broke out in a roar of laughter.
+All joined in this merriment, including Mrs. Grantly. Mr. Barton laughed
+with them, but he was vaguely nettled.
+
+“You try it, Story,” he said.
+
+Uncle Robert, still laughing, and urged on by Lute and his wife, took
+the board. Suddenly his face sobered. His hand had begun to move, and
+the pencil could be heard scratching across the paper.
+
+“By George!” he muttered. “That’s curious. Look at it. I’m not doing it.
+I know I’m not doing it. Look at that hand go! Just look at it!”
+
+“Now, Robert, none of your ridiculousness,” his wife warned him.
+
+“I tell you I’m not doing it,” he replied indignantly. “The force has
+got hold of me. Ask Mrs. Grantly. Tell her to make it stop, if you want
+it to stop. I can’t stop it. By George! look at that flourish. I didn’t
+do that. I never wrote a flourish in my life.”
+
+“Do try to be serious,” Mrs. Grantly warned them. “An atmosphere of
+levity does not conduce to the best operation of Planchette.”
+
+“There, that will do, I guess,” Uncle Robert said as he took his hand
+away. “Now let’s see.”
+
+He bent over and adjusted his glasses. “It’s handwriting at any rate,
+and that’s better than the rest of you did. Here, Lute, your eyes are
+young.”
+
+“Oh, what flourishes!” Lute exclaimed, as she looked at the paper. “And
+look there, there are two different handwritings.”
+
+She began to read: “This is the first lecture. Concentrate on this
+sentence: ‘I am a positive spirit and not negative to any condition.’
+Then follow with concentration on positive love. After that peace and
+harmony will vibrate through and around your body. Your soul—The other
+writing breaks right in. This is the way it goes: Bullfrog 95, Dixie 16,
+Golden Anchor 65, Gold Mountain 13, Jim Butler 70, Jumbo 75, North Star
+42, Rescue 7, Black Butte 75, Brown Hope 16, Iron Top 3.”
+
+“Iron Top’s pretty low,” Mr. Barton murmured.
+
+“Robert, you’ve been dabbling again!” Aunt Mildred cried accusingly.
+
+“No, I’ve not,” he denied. “I only read the quotations. But how the
+devil—I beg your pardon—they got there on that piece of paper I’d like
+to know.”
+
+“Your subconscious mind,” Chris suggested. “You read the quotations in
+to-day’s paper.”
+
+“No, I didn’t; but last week I glanced over the column.”
+
+“A day or a year is all the same in the subconscious mind,” said Mrs.
+Grantly. “The subconscious mind never forgets. But I am not saying that
+this is due to the subconscious mind. I refuse to state to what I think
+it is due.”
+
+“But how about that other stuff?” Uncle Robert demanded. “Sounds like
+what I’d think Christian Science ought to sound like.”
+
+“Or theosophy,” Aunt Mildred volunteered. “Some message to a neophyte.”
+
+“Go on, read the rest,” her husband commanded.
+
+“This puts you in touch with the mightier spirits,” Lute read. “You
+shall become one with us, and your name shall be ‘Arya,’ and you
+shall—Conqueror 20, Empire 12, Columbia Mountain 18, Midway 140—and,
+and that is all. Oh, no! here’s a last flourish, Arya, from Kandor—that
+must surely be the Mahatma.”
+
+“I’d like to have you explain that theosophy stuff on the basis of the
+subconscious mind, Chris,” Uncle Robert challenged.
+
+Chris shrugged his shoulders. “No explanation. You must have got a
+message intended for some one else.”
+
+“Lines were crossed, eh?” Uncle Robert chuckled. “Multiplex spiritual
+wireless telegraphy, I’d call it.”
+
+“It IS nonsense,” Mrs. Grantly said. “I never knew Planchette to behave
+so outrageously. There are disturbing influences at work. I felt them
+from the first. Perhaps it is because you are all making too much fun of
+it. You are too hilarious.”
+
+“A certain befitting gravity should grace the occasion,” Chris agreed,
+placing his hand on Planchette. “Let me try. And not one of you must
+laugh or giggle, or even think ‘laugh’ or ‘giggle.’ And if you dare
+to snort, even once, Uncle Robert, there is no telling what occult
+vengeance may be wreaked upon you.”
+
+“I’ll be good,” Uncle Robert rejoined. “But if I really must snort, may
+I silently slip away?”
+
+Chris nodded. His hand had already begun to work. There had been no
+preliminary twitchings nor tentative essays at writing. At once his hand
+had started off, and Planchette was moving swiftly and smoothly across
+the paper.
+
+“Look at him,” Lute whispered to her aunt. “See how white he is.”
+
+Chris betrayed disturbance at the sound of her voice, and thereafter
+silence was maintained. Only could be heard the steady scratching of the
+pencil. Suddenly, as though it had been stung, he jerked his hand away.
+With a sigh and a yawn he stepped back from the table, then glanced with
+the curiosity of a newly awakened man at their faces.
+
+“I think I wrote something,” he said.
+
+“I should say you did,” Mrs. Grantly remarked with satisfaction, holding
+up the sheet of paper and glancing at it.
+
+“Read it aloud,” Uncle Robert said.
+
+“Here it is, then. It begins with ‘beware’ written three times, and in
+much larger characters than the rest of the writing. BEWARE! BEWARE!
+BEWARE! Chris Dunbar, I intend to destroy you. I have already made two
+attempts upon your life, and failed. I shall yet succeed. So sure am I
+that I shall succeed that I dare to tell you. I do not need to tell you
+why. In your own heart you know. The wrong you are doing—And here it
+abruptly ends.”
+
+Mrs. Grantly laid the paper down on the table and looked at Chris, who
+had already become the centre of all eyes, and who was yawning as from
+an overpowering drowsiness.
+
+“Quite a sanguinary turn, I should say,” Uncle Robert remarked.
+
+“I have already made two attempts upon your life,” Mrs. Grantly read
+from the paper, which she was going over a second time.
+
+“On my life?” Chris demanded between yawns. “Why, my life hasn’t been
+attempted even once. My! I am sleepy!”
+
+“Ah, my boy, you are thinking of flesh-and-blood men,” Uncle Robert
+laughed. “But this is a spirit. Your life has been attempted by unseen
+things. Most likely ghostly hands have tried to throttle you in your
+sleep.”
+
+“Oh, Chris!” Lute cried impulsively. “This afternoon! The hand you said
+must have seized your rein!”
+
+“But I was joking,” he objected.
+
+“Nevertheless ...” Lute left her thought unspoken.
+
+Mrs. Grantly had become keen on the scent. “What was that about this
+afternoon? Was your life in danger?”
+
+Chris’s drowsiness had disappeared. “I’m becoming interested myself,”
+ he acknowledged. “We haven’t said anything about it. Ban broke his back
+this afternoon. He threw himself off the bank, and I ran the risk of
+being caught underneath.”
+
+“I wonder, I wonder,” Mrs. Grantly communed aloud. “There is something
+in this.... It is a warning.... Ah! You were hurt yesterday riding Miss
+Story’s horse! That makes the two attempts!”
+
+She looked triumphantly at them. Planchette had been vindicated.
+
+“Nonsense,” laughed Uncle Robert, but with a slight hint of irritation
+in his manner. “Such things do not happen these days. This is the
+twentieth century, my dear madam. The thing, at the very latest, smacks
+of mediaevalism.”
+
+“I have had such wonderful tests with Planchette,” Mrs. Grantly began,
+then broke off suddenly to go to the table and place her hand on the
+board.
+
+“Who are you?” she asked. “What is your name?”
+
+The board immediately began to write. By this time all heads, with the
+exception of Mr. Barton’s, were bent over the table and following the
+pencil.
+
+“It’s Dick,” Aunt Mildred cried, a note of the mildly hysterical in her
+voice.
+
+Her husband straightened up, his face for the first time grave.
+
+“It’s Dick’s signature,” he said. “I’d know his fist in a thousand.”
+
+“‘Dick Curtis,’” Mrs. Grantly read aloud. “Who is Dick Curtis?”
+
+“By Jove, that’s remarkable!” Mr. Barton broke in. “The handwriting in
+both instances is the same. Clever, I should say, really clever,” he
+added admiringly.
+
+“Let me see,” Uncle Robert demanded, taking the paper and examining it.
+“Yes, it is Dick’s handwriting.”
+
+“But who is Dick?” Mrs. Grantly insisted. “Who is this Dick Curtis?”
+
+“Dick Curtis, why, he was Captain Richard Curtis,” Uncle Robert
+answered.
+
+“He was Lute’s father,” Aunt Mildred supplemented. “Lute took our name.
+She never saw him. He died when she was a few weeks old. He was my
+brother.”
+
+“Remarkable, most remarkable.” Mrs. Grantly was revolving the message
+in her mind. “There were two attempts on Mr. Dunbar’s life. The
+subconscious mind cannot explain that, for none of us knew of the
+accident to-day.”
+
+“I knew,” Chris answered, “and it was I that operated Planchette. The
+explanation is simple.”
+
+“But the handwriting,” interposed Mr. Barton. “What you wrote and what
+Mrs. Grantly wrote are identical.”
+
+Chris bent over and compared the handwriting.
+
+“Besides,” Mrs. Grantly cried, “Mr. Story recognizes the handwriting.”
+
+She looked at him for verification.
+
+He nodded his head. “Yes, it is Dick’s fist. I’ll swear to that.”
+
+But to Lute had come a visioning. While the rest argued pro and con and
+the air was filled with phrases,—“psychic phenomena,” “self-hypnotism,”
+ “residuum of unexplained truth,” and “spiritism,”—she was reviving
+mentally the girlhood pictures she had conjured of this soldier-father
+she had never seen. She possessed his sword, there were several
+old-fashioned daguerreotypes, there was much that had been said of him,
+stories told of him—and all this had constituted the material out of
+which she had builded him in her childhood fancy.
+
+“There is the possibility of one mind unconsciously suggesting to
+another mind,” Mrs. Grantly was saying; but through Lute’s mind was
+trooping her father on his great roan war-horse. Now he was leading
+his men. She saw him on lonely scouts, or in the midst of the yelling
+Indians at Salt Meadows, when of his command he returned with one man
+in ten. And in the picture she had of him, in the physical semblance she
+had made of him, was reflected his spiritual nature, reflected by her
+worshipful artistry in form and feature and expression—his bravery,
+his quick temper, his impulsive championship, his madness of wrath in
+a righteous cause, his warm generosity and swift forgiveness, and his
+chivalry that epitomized codes and ideals primitive as the days of
+knighthood. And first, last, and always, dominating all, she saw in the
+face of him the hot passion and quickness of deed that had earned for
+him the name “Fighting Dick Curtis.”
+
+“Let me put it to the test,” she heard Mrs. Grantly saying. “Let Miss
+Story try Planchette. There may be a further message.”
+
+“No, no, I beg of you,” Aunt Mildred interposed. “It is too uncanny.
+It surely is wrong to tamper with the dead. Besides, I am nervous. Or,
+better, let me go to bed, leaving you to go on with your experiments.
+That will be the best way, and you can tell me in the morning.” Mingled
+with the “Good-nights,” were half-hearted protests from Mrs. Grantly, as
+Aunt Mildred withdrew.
+
+“Robert can return,” she called back, “as soon as he has seen me to my
+tent.”
+
+“It would be a shame to give it up now,” Mrs. Grantly said. “There is no
+telling what we are on the verge of. Won’t you try it, Miss Story?”
+
+Lute obeyed, but when she placed her hand on the board she was conscious
+of a vague and nameless fear at this toying with the supernatural. She
+was twentieth-century, and the thing in essence, as her uncle had said,
+was mediaeval. Yet she could not shake off the instinctive fear that
+arose in her—man’s inheritance from the wild and howling ages when
+his hairy, apelike prototype was afraid of the dark and personified the
+elements into things of fear.
+
+But as the mysterious influence seized her hand and sent it meriting
+across the paper, all the unusual passed out of the situation and she
+was unaware of more than a feeble curiosity. For she was intent on
+another visioning—this time of her mother, who was also unremembered
+in the flesh. Not sharp and vivid like that of her father, but dim and
+nebulous was the picture she shaped of her mother—a saint’s head in an
+aureole of sweetness and goodness and meekness, and withal, shot
+through with a hint of reposeful determination, of will, stubborn and
+unobtrusive, that in life had expressed itself mainly in resignation.
+
+Lute’s hand had ceased moving, and Mrs. Grantly was already reading the
+message that had been written.
+
+“It is a different handwriting,” she said. “A woman’s hand. ‘Martha,’ it
+is signed. Who is Martha?”
+
+Lute was not surprised. “It is my mother,” she said simply. “What does
+she say?”
+
+She had not been made sleepy, as Chris had; but the keen edge of her
+vitality had been blunted, and she was experiencing a sweet and pleasing
+lassitude. And while the message was being read, in her eyes persisted
+the vision of her mother.
+
+“Dear child,” Mrs. Grantly read, “do not mind him. He was ever quick of
+speech and rash. Be no niggard with your love. Love cannot hurt you.
+To deny love is to sin. Obey your heart and you can do no wrong. Obey
+worldly considerations, obey pride, obey those that prompt you against
+your heart’s prompting, and you do sin. Do not mind your father. He is
+angry now, as was his way in the earth-life; but he will come to see
+the wisdom of my counsel, for this, too, was his way in the earth-life.
+Love, my child, and love well.—Martha.”
+
+“Let me see it,” Lute cried, seizing the paper and devouring the
+handwriting with her eyes. She was thrilling with unexpressed love for
+the mother she had never seen, and this written speech from the grave
+seemed to give more tangibility to her having ever existed, than did the
+vision of her.
+
+“This IS remarkable,” Mrs. Grantly was reiterating. “There was never
+anything like it. Think of it, my dear, both your father and mother here
+with us to-night.”
+
+Lute shivered. The lassitude was gone, and she was her natural self
+again, vibrant with the instinctive fear of things unseen. And it
+was offensive to her mind that, real or illusion, the presence or the
+memorized existences of her father and mother should be touched by these
+two persons who were practically strangers—Mrs. Grantly, unhealthy and
+morbid, and Mr. Barton, stolid and stupid with a grossness both of
+the flesh and the spirit. And it further seemed a trespass that these
+strangers should thus enter into the intimacy between her and Chris.
+
+She could hear the steps of her uncle approaching, and the situation
+flashed upon her, luminous and clear. She hurriedly folded the sheet of
+paper and thrust it into her bosom.
+
+“Don’t say anything to him about this second message, Mrs. Grantly,
+please, and Mr. Barton. Nor to Aunt Mildred. It would only cause them
+irritation and needless anxiety.”
+
+In her mind there was also the desire to protect her lover, for she knew
+that the strain of his present standing with her aunt and uncle would
+be added to, unconsciously in their minds, by the weird message of
+Planchette.
+
+“And please don’t let us have any more Planchette,” Lute continued
+hastily. “Let us forget all the nonsense that has occurred.”
+
+“‘Nonsense,’ my dear child?” Mrs. Grantly was indignantly protesting
+when Uncle Robert strode into the circle.
+
+“Hello!” he demanded. “What’s being done?”
+
+“Too late,” Lute answered lightly. “No more stock quotations for you.
+Planchette is adjourned, and we’re just winding up the discussion of the
+theory of it. Do you know how late it is?”
+
+    *       *       *
+
+“Well, what did you do last night after we left?”
+
+“Oh, took a stroll,” Chris answered.
+
+Lute’s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was
+palpably assumed, “With—a—with Mr. Barton?”
+
+“Why, yes.”
+
+“And a smoke?”
+
+“Yes; and now what’s it all about?”
+
+Lute broke into merry laughter. “Just as I told you that you would do.
+Am I not a prophet? But I knew before I saw you that my forecast had
+come true. I have just left Mr. Barton, and I knew he had walked with
+you last night, for he is vowing by all his fetishes and idols that you
+are a perfectly splendid young man. I could see it with my eyes shut.
+The Chris Dunbar glamour has fallen upon him. But I have not finished
+the catechism by any means. Where have you been all morning?”
+
+“Where I am going to take you this afternoon.”
+
+“You plan well without knowing my wishes.”
+
+“I knew well what your wishes are. It is to see a horse I have found.”
+
+Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, “Oh, good!”
+
+“He is a beauty,” Chris said.
+
+But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her
+eyes.
+
+“He’s called Comanche,” Chris went on. “A beauty, a regular beauty, the
+perfect type of the Californian cow-pony. And his lines—why, what’s the
+matter?”
+
+“Don’t let us ride any more,” Lute said, “at least for a while. Really,
+I think I am a tiny bit tired of it, too.”
+
+He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his
+eyes.
+
+“I see hearses and flowers for you,” he began, “and a funeral oration; I
+see the end of the world, and the stars falling out of the sky, and the
+heavens rolling up as a scroll; I see the living and the dead gathered
+together for the final judgement, the sheep and the goats, the lambs and
+the rams and all the rest of it, the white-robed saints, the sound of
+golden harps, and the lost souls howling as they fall into the Pit—all
+this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a
+horse. A horse, Lute! a horse!”
+
+“For a while, at least,” she pleaded.
+
+“Ridiculous!” he cried. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?—you who
+are always so abominably and adorably well!”
+
+“No, it’s not that,” she answered. “I know it is ridiculous, Chris, I
+know it, but the doubt will arise. I cannot help it. You always say I
+am so sanely rooted to the earth and reality and all that, but—perhaps
+it’s superstition, I don’t know—but the whole occurrence, the messages
+of Planchette, the possibility of my father’s hand, I know not how,
+reaching, out to Ban’s rein and hurling him and you to death, the
+correspondence between my father’s statement that he has twice attempted
+your life and the fact that in the last two days your life has twice
+been endangered by horses—my father was a great horseman—all this, I
+say, causes the doubt to arise in my mind. What if there be something in
+it? I am not so sure. Science may be too dogmatic in its denial of the
+unseen. The forces of the unseen, of the spirit, may well be too
+subtle, too sublimated, for science to lay hold of, and recognize, and
+formulate. Don’t you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very
+doubt? It may be a very small doubt—oh, so small; but I love you too
+much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and
+that should in itself fully account for my predisposition toward
+superstition.
+
+“Yes, yes, I know, call it unreality. But I’ve heard you paradoxing upon
+the reality of the unreal—the reality of delusion to the mind that is
+sick. And so with me, if you will; it is delusion and unreal, but to me,
+constituted as I am, it is very real—is real as a nightmare is real, in
+the throes of it, before one awakes.”
+
+“The most logical argument for illogic I have ever heard,” Chris smiled.
+“It is a good gaming proposition, at any rate. You manage to embrace
+more chances in your philosophy than do I in mine. It reminds me of
+Sam—the gardener you had a couple of years ago. I overheard him and
+Martin arguing in the stable. You know what a bigoted atheist Martin is.
+Well, Martin had deluged Sam with floods of logic. Sam pondered awhile,
+and then he said, ‘Foh a fack, Mis’ Martin, you jis’ tawk like a house
+afire; but you ain’t got de show I has.’ ‘How’s that?’ Martin asked.
+‘Well, you see, Mis’ Martin, you has one chance to mah two.’ ‘I don’t
+see it,’ Martin said. ‘Mis’ Martin, it’s dis way. You has jis’ de
+chance, lak you say, to become worms foh de fruitification of de cabbage
+garden. But I’s got de chance to lif’ mah voice to de glory of de Lawd
+as I go paddin’ dem golden streets—along ‘ith de chance to be jis’
+worms along ‘ith you, Mis’ Martin.’”
+
+“You refuse to take me seriously,” Lute said, when she had laughed her
+appreciation.
+
+“How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?” he asked.
+
+“You don’t explain it—the handwriting of my father, which Uncle Robert
+recognized—oh, the whole thing, you don’t explain it.”
+
+“I don’t know all the mysteries of mind,” Chris answered. “But I believe
+such phenomena will all yield to scientific explanation in the not
+distant future.”
+
+“Just the same, I have a sneaking desire to find out some more from
+Planchette,” Lute confessed. “The board is still down in the dining
+room. We could try it now, you and I, and no one would know.”
+
+Chris caught her hand, crying: “Come on! It will be a lark.”
+
+Hand in hand they ran down the path to the tree-pillared room.
+
+“The camp is deserted,” Lute said, as she placed Planchette on the
+table. “Mrs. Grantly and Aunt Mildred are lying down, and Mr. Barton has
+gone off with Uncle Robert. There is nobody to disturb us.” She placed
+her hand on the board. “Now begin.”
+
+For a few minutes nothing happened. Chris started to speak, but she
+hushed him to silence. The preliminary twitchings had appeared in her
+hand and arm. Then the pencil began to write. They read the message,
+word by word, as it was written:
+
+There is wisdom greater than the wisdom of reason. Love proceeds not out
+of the dry-as-dust way of the mind. Love is of the heart, and is
+beyond all reason, and logic, and philosophy. Trust your own heart,
+my daughter. And if your heart bids you have faith in your lover, then
+laugh at the mind and its cold wisdom, and obey your heart, and have
+faith in your lover.—Martha.
+
+“But that whole message is the dictate of your own heart,” Chris
+cried. “Don’t you see, Lute? The thought is your very own, and your
+subconscious mind has expressed it there on the paper.”
+
+“But there is one thing I don’t see,” she objected.
+
+“And that?”
+
+“Is the handwriting. Look at it. It does not resemble mine at all. It
+is mincing, it is old-fashioned, it is the old-fashioned feminine of a
+generation ago.”
+
+“But you don’t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a
+message from the dead?” he interrupted.
+
+“I don’t know, Chris,” she wavered. “I am sure I don’t know.”
+
+“It is absurd!” he cried. “These are cobwebs of fancy. When one dies, he
+is dead. He is dust. He goes to the worms, as Martin says. The dead? I
+laugh at the dead. They do not exist. They are not. I defy the powers of
+the grave, the men dead and dust and gone!
+
+“And what have you to say to that?” he challenged, placing his hand on
+Planchette.
+
+On the instant his hand began to write. Both were startled by the
+suddenness of it. The message was brief:
+
+BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!
+
+He was distinctly sobered, but he laughed. “It is like a miracle play.
+Death we have, speaking to us from the grave. But Good Deeds, where art
+thou? And Kindred? and Joy? and Household Goods? and Friendship? and all
+the goodly company?”
+
+But Lute did not share his bravado. Her fright showed itself in her
+face. She laid her trembling hand on his arm.
+
+“Oh, Chris, let us stop. I am sorry we began it. Let us leave the
+quiet dead to their rest. It is wrong. It must be wrong. I confess I
+am affected by it. I cannot help it. As my body is trembling, so is
+my soul. This speech of the grave, this dead man reaching out from the
+mould of a generation to protect me from you. There is reason in it.
+There is the living mystery that prevents you from marrying me. Were my
+father alive, he would protect me from you. Dead, he still strives to
+protect me. His hands, his ghostly hands, are against your life!”
+
+“Do be calm,” Chris said soothingly. “Listen to me. It is all a lark. We
+are playing with the subjective forces of our own being, with phenomena
+which science has not yet explained, that is all. Psychology is so young
+a science. The subconscious mind has just been discovered, one might
+say. It is all mystery as yet; the laws of it are yet to be formulated.
+This is simply unexplained phenomena. But that is no reason that we
+should immediately account for it by labelling it spiritism. As yet we
+do not know, that is all. As for Planchette—”
+
+He abruptly ceased, for at that moment, to enforce his remark, he had
+placed his hand on Planchette, and at that moment his hand had been
+seized, as by a paroxysm, and sent dashing, willy-nilly, across the
+paper, writing as the hand of an angry person would write.
+
+“No, I don’t care for any more of it,” Lute said, when the message was
+completed. “It is like witnessing a fight between you and my father in
+the flesh. There is the savor in it of struggle and blows.”
+
+She pointed out a sentence that read: “You cannot escape me nor the just
+punishment that is yours!”
+
+“Perhaps I visualize too vividly for my own comfort, for I can see his
+hands at your throat. I know that he is, as you say, dead and dust, but
+for all that, I can see him as a man that is alive and walks the earth;
+I see the anger in his face, the anger and the vengeance, and I see it
+all directed against you.”
+
+She crumpled up the scrawled sheets of paper, and put Planchette away.
+
+“We won’t bother with it any more,” Chris said. “I didn’t think it would
+affect you so strongly. But it’s all subjective, I’m sure, with possibly
+a bit of suggestion thrown in—that and nothing more. And the whole
+strain of our situation has made conditions unusually favorable for
+striking phenomena.”
+
+“And about our situation,” Lute said, as they went slowly up the path
+they had run down. “What we are to do, I don’t know. Are we to go on, as
+we have gone on? What is best? Have you thought of anything?”
+
+He debated for a few steps. “I have thought of telling your uncle and
+aunt.”
+
+“What you couldn’t tell me?” she asked quickly.
+
+“No,” he answered slowly; “but just as much as I have told you. I have
+no right to tell them more than I have told you.”
+
+This time it was she that debated. “No, don’t tell them,” she said
+finally. “They wouldn’t understand. I don’t understand, for that matter,
+but I have faith in you, and in the nature of things they are not
+capable of this same implicit faith. You raise up before me a mystery
+that prevents our marriage, and I believe you; but they could not
+believe you without doubts arising as to the wrong and ill-nature of the
+mystery. Besides, it would but make their anxieties greater.”
+
+“I should go away, I know I should go away,” he said, half under his
+breath. “And I can. I am no weakling. Because I have failed to remain
+away once, is no reason that I shall fail again.”
+
+She caught her breath with a quick gasp. “It is like a bereavement to
+hear you speak of going away and remaining away. I should never see you
+again. It is too terrible. And do not reproach yourself for weakness.
+It is I who am to blame. It is I who prevented you from remaining away
+before, I know. I wanted you so. I want you so.
+
+“There is nothing to be done, Chris, nothing to be done but to go on
+with it and let it work itself out somehow. That is one thing we are
+sure of: it will work out somehow.”
+
+“But it would be easier if I went away,” he suggested.
+
+“I am happier when you are here.”
+
+“The cruelty of circumstance,” he muttered savagely.
+
+“Go or stay—that will be part of the working out. But I do not want you
+to go, Chris; you know that. And now no more about it. Talk cannot mend
+it. Let us never mention it again—unless ... unless some time, some
+wonderful, happy time, you can come to me and say: ‘Lute, all is well
+with me. The mystery no longer binds me. I am free.’ Until that time let
+us bury it, along with Planchette and all the rest, and make the most of
+the little that is given us.
+
+“And now, to show you how prepared I am to make the most of that little,
+I am even ready to go with you this afternoon to see the horse—though
+I wish you wouldn’t ride any more ... for a few days, anyway, or for a
+week. What did you say was his name?”
+
+“Comanche,” he answered. “I know you will like him.”
+
+    *       *       *
+
+Chris lay on his back, his head propped by the bare jutting wall of
+stone, his gaze attentively directed across the canyon to the opposing
+tree-covered slope. There was a sound of crashing through underbrush,
+the ringing of steel-shod hoofs on stone, and an occasional and mossy
+descent of a dislodged boulder that bounded from the hill and fetched
+up with a final splash in the torrent that rushed over a wild chaos of
+rocks beneath him. Now and again he caught glimpses, framed in green
+foliage, of the golden brown of Lute’s corduroy riding-habit and of the
+bay horse that moved beneath her.
+
+She rode out into an open space where a loose earth-slide denied
+lodgement to trees and grass. She halted the horse at the brink of the
+slide and glanced down it with a measuring eye. Forty feet beneath,
+the slide terminated in a small, firm-surfaced terrace, the banked
+accumulation of fallen earth and gravel.
+
+“It’s a good test,” she called across the canyon. “I’m going to put him
+down it.”
+
+The animal gingerly launched himself on the treacherous footing,
+irregularly losing and gaining his hind feet, keeping his fore
+legs stiff, and steadily and calmly, without panic or nervousness,
+extricating the fore feet as fast as they sank too deep into the sliding
+earth that surged along in a wave before him. When the firm footing
+at the bottom was reached, he strode out on the little terrace with a
+quickness and springiness of gait and with glintings of muscular fires
+that gave the lie to the calm deliberation of his movements on the
+slide.
+
+“Bravo!” Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.
+
+“The wisest-footed, clearest-headed horse I ever saw,” Lute called back,
+as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of
+rubble and into the trees again.
+
+Chris followed her by the sound of her progress, and by occasional
+glimpses where the foliage was more open, as she zigzagged down the
+steep and trailless descent. She emerged below him at the rugged rim
+of the torrent, dropped the horse down a three-foot wall, and halted to
+study the crossing.
+
+Four feet out in the stream, a narrow ledge thrust above the surface of
+the water. Beyond the ledge boiled an angry pool. But to the left, from
+the ledge, and several feet lower, was a tiny bed of gravel. A giant
+boulder prevented direct access to the gravel bed. The only way to gain
+it was by first leaping to the ledge of rock. She studied it carefully,
+and the tightening of her bridle-arm advertised that she had made up her
+mind.
+
+Chris, in his anxiety, had sat up to observe more closely what she
+meditated.
+
+“Don’t tackle it,” he called.
+
+“I have faith in Comanche,” she called in return.
+
+“He can’t make that side-jump to the gravel,” Chris warned. “He’ll
+never keep his legs. He’ll topple over into the pool. Not one horse in a
+thousand could do that stunt.”
+
+“And Comanche is that very horse,” she answered. “Watch him.”
+
+She gave the animal his head, and he leaped cleanly and accurately to
+the ledge, striking with feet close together on the narrow space. On
+the instant he struck, Lute lightly touched his neck with the rein,
+impelling him to the left; and in that instant, tottering on the
+insecure footing, with front feet slipping over into the pool beyond,
+he lifted on his hind legs, with a half turn, sprang to the left, and
+dropped squarely down to the tiny gravel bed. An easy jump brought him
+across the stream, and Lute angled him up the bank and halted before her
+lover.
+
+“Well?” she asked.
+
+“I am all tense,” Chris answered. “I was holding my breath.”
+
+“Buy him, by all means,” Lute said, dismounting. “He is a bargain. I
+could dare anything on him. I never in my life had such confidence in a
+horse’s feet.”
+
+“His owner says that he has never been known to lose his feet, that it
+is impossible to get him down.”
+
+“Buy him, buy him at once,” she counselled, “before the man changes his
+mind. If you don’t, I shall. Oh, such feet! I feel such confidence in
+them that when I am on him I don’t consider he has feet at all. And he’s
+quick as a cat, and instantly obedient. Bridle-wise is no name for it!
+You could guide him with silken threads. Oh, I know I’m enthusiastic,
+but if you don’t buy him, Chris. I shall. Remember, I’ve second
+refusal.”
+
+Chris smiled agreement as he changed the saddles. Meanwhile she compared
+the two horses.
+
+“Of course he doesn’t match Dolly the way Ban did,” she concluded
+regretfully; “but his coat is splendid just the same. And think of the
+horse that is under the coat!”
+
+Chris gave her a hand into the saddle, and followed her up the slope to
+the county road. She reined in suddenly, saying:
+
+“We won’t go straight back to camp.”
+
+“You forget dinner,” he warned.
+
+“But I remember Comanche,” she retorted. “We’ll ride directly over to
+the ranch and buy him. Dinner will keep.”
+
+“But the cook won’t,” Chris laughed. “She’s already threatened to leave,
+what of our late-comings.”
+
+“Even so,” was the answer. “Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook,
+but at any rate we shall have got Comanche.”
+
+They turned the horses in the other direction, and took the climb of the
+Nun Canyon road that led over the divide and down into the Napa Valley.
+But the climb was hard, the going was slow. Sometimes they topped the
+bed of the torrent by hundreds of feet, and again they dipped down and
+crossed and recrossed it twenty times in twice as many rods. They rode
+through the deep shade of clean-bunked maples and towering redwoods, to
+emerge on open stretches of mountain shoulder where the earth lay dry
+and cracked under the sun.
+
+On one such shoulder they emerged, where the road stretched level before
+them, for a quarter of a mile. On one side rose the huge bulk of the
+mountain. On the other side the steep wall of the canyon fell away in
+impossible slopes and sheer drops to the torrent at the bottom. It was
+an abyss of green beauty and shady depths, pierced by vagrant shafts
+of the sun and mottled here and there by the sun’s broader blazes. The
+sound of rushing water ascended on the windless air, and there was a hum
+of mountain bees.
+
+The horses broke into an easy lope. Chris rode on the outside, looking
+down into the great depths and pleasuring with his eyes in what he
+saw. Dissociating itself from the murmur of the bees, a murmur arose of
+falling water. It grew louder with every stride of the horses.
+
+“Look!” he cried.
+
+Lute leaned well out from her horse to see. Beneath them the water slid
+foaming down a smooth-faced rock to the lip, whence it leaped clear—a
+pulsating ribbon of white, a-breath with movement, ever falling and ever
+remaining, changing its substance but never its form, an aerial waterway
+as immaterial as gauze and as permanent as the hills, that spanned space
+and the free air from the lip of the rock to the tops of the trees far
+below, into whose green screen it disappeared to fall into a secret
+pool.
+
+They had flashed past. The descending water became a distant murmur that
+merged again into the murmur of the bees and ceased. Swayed by a common
+impulse, they looked at each other.
+
+“Oh, Chris, it is good to be alive ... and to have you here by my side!”
+
+He answered her by the warm light in his eyes.
+
+All things tended to key them to an exquisite pitch—the movement of
+their bodies, at one with the moving bodies of the animals beneath them;
+the gently stimulated blood caressing the flesh through and through with
+the soft vigors of health; the warm air fanning their faces, flowing
+over the skin with balmy and tonic touch, permeating them and bathing
+them, subtly, with faint, sensuous delight; and the beauty of the world,
+more subtly still, flowing upon them and bathing them in the delight
+that is of the spirit and is personal and holy, that is inexpressible
+yet communicable by the flash of an eye and the dissolving of the veils
+of the soul.
+
+So looked they at each other, the horses bounding beneath them, the
+spring of the world and the spring of their youth astir in their blood,
+the secret of being trembling in their eyes to the brink of disclosure,
+as if about to dispel, with one magic word, all the irks and riddles of
+existence.
+
+The road curved before them, so that the upper reaches of the canyon
+could be seen, the distant bed of it towering high above their heads.
+They were rounding the curve, leaning toward the inside, gazing before
+them at the swift-growing picture. There was no sound of warning. She
+heard nothing, but even before the horse went down she experienced
+the feeling that the unison of the two leaping animals was broken. She
+turned her head, and so quickly that she saw Comanche fall. It was not a
+stumble nor a trip. He fell as though, abruptly, in midleap, he had died
+or been struck a stunning blow.
+
+And in that moment she remembered Planchette; it seared her brain as
+a lightning-flash of all-embracing memory. Her horse was back on its
+haunches, the weight of her body on the reins; but her head was turned
+and her eyes were on the falling Comanche. He struck the road-bed
+squarely, with his legs loose and lifeless beneath him.
+
+It all occurred in one of those age-long seconds that embrace an
+eternity of happening. There was a slight but perceptible rebound from
+the impact of Comanche’s body with the earth. The violence with which
+he struck forced the air from his great lungs in an audible groan. His
+momentum swept him onward and over the edge. The weight of the rider on
+his neck turned him over head first as he pitched to the fall.
+
+She was off her horse, she knew not how, and to the edge. Her lover was
+out of the saddle and clear of Comanche, though held to the animal by
+his right foot, which was caught in the stirrup. The slope was too steep
+for them to come to a stop. Earth and small stones, dislodged by their
+struggles, were rolling down with them and before them in a miniature
+avalanche. She stood very quietly, holding one hand against her heart
+and gazing down. But while she saw the real happening, in her eyes was
+also the vision of her father dealing the spectral blow that had smashed
+Comanche down in mid-leap and sent horse and rider hurtling over the
+edge.
+
+Beneath horse and man the steep terminated in an up-and-down wall, from
+the base of which, in turn, a second slope ran down to a second wall.
+A third slope terminated in a final wall that based itself on the
+canyon-bed four hundred feet beneath the point where the girl stood and
+watched. She could see Chris vainly kicking his leg to free the foot
+from the trap of the stirrup. Comanche fetched up hard against an
+outputting point of rock. For a fraction of a second his fall was
+stopped, and in the slight interval the man managed to grip hold of a
+young shoot of manzanita. Lute saw him complete the grip with his other
+hand. Then Comanche’s fall began again. She saw the stirrup-strap draw
+taut, then her lover’s body and arms. The manzanita shoot yielded its
+roots, and horse and man plunged over the edge and out of sight.
+
+They came into view on the next slope, together and rolling over and
+over, with sometimes the man under and sometimes the horse. Chris no
+longer struggled, and together they dashed over to the third slope. Near
+the edge of the final wall, Comanche lodged on a buttock of stone. He
+lay quietly, and near him, still attached to him by the stirrup, face
+downward, lay his rider.
+
+“If only he will lie quietly,” Lute breathed aloud, her mind at work on
+the means of rescue.
+
+But she saw Comanche begin to struggle again, and clear on her vision,
+it seemed, was the spectral arm of her father clutching the reins and
+dragging the animal over. Comanche floundered across the hummock, the
+inert body following, and together, horse and man, they plunged from
+sight. They did not appear again. They had fetched bottom.
+
+Lute looked about her. She stood alone on the world. Her lover was gone.
+There was naught to show of his existence, save the marks of Comanche’s
+hoofs on the road and of his body where it had slid over the brink.
+
+“Chris!” she called once, and twice; but she called hopelessly.
+
+Out of the depths, on the windless air, arose only the murmur of bees
+and of running water.
+
+“Chris!” she called yet a third time, and sank slowly down in the dust
+of the road.
+
+She felt the touch of Dolly’s muzzle on her arm, and she leaned her head
+against the mare’s neck and waited. She knew not why she waited, nor for
+what, only there seemed nothing else but waiting left for her to do.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1089 ***