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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 ***
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
+    <title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Moon-face and Other Stories, by Jack London</title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover" />
+<style> /* <![CDATA[ */
+
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+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+
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+div.chapter {page-break-before: always;}
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+    /* ]]> */ </style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1089 ***</div>
+
+
+
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class='ph2'>
+      By Jack London
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2></div>
+    <table style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> MOON-FACE </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> THE LEOPARD MAN’S STORY </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> LOCAL COLOR </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> AMATEUR NIGHT </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> THE MINIONS OF MIDAS </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> ALL GOLD CANYON </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> PLANCHETTE </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a id="link2H_4_0001"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      MOON-FACE
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning, being
+      Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where are you going?” I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Trout,” he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. “I just dote on
+      trout.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t see any laugh in it,” I said shortly, and I know my face went
+      sour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What is her name?” he managed to ask between paroxysms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bellona,” I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He! he!” he tittered. “What a funny name.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out
+      between them, “She was the wife of Mars, you know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, “You go away
+      Monday, don’t you?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded his head and grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then you won’t have another chance to get a mess of those trout you just
+      ‘dote’ on.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not notice the sneer. “Oh, I don’t know,” he chuckled. “I’m
+      going up to-morrow to try pretty hard.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging
+      myself with rapture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0002"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      THE LEOPARD MAN’S STORY
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as
+      anxious to give me a story as I was to get it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I suppose you’ve heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?”
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which
+      would have been critical had it not been so sad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Madame de Ville—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “—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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the far-away look
+      came into his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It... it was...?” I queried with halting eagerness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Snuff—that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old
+      Augustus never meant to do it. He only sneezed.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0003"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      LOCAL COLOR
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is sufficiently—er—journalese?” he interrupted suavely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and
+      dismissed the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have tried it. It does not pay.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was paid for and published,” he added, after a pause. “And I was also
+      honored with sixty days in the Hobo.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The Hobo?” I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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’—
+    </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    “‘The case of a treble hautboy
+     Was a mansion for him, a court.’
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria’s “Economic
+      Foundation of Society.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I should advise you, however,” I added, “to mend the pockets first.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Sunflower’s face clouded. “N—o,” she said, “the black one.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The black one!” This explosively, incredulously. “I wear it quite often.
+      I—I intended wearing it to-night.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear,” the
+      Sunflower hurried on. “Besides, it’s shiny—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Shiny!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Has seen better days.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are threadbare.
+      And you have many suits—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Five,” I corrected, “counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
+      draggled pockets.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And he has none, no home, nothing—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You ARE a dear!” And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked back
+      alluringly. “You are a PERFECT dear.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid
+      and apologetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Old ones!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?” I
+      asked. “Never mind Loria. Tell me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, if I must.” He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Pale youth,’ quoth I, ‘I pray thee the way to the sanctum-sanctorum, to
+      the Most High Cock-a-lorum.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He deigned to look at me, scornfully, with infinite weariness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘G’wan an’ see the janitor. I don’t know nothin’ about the gas.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nay, my lily-white, the editor.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Wich editor?’ he snapped like a young bullterrier. ‘Dramatic? Sportin’?
+      Society? Sunday? Weekly? Daily? Telegraph? Local? News? Editorial? Wich?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Which, I did not know. ‘THE Editor,’ I proclaimed stoutly. ‘The ONLY
+      Editor.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Aw, Spargo!’ he sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Of course, Spargo,’ I answered. ‘Who else?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Gimme yer card,’ says he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘My what?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Yer card—Say! Wot’s yer business, anyway?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I am the census-taker Time,’ I boomed in sepulchral tones. ‘Beware lest
+      I knock too loud.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he sneered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whereupon I rapped him smartly, and he choked and turned purplish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Well, whatcher want?’ he wheezed with returning breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I want Spargo, the only Spargo.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Then leave go, an’ I’ll glide an’ see.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘You are a very busy man,’ I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He jerked a nod with his head, and waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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—’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘What the hell—?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nay, fair sir, a tramp, a man of devious ways and strange lodgements and
+      multifarious—’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Quit it!’ he shouted. ‘What do you want?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I want money.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He started and half reached for an open drawer where must have reposed a
+      revolver, then bethought himself and growled, ‘This is no bank.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And I tumbled and borrowed a dollar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Don’t forget the local color!’ he shouted after me through the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And, Anak, it was the local color that did for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The anaemic Cerberus grinned when I took the elevator. ‘Got the bounce,
+      eh?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how could you, Leith,” I cried, the picture of the consumptive lad
+      strong before me, “how could you treat him so barbarously?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the local color?” I prodded him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Humph!’ grunted Spargo when I put the copy in his fist. ‘Swift gait you
+      strike, my man.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Where’d you work, you pencil-pusher?’ he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘My maiden effort,’ I simpered modestly, scraping one foot and faintly
+      simulating embarrassment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Maiden hell! What salary do you want?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Save John Law,’ he chuckled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Save John Law,’ said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘How did you know I was bucking the police department?’ he demanded
+      abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He stood up, shook my hand, and emptied his plethoric vest pocket. I put
+      them away and puffed on the old one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In short, he wrestled with me, but I was bricks, and at the end of half
+      an hour the only Spargo gave it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I thanked him, and asked the pay for my copy—dope, he called it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Oh, regular routine,’ he said. ‘Get it the first Thursday after
+      publication.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Then I’ll have to trouble you for a few scad until—’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He looked at me and smiled. ‘Better cough up, eh?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Nobody to identify me, so make it cash.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And cash it was made, thirty plunks (a plunk is a dollar, my dear Anak),
+      and I pulled my freight... eh?—oh, departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I had intended to slip a fiver into his hand, but for all his surprise,
+      he was too quick for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Aw, keep yer dirt,’ he snarled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I like you still better,’ I said, adding a second fiver. ‘You grow
+      perfect. But you must take it.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘It’s a way I have,’ I said, pocketing them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Some bloke’s dropped ‘em down the shaft,’ he whispered, awed by the
+      circumstance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘It stands to reason,’ said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I’ll take charge of ‘em,’ he volunteered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nonsense!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘You’d better turn ‘em over,’ he threatened, ‘or I stop the works.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Pshaw!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And stop he did, between floors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I had not got to the corner when I heard a familiar voice at my shoulder:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Hello, Cinders! Which way?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Bound south,’ I answered. ‘And how’s Slim?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Bum. Bulls is horstile.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Where’s the push?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘At the hang-out. I’ll put you wise.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Who’s the main guy?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Me, and don’t yer ferget it.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lingo was rippling from Leith’s lips, but perforce I stopped him.
+      “Pray translate. Remember, I am a foreigner.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Come on, you mugs!’ Slim addressed them. ‘Throw yer feet! Here’s
+      Cinders, an’ we must do ‘em proud.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘John Ambrose!’ the clerk called out, and Chi Slim, with the ease of long
+      practice, stood up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Vagrant, your Honor,’ the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not
+      deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, ‘Ten days,’ and Chi Slim sat
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Chi Slim nudged me. ‘Give’m a spiel, Cinders. You kin do it.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘L. C. Randolph!’ the clerk called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I stood up, but a hitch came in the proceedings. The clerk whispered to
+      the judge, and the bailiff smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘You are a newspaper man, I understand, Mr. Randolph?’ his Honor remarked
+      sweetly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘That’s yer graft. Work it,’ Slim prompted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘It’s all over but the shouting,’ I groaned back, but Slim, unaware of
+      the article, was puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Your Honor,’ I answered, ‘when I can get work, that is my occupation.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Rarely, your I Honor,’ I answered. ‘Composites, ideals, rather ... er,
+      types, I may say.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘But you have color, sir, unmistakable color,’ he continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘That is splashed on afterward,’ I explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘This judge, then, is not modelled from life, as one might be led to
+      believe?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘No, your Honor.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Ah, I see, merely a type of judicial wickedness?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nay, more, your Honor,’ I said boldly, ‘an ideal.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Splashed with local color afterward? Ha! Good! And may I venture to ask
+      how much you received for this bit of work?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Thirty dollars, your Honor.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Alas!’ said I, ‘I spent the thirty dollars in riotous living.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘And thirty days more for wasting your substance.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Next case!’ said his Honor to the clerk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Slim was stunned. ‘Gee!’ he whispered. ‘Gee the push gets ten days and
+      you get sixty. Gee!’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes,” I said absently; “yes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0004"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      AMATEUR NIGHT
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They made themselves indispensable,” was the terse response. “Make
+      yourself indispensable.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how can I, if I do not get the chance?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Make your chance.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how?” she had insisted, at the same time privately deeming him a most
+      unreasonable man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I don’t know him,” Edna objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Y-e-s,” (long and judicially), “but that’s different.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not a bit different from the strange men and women you’ll interview when
+      you’ve learned how,” Letty encouraged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Letty knew and nodded. “I wonder what he is like?” she asked softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ll make it my business to find out,” Edna assured her; “and I’ll let
+      you know inside forty-eight hours.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Letty clapped her hands. “Good! That’s the newspaper spirit! Make it
+      twenty-four hours and you are perfect!”
+     </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “—and I am very sorry to trouble you,” she concluded the statement
+      of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am sure I know none of them,” she answered despondently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that
+      knows any one else that knows them?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Edna shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then we must think of something else,” he went on, cheerfully. “You’ll
+      have to do something yourself. Let me see.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have it! But no, wait a minute.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I—I hardly understand,” Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no
+      meaning to her. “What are the ‘Loops’? and what is ‘Amateur Night’?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But—but,” she quavered, “I—I—” and there was a
+      suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But what kind of turns can I do?” Edna asked dubiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had reached the door and were shaking hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whatcher turn?” he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her
+      lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sentimental soloist, soprano,” she answered promptly, remembering Irwin’s
+      advice to talk up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whatcher name?” Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she
+      had not considered the question of a name at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Any name? Stage name?” he bellowed impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nan Bellayne,” she invented on the spur of the moment. “B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e.
+      Yes, that’s it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He scribbled it into a notebook. “All right. Take your turn Wednesday and
+      Saturday.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “How much do I get?” Edna demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Two-an’-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after
+      second turn.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hello, girls!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Soprano—sentimental,” she answered, trying to be offhand and at
+      ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whata you doin’ it for?” he demanded directly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “For fun; what else?” she countered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain’t
+      graftin’ for a paper, are you?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I never met but one editor in my life,” she replied evasively, “and I, he—well,
+      we didn’t get on very well together.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hittin’ ‘m for a job?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains
+      for something to turn the conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’d he say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That eighteen other girls had already been there that week.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And what’s your turn?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who? me? Oh, I’m doin’ the tramp act to-night. I’m Charley Welsh, you
+      know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face,
+      but concealed her amusement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But what’s an ‘Only’?” she queried. “I want to learn.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Edna saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Go ahead,” Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side
+      came the peremptory “Don’t flunk!” of Charley Welsh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hello!” he greeted her. “On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin’ your
+      way.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled brightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I told you my experience with editors,” she parried. “And honest now, it
+      was honest, too.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’ll treat us well, I hope,” he said insinuatingly. “Do the right thing
+      by us, and all that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You know what I mean,” he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing
+      manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, I really won’t,” she persisted. “Vaudeville’s too—too wearing
+      on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point
+      further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the
+      two turns, it was he who puzzled her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’d he say? What’d he say?” Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0005"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We beg to remain,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., October 1, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very cordially,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 15, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time Mr. Hale took up the paper, and after a brief search, read to me
+      this account:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A DASTARDLY CRIME
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 21, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cordially yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., December 31, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cordially yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., February 15, 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very cordially,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Barely had I left that chamber of death, when—but too late—the
+      following extraordinary letter was received:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. of M., February 17, 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cordially yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yours, in long farewell,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      WADE ATSHELER. <a id="link2H_4_0006"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But we see black objects in daylight,” I objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It would be a remarkable discovery,” I said non-committally, for the
+      whole thing seemed too fantastic for aught but speculative purposes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A laugh from the doorway startled us. Paul Tichlorne was standing there, a
+      smile of mockery on his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You forget, my dear Lloyd,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Forget what?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You forget,” Paul went on—“ah, you forget the shadow.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Transparency!” ejaculated Lloyd, instantly. “But it can’t be achieved.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, no; of course not.” And Paul shrugged his shoulders and strolled off
+      down the briar-rose path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Certainly,” I answered. “They are a seat apart. The gap is the unoccupied
+      seat.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was for crossing over to verify Lloyd’s statement, but he restrained me.
+      “Wait,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well?” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well?” I echoed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t see him about,” Paul remarked unconcernedly, and we set off across
+      the fields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Did you hear anything, Paul?” I asked once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he shook his head, and thrust his feet steadily forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dropped to the ground, limp and trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Paul,” I said, “we had better return to the house. I am afraid I am going
+      to be sick.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nonsense, old man,” he answered. “The sunshine has gone to your head like
+      wine. You’ll be all right. It’s famous weather.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Tripping over your own feet?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s all up with me,” I gasped, covering my eyes with my hands. “It has
+      attacked my eyes. Paul, take me home.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Paul laughed long and loud. “What did I tell you?—the most
+      wonderful dog, eh? Well, what do you think?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Here! Give me your fist.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Never mind that,” he interrupted my congratulations. “I’ve something
+      better for you to do.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an oily, shellac-like stuff, which spread quickly and easily over
+      the skin and dried immediately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Merely preliminary and precautionary,” he explained when I had finished;
+      “but now for the real stuff.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I picked up another pot he indicated, and glanced inside, but could see
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s empty,” I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stick your finger in it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lloyd chuckled. “Now spread it on, and keep your eyes open.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have a refined and harmless solution for them,” he said. “A fine spray
+      with an air-brush, and presto! I am not.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This deftly accomplished, he said, “Now I shall move about, and do you
+      tell me what sensations you experience.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Have you any other warnings of my presence?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “For God’s sake!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But their locked bodies smote against my knees, and I was overthrown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0007"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      ALL GOLD CANYON
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    “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’!).”
+ </div>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Looks good to me,” he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and
+      gold-pan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved down the stream a few steps and took a second panful of dirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Five,” he muttered, and repeated, “five.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “If it ain’t the real thing, may God knock off my head with sour apples!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Almost enough to save,” he remarked regretfully as he allowed the water
+      to sweep them away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when no specks at all were found in several pans, he straightened up
+      and favored the hillside with a confident glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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’.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Guess I’ll take another whack at her,” he concluded, starting to cross
+      the stream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come down out o’ that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an’ agreeable, an’ come
+      down!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Gosh darn my buttons! if I didn’t plumb forget dinner!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good night, Mr. Pocket,” he called sleepily. “Good night.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’d just better take a hike down-stream a ways,” he said. “There’s no
+      tellin’ what cuss may be snoopin’ around.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just about two yards above that manzanita bush an’ a yard to the right,”
+       he finally concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He yawned and glanced across at his side-hill. “Good night, Mr. Pocket,”
+       he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hey, you, Mr. Pocket!” he called down into the canyon. “Stand out from
+      under! I’m a-comin’, Mr. Pocket! I’m a-comin’!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nightfall found him by the edge of the stream his eyes wrestling with the
+      gathering darkness over the washing of a five-dollar pan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wisht I had an electric light to go on working,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sufferin’ Sardanopolis!” he cried. “Lumps an’ chunks of it! Lumps an’
+      chunks of it!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened his shirt and felt himself, front and back, on his left side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He shot me in the back, the measly skunk! He shot me in the back!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When his treasure was quite cleaned up and wrapped securely into a number
+      of blanket-covered parcels, he made an estimate of its value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked angrily over to the dead man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “An’ you shot me in the back!” he said accusingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The measly skunk!” he said, and disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:—
+    </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    “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’!).”
+ </div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0008"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      PLANCHETTE
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      “It is my right to know,” the girl said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is my right,” the girl repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know it,” he answered, desperately and helplessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked down at the man. “Well?” she asked, with the firmness which
+      feigns belief that obedience will be forthcoming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Dear, dear Lute,” he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her lips were compressed with the effort of control. His head was sinking
+      back to her knee, when she checked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You are already married, Chris?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No! no!” he cried vehemently. “I have never been married. I want to marry
+      only you, and I cannot!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t!” he interrupted. “Don’t ask me!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is my right to know,” she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know it,” he again interrupted. “But I cannot tell you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You have not considered me, Chris,” she went on gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know, I know,” he broke in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You cannot have considered me. You do not know what I have to bear from
+      my people because of you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I did not think they felt so very unkindly toward me,” he said bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she talked, she continued to pass her fingers caressingly through his
+      hair, sorrowful for the pain that she was inflicting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I had no idea of imposing such slavery,” he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man, his head resting on her knee again, groaned, but made no other
+      reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But why should you go away?” she asked. “Besides, I must know why, before
+      I can send you away.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t ask me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Tell me,” she said, her voice tenderly imperative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t, Lute; don’t force me,” the man pleaded, and there was appeal in
+      his eyes and voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But you must tell me,” she insisted. “It is justice you owe me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come, let us go,” she said, almost in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No—wait!” she cried, before he had touched the two lower bars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, no,” he protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They proceeded to exchange the saddles on the horses, glad of the
+      diversion and making the most of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You look like a young Amazon,” the man said approvingly, his eyes passing
+      tenderly over the girl as she swung the horse around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Are you ready?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “All ready!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “To the old mill,” she called, as the horses sprang forward. “That’s less
+      than a mile.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “To a finish?” he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now for it!” the girl cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Touch her on the neck!” she cried to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Shall I give him the spurs?” Lute shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute leaned to the side and rested her hand for a moment on Dolly’s wet
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ban’s a sluggard alongside of her,” Chris affirmed. “Dolly’s all right,
+      if she is in her Indian Summer.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That accounts for it,” Chris demurred. “Her folly passed with her youth.
+      Many’s the lively time she’s given you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There is summer, here is spring,” Lute said. “Oh, beautiful Sonoma
+      Valley!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Have you ever heard of the secret pasture?” she asked, her eyes still
+      fixed on the remote green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, Dolly, this is most remarkable,” Lute began reprovingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A genuine buck!” Chris called out, and the next moment the mare was
+      rising under him in a second buck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Chris!” she said, so softly that it was almost a whisper. Then she
+      sighed, “Thank God.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know where there is a spring,” she said, a moment later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Regular bucking-bronco proposition.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But what should she know about bucking?” Lute demanded. “She was never
+      known to buck—never.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders. “Some forgotten instinct, perhaps, long-lapsed
+      and come to life again.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl rose to her feet determinedly. “I’m going to find out,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whatever it was, it was subjective, that much is certain,” Chris said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Obsession,” Lute suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “An evil spirit,” Chris laughed; “but what evil have I done that I should
+      be so punished?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she talked, she took hold of the stirrup-strap and started to shorten
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What are you doing?” Chris demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m going to ride Dolly in.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, you’re not,” he announced. “It would be bad discipline. After what
+      has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has happened,”
+       Lute said, as they rode into camp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “My thoughts were of you,” Chris answered, and felt the responsive
+      pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her face up to his and met his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good night,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Dear Lute, dear Lute,” he caressed her with his voice as she moved away
+      among the shadows.
+    </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s going for the mail?” called a woman’s voice through the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute closed the book from which they had been reading, and sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “We weren’t going to ride to-day,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Let me go,” Chris proposed. “You stay here. I’ll be down and back in no
+      time.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s going for the mail?” the voice insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where’s Martin?” Lute called, lifting her voice in answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “All right, Aunty, we’re starting,” Lute called back, getting out of the
+      hammock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Like a kitten,” was Lute’s comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yet I shall never be able wholly to trust her again,” Chris said. “Not
+      after yesterday’s mad freak.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I feel the same way,” Chris laughed back. “Ban could never possibly
+      betray me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris looked up reassuringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled back and went over to the fallen beast, letting go the girths of
+      the saddle and getting the head straightened out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I thought so,” he said, after a cursory examination. “I thought so at the
+      time. Did you hear that sort of crunching snap?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shuddered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the top of the bank Chris turned and looked down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good-by, Washoe Ban!” he called out. “Good-by, old fellow.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was done deliberately,” Chris burst forth suddenly. “There was no
+      warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don’t know where.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Can you shoot a horse?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The groom nodded, then added, “Yes, sir,” with a second and deeper nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “How do you do it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Draw a line from the eyes to the ears—I mean the opposite ears,
+      sir. And where the lines cross—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That will do,” Chris interrupted. “You know the watering place at the
+      second bend. You’ll find Ban there with a broken back.”
+     </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, here you are, sir. I have been looking for you everywhere since
+      dinner. You are wanted immediately.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris tossed his cigar away, then went over and pressed his foot on its
+      glowing fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You haven’t told anybody about it?—Ban?” he queried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute shook her head. “They’ll learn soon enough. Martin will mention it to
+      Uncle Robert to-morrow.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But don’t feel too bad about it,” she said, after a moment’s pause,
+      slipping her hand into his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That’s the only explanation,” he answered, starting off with her. “But
+      why am I wanted urgently?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Planchette.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I remember. It will be a new experience to me. Somehow I missed it
+      when it was all the rage long ago.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “So did all of us,” Lute replied, “except Mrs. Grantly. It is her favorite
+      phantom, it seems.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Positively uncanny... at times.” Lute shivered involuntarily. “She gives
+      me the creeps.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s that?” Chris whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Doesn’t look as though he could give an ox points on imagination.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m almost bursting with vanity from listening to you,” he laughed,
+      passing his arm around her and drawing her against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned more closely against him, and sighed as with fatigue. He
+      breathed a kiss into her hair and held her with firm tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aunt Mildred stirred briskly and looked up from the Planchette board.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come, let us begin,” she said. “It will soon grow chilly. Robert, where
+      are those children?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Here we are,” Lute called out, disengaging herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now for a bundle of creeps,” Chris whispered, as they started in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s first?” Uncle Robert demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Brave woman,” applauded her husband. “Now, Mrs. Grantly, do your worst.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I wish the influence would hurry up,” Aunt Mildred protested at the end
+      of five motionless minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just a little longer, Mrs. Story, just a little longer,” Mrs. Grantly
+      said soothingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For another five minutes this continued, when Aunt Mildred withdrew her
+      hand with an effort, and said, with a nervous laugh:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hen-scratches,” was Uncle Robert’s judgement, when he looked over the
+      paper upon which she had scrawled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You try it, Story,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now, Robert, none of your ridiculousness,” his wife warned him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do try to be serious,” Mrs. Grantly warned them. “An atmosphere of levity
+      does not conduce to the best operation of Planchette.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There, that will do, I guess,” Uncle Robert said as he took his hand
+      away. “Now let’s see.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, what flourishes!” Lute exclaimed, as she looked at the paper. “And
+      look there, there are two different handwritings.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Iron Top’s pretty low,” Mr. Barton murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Robert, you’ve been dabbling again!” Aunt Mildred cried accusingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Your subconscious mind,” Chris suggested. “You read the quotations in
+      to-day’s paper.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, I didn’t; but last week I glanced over the column.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how about that other stuff?” Uncle Robert demanded. “Sounds like what
+      I’d think Christian Science ought to sound like.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Or theosophy,” Aunt Mildred volunteered. “Some message to a neophyte.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Go on, read the rest,” her husband commanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’d like to have you explain that theosophy stuff on the basis of the
+      subconscious mind, Chris,” Uncle Robert challenged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris shrugged his shoulders. “No explanation. You must have got a message
+      intended for some one else.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lines were crossed, eh?” Uncle Robert chuckled. “Multiplex spiritual
+      wireless telegraphy, I’d call it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ll be good,” Uncle Robert rejoined. “But if I really must snort, may I
+      silently slip away?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look at him,” Lute whispered to her aunt. “See how white he is.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I think I wrote something,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I should say you did,” Mrs. Grantly remarked with satisfaction, holding
+      up the sheet of paper and glancing at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Read it aloud,” Uncle Robert said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Quite a sanguinary turn, I should say,” Uncle Robert remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have already made two attempts upon your life,” Mrs. Grantly read from
+      the paper, which she was going over a second time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “On my life?” Chris demanded between yawns. “Why, my life hasn’t been
+      attempted even once. My! I am sleepy!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, Chris!” Lute cried impulsively. “This afternoon! The hand you said
+      must have seized your rein!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I was joking,” he objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nevertheless...” Lute left her thought unspoken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Grantly had become keen on the scent. “What was that about this
+      afternoon? Was your life in danger?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked triumphantly at them. Planchette had been vindicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who are you?” she asked. “What is your name?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s Dick,” Aunt Mildred cried, a note of the mildly hysterical in her
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband straightened up, his face for the first time grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s Dick’s signature,” he said. “I’d know his fist in a thousand.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Dick Curtis,’” Mrs. Grantly read aloud. “Who is Dick Curtis?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Let me see,” Uncle Robert demanded, taking the paper and examining it.
+      “Yes, it is Dick’s handwriting.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But who is Dick?” Mrs. Grantly insisted. “Who is this Dick Curtis?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Dick Curtis, why, he was Captain Richard Curtis,” Uncle Robert answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I knew,” Chris answered, “and it was I that operated Planchette. The
+      explanation is simple.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the handwriting,” interposed Mr. Barton. “What you wrote and what
+      Mrs. Grantly wrote are identical.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris bent over and compared the handwriting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Besides,” Mrs. Grantly cried, “Mr. Story recognizes the handwriting.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him for verification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded his head. “Yes, it is Dick’s fist. I’ll swear to that.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Let me put it to the test,” she heard Mrs. Grantly saying. “Let Miss
+      Story try Planchette. There may be a further message.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Robert can return,” she called back, “as soon as he has seen me to my
+      tent.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute’s hand had ceased moving, and Mrs. Grantly was already reading the
+      message that had been written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is a different handwriting,” she said. “A woman’s hand. ‘Martha,’ it
+      is signed. Who is Martha?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute was not surprised. “It is my mother,” she said simply. “What does she
+      say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And please don’t let us have any more Planchette,” Lute continued
+      hastily. “Let us forget all the nonsense that has occurred.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nonsense,’ my dear child?” Mrs. Grantly was indignantly protesting when
+      Uncle Robert strode into the circle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hello!” he demanded. “What’s being done?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “Well, what did you do last night after we left?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, took a stroll,” Chris answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute’s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was
+      palpably assumed, “With—a—with Mr. Barton?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, yes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And a smoke?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes; and now what’s it all about?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where I am going to take you this afternoon.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You plan well without knowing my wishes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I knew well what your wishes are. It is to see a horse I have found.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, “Oh, good!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He is a beauty,” Chris said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “For a while, at least,” she pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ridiculous!” he cried. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?—you who
+      are always so abominably and adorably well!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You refuse to take me seriously,” Lute said, when she had laughed her
+      appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You don’t explain it—the handwriting of my father, which Uncle
+      Robert recognized—oh, the whole thing, you don’t explain it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris caught her hand, crying: “Come on! It will be a lark.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hand in hand they ran down the path to the tree-pillared room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But there is one thing I don’t see,” she objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But you don’t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a
+      message from the dead?” he interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know, Chris,” she wavered. “I am sure I don’t know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And what have you to say to that?” he challenged, placing his hand on
+      Planchette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the instant his hand began to write. Both were startled by the
+      suddenness of it. The message was brief:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Lute did not share his bravado. Her fright showed itself in her face.
+      She laid her trembling hand on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She pointed out a sentence that read: “You cannot escape me nor the just
+      punishment that is yours!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She crumpled up the scrawled sheets of paper, and put Planchette away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He debated for a few steps. “I have thought of telling your uncle and
+      aunt.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What you couldn’t tell me?” she asked quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But it would be easier if I went away,” he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am happier when you are here.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The cruelty of circumstance,” he muttered savagely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Comanche,” he answered. “I know you will like him.”
+     </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s a good test,” she called across the canyon. “I’m going to put him
+      down it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bravo!” Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris, in his anxiety, had sat up to observe more closely what she
+      meditated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t tackle it,” he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have faith in Comanche,” she called in return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And Comanche is that very horse,” she answered. “Watch him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am all tense,” Chris answered. “I was holding my breath.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “His owner says that he has never been known to lose his feet, that it is
+      impossible to get him down.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris smiled agreement as he changed the saddles. Meanwhile she compared
+      the two horses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris gave her a hand into the saddle, and followed her up the slope to
+      the county road. She reined in suddenly, saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “We won’t go straight back to camp.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You forget dinner,” he warned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I remember Comanche,” she retorted. “We’ll ride directly over to the
+      ranch and buy him. Dinner will keep.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the cook won’t,” Chris laughed. “She’s already threatened to leave,
+      what of our late-comings.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Even so,” was the answer. “Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook, but
+      at any rate we shall have got Comanche.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look!” he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, Chris, it is good to be alive... and to have you here by my side!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered her by the warm light in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “If only he will lie quietly,” Lute breathed aloud, her mind at work on
+      the means of rescue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Chris!” she called once, and twice; but she called hopelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the depths, on the windless air, arose only the murmur of bees and
+      of running water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Chris!” she called yet a third time, and sank slowly down in the dust of
+      the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+
+
+
+
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1089 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1089 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1089)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Moon-Face and Other Stories, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Moon-Face and Other Stories
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: July 31, 2008 [eBook #1089]
+[Most recently updated: February 8, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Espen Ore, Steve Henshaw, and Andrew Sly.
+Revised by Richard Tonsing.
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
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+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold;'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Moon-face and Other Stories, by Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Moon-Face and Other Stories</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Release Date: July 31, 2008 [eBook #1089]<br />
+[Most recently updated: February 8, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Espen Ore, Steve Henshaw, Andrew Sly, and David Widger
+<br />Revised by Richard Tonsing.</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em;margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES ***</div>
+
+
+
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class='ph2'>
+      By Jack London
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2></div>
+    <table style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> MOON-FACE </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> THE LEOPARD MAN’S STORY </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> LOCAL COLOR </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> AMATEUR NIGHT </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> THE MINIONS OF MIDAS </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> ALL GOLD CANYON </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> PLANCHETTE </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a id="link2H_4_0001"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      MOON-FACE
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning, being
+      Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where are you going?” I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Trout,” he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. “I just dote on
+      trout.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t see any laugh in it,” I said shortly, and I know my face went
+      sour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What is her name?” he managed to ask between paroxysms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bellona,” I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He! he!” he tittered. “What a funny name.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out
+      between them, “She was the wife of Mars, you know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, “You go away
+      Monday, don’t you?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded his head and grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then you won’t have another chance to get a mess of those trout you just
+      ‘dote’ on.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not notice the sneer. “Oh, I don’t know,” he chuckled. “I’m
+      going up to-morrow to try pretty hard.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging
+      myself with rapture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0002"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      THE LEOPARD MAN’S STORY
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as
+      anxious to give me a story as I was to get it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I suppose you’ve heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?”
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which
+      would have been critical had it not been so sad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Madame de Ville—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “—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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the far-away look
+      came into his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It... it was...?” I queried with halting eagerness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Snuff—that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old
+      Augustus never meant to do it. He only sneezed.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0003"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      LOCAL COLOR
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is sufficiently—er—journalese?” he interrupted suavely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and
+      dismissed the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have tried it. It does not pay.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was paid for and published,” he added, after a pause. “And I was also
+      honored with sixty days in the Hobo.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The Hobo?” I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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’—
+    </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    “‘The case of a treble hautboy
+     Was a mansion for him, a court.’
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria’s “Economic
+      Foundation of Society.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I should advise you, however,” I added, “to mend the pockets first.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Sunflower’s face clouded. “N—o,” she said, “the black one.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The black one!” This explosively, incredulously. “I wear it quite often.
+      I—I intended wearing it to-night.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear,” the
+      Sunflower hurried on. “Besides, it’s shiny—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Shiny!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Has seen better days.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are threadbare.
+      And you have many suits—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Five,” I corrected, “counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
+      draggled pockets.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And he has none, no home, nothing—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You ARE a dear!” And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked back
+      alluringly. “You are a PERFECT dear.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid
+      and apologetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Old ones!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?” I
+      asked. “Never mind Loria. Tell me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, if I must.” He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Pale youth,’ quoth I, ‘I pray thee the way to the sanctum-sanctorum, to
+      the Most High Cock-a-lorum.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He deigned to look at me, scornfully, with infinite weariness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘G’wan an’ see the janitor. I don’t know nothin’ about the gas.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nay, my lily-white, the editor.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Wich editor?’ he snapped like a young bullterrier. ‘Dramatic? Sportin’?
+      Society? Sunday? Weekly? Daily? Telegraph? Local? News? Editorial? Wich?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Which, I did not know. ‘THE Editor,’ I proclaimed stoutly. ‘The ONLY
+      Editor.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Aw, Spargo!’ he sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Of course, Spargo,’ I answered. ‘Who else?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Gimme yer card,’ says he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘My what?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Yer card—Say! Wot’s yer business, anyway?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I am the census-taker Time,’ I boomed in sepulchral tones. ‘Beware lest
+      I knock too loud.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he sneered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whereupon I rapped him smartly, and he choked and turned purplish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Well, whatcher want?’ he wheezed with returning breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I want Spargo, the only Spargo.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Then leave go, an’ I’ll glide an’ see.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘You are a very busy man,’ I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He jerked a nod with his head, and waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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—’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘What the hell—?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nay, fair sir, a tramp, a man of devious ways and strange lodgements and
+      multifarious—’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Quit it!’ he shouted. ‘What do you want?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I want money.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He started and half reached for an open drawer where must have reposed a
+      revolver, then bethought himself and growled, ‘This is no bank.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And I tumbled and borrowed a dollar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Don’t forget the local color!’ he shouted after me through the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And, Anak, it was the local color that did for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The anaemic Cerberus grinned when I took the elevator. ‘Got the bounce,
+      eh?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how could you, Leith,” I cried, the picture of the consumptive lad
+      strong before me, “how could you treat him so barbarously?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the local color?” I prodded him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Humph!’ grunted Spargo when I put the copy in his fist. ‘Swift gait you
+      strike, my man.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Where’d you work, you pencil-pusher?’ he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘My maiden effort,’ I simpered modestly, scraping one foot and faintly
+      simulating embarrassment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Maiden hell! What salary do you want?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Save John Law,’ he chuckled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Save John Law,’ said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘How did you know I was bucking the police department?’ he demanded
+      abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He stood up, shook my hand, and emptied his plethoric vest pocket. I put
+      them away and puffed on the old one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In short, he wrestled with me, but I was bricks, and at the end of half
+      an hour the only Spargo gave it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I thanked him, and asked the pay for my copy—dope, he called it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Oh, regular routine,’ he said. ‘Get it the first Thursday after
+      publication.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Then I’ll have to trouble you for a few scad until—’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He looked at me and smiled. ‘Better cough up, eh?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Nobody to identify me, so make it cash.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And cash it was made, thirty plunks (a plunk is a dollar, my dear Anak),
+      and I pulled my freight... eh?—oh, departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I had intended to slip a fiver into his hand, but for all his surprise,
+      he was too quick for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Aw, keep yer dirt,’ he snarled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I like you still better,’ I said, adding a second fiver. ‘You grow
+      perfect. But you must take it.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘It’s a way I have,’ I said, pocketing them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Some bloke’s dropped ‘em down the shaft,’ he whispered, awed by the
+      circumstance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘It stands to reason,’ said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘I’ll take charge of ‘em,’ he volunteered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nonsense!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘You’d better turn ‘em over,’ he threatened, ‘or I stop the works.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Pshaw!’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And stop he did, between floors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I had not got to the corner when I heard a familiar voice at my shoulder:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Hello, Cinders! Which way?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Bound south,’ I answered. ‘And how’s Slim?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Bum. Bulls is horstile.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Where’s the push?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘At the hang-out. I’ll put you wise.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Who’s the main guy?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Me, and don’t yer ferget it.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lingo was rippling from Leith’s lips, but perforce I stopped him.
+      “Pray translate. Remember, I am a foreigner.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Come on, you mugs!’ Slim addressed them. ‘Throw yer feet! Here’s
+      Cinders, an’ we must do ‘em proud.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘John Ambrose!’ the clerk called out, and Chi Slim, with the ease of long
+      practice, stood up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Vagrant, your Honor,’ the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not
+      deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, ‘Ten days,’ and Chi Slim sat
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Chi Slim nudged me. ‘Give’m a spiel, Cinders. You kin do it.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘L. C. Randolph!’ the clerk called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I stood up, but a hitch came in the proceedings. The clerk whispered to
+      the judge, and the bailiff smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘You are a newspaper man, I understand, Mr. Randolph?’ his Honor remarked
+      sweetly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘That’s yer graft. Work it,’ Slim prompted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘It’s all over but the shouting,’ I groaned back, but Slim, unaware of
+      the article, was puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Your Honor,’ I answered, ‘when I can get work, that is my occupation.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Rarely, your I Honor,’ I answered. ‘Composites, ideals, rather ... er,
+      types, I may say.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘But you have color, sir, unmistakable color,’ he continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘That is splashed on afterward,’ I explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘This judge, then, is not modelled from life, as one might be led to
+      believe?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘No, your Honor.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Ah, I see, merely a type of judicial wickedness?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nay, more, your Honor,’ I said boldly, ‘an ideal.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Splashed with local color afterward? Ha! Good! And may I venture to ask
+      how much you received for this bit of work?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Thirty dollars, your Honor.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘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.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Alas!’ said I, ‘I spent the thirty dollars in riotous living.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘And thirty days more for wasting your substance.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Next case!’ said his Honor to the clerk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Slim was stunned. ‘Gee!’ he whispered. ‘Gee the push gets ten days and
+      you get sixty. Gee!’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes,” I said absently; “yes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0004"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      AMATEUR NIGHT
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They made themselves indispensable,” was the terse response. “Make
+      yourself indispensable.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how can I, if I do not get the chance?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Make your chance.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how?” she had insisted, at the same time privately deeming him a most
+      unreasonable man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I don’t know him,” Edna objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Y-e-s,” (long and judicially), “but that’s different.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not a bit different from the strange men and women you’ll interview when
+      you’ve learned how,” Letty encouraged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Letty knew and nodded. “I wonder what he is like?” she asked softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ll make it my business to find out,” Edna assured her; “and I’ll let
+      you know inside forty-eight hours.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Letty clapped her hands. “Good! That’s the newspaper spirit! Make it
+      twenty-four hours and you are perfect!”
+     </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “—and I am very sorry to trouble you,” she concluded the statement
+      of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am sure I know none of them,” she answered despondently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that
+      knows any one else that knows them?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Edna shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then we must think of something else,” he went on, cheerfully. “You’ll
+      have to do something yourself. Let me see.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have it! But no, wait a minute.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I—I hardly understand,” Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no
+      meaning to her. “What are the ‘Loops’? and what is ‘Amateur Night’?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But—but,” she quavered, “I—I—” and there was a
+      suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But what kind of turns can I do?” Edna asked dubiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had reached the door and were shaking hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whatcher turn?” he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her
+      lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sentimental soloist, soprano,” she answered promptly, remembering Irwin’s
+      advice to talk up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whatcher name?” Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she
+      had not considered the question of a name at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Any name? Stage name?” he bellowed impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nan Bellayne,” she invented on the spur of the moment. “B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e.
+      Yes, that’s it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He scribbled it into a notebook. “All right. Take your turn Wednesday and
+      Saturday.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “How much do I get?” Edna demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Two-an’-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after
+      second turn.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hello, girls!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Soprano—sentimental,” she answered, trying to be offhand and at
+      ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whata you doin’ it for?” he demanded directly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “For fun; what else?” she countered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain’t
+      graftin’ for a paper, are you?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I never met but one editor in my life,” she replied evasively, “and I, he—well,
+      we didn’t get on very well together.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hittin’ ‘m for a job?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains
+      for something to turn the conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’d he say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That eighteen other girls had already been there that week.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And what’s your turn?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who? me? Oh, I’m doin’ the tramp act to-night. I’m Charley Welsh, you
+      know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face,
+      but concealed her amusement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But what’s an ‘Only’?” she queried. “I want to learn.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Edna saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Go ahead,” Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side
+      came the peremptory “Don’t flunk!” of Charley Welsh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hello!” he greeted her. “On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin’ your
+      way.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled brightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I told you my experience with editors,” she parried. “And honest now, it
+      was honest, too.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’ll treat us well, I hope,” he said insinuatingly. “Do the right thing
+      by us, and all that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You know what I mean,” he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing
+      manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, I really won’t,” she persisted. “Vaudeville’s too—too wearing
+      on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point
+      further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the
+      two turns, it was he who puzzled her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’d he say? What’d he say?” Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0005"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We beg to remain,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., October 1, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very cordially,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 15, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time Mr. Hale took up the paper, and after a brief search, read to me
+      this account:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A DASTARDLY CRIME
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 21, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cordially yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., December 31, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cordially yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., February 15, 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very cordially,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Barely had I left that chamber of death, when—but too late—the
+      following extraordinary letter was received:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. of M., February 17, 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cordially yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yours, in long farewell,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      WADE ATSHELER. <a id="link2H_4_0006"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But we see black objects in daylight,” I objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It would be a remarkable discovery,” I said non-committally, for the
+      whole thing seemed too fantastic for aught but speculative purposes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A laugh from the doorway startled us. Paul Tichlorne was standing there, a
+      smile of mockery on his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You forget, my dear Lloyd,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Forget what?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You forget,” Paul went on—“ah, you forget the shadow.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Transparency!” ejaculated Lloyd, instantly. “But it can’t be achieved.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, no; of course not.” And Paul shrugged his shoulders and strolled off
+      down the briar-rose path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Certainly,” I answered. “They are a seat apart. The gap is the unoccupied
+      seat.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was for crossing over to verify Lloyd’s statement, but he restrained me.
+      “Wait,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well?” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well?” I echoed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t see him about,” Paul remarked unconcernedly, and we set off across
+      the fields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Did you hear anything, Paul?” I asked once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he shook his head, and thrust his feet steadily forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dropped to the ground, limp and trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Paul,” I said, “we had better return to the house. I am afraid I am going
+      to be sick.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nonsense, old man,” he answered. “The sunshine has gone to your head like
+      wine. You’ll be all right. It’s famous weather.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Tripping over your own feet?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s all up with me,” I gasped, covering my eyes with my hands. “It has
+      attacked my eyes. Paul, take me home.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Paul laughed long and loud. “What did I tell you?—the most
+      wonderful dog, eh? Well, what do you think?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Here! Give me your fist.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Never mind that,” he interrupted my congratulations. “I’ve something
+      better for you to do.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an oily, shellac-like stuff, which spread quickly and easily over
+      the skin and dried immediately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Merely preliminary and precautionary,” he explained when I had finished;
+      “but now for the real stuff.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I picked up another pot he indicated, and glanced inside, but could see
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s empty,” I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stick your finger in it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lloyd chuckled. “Now spread it on, and keep your eyes open.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have a refined and harmless solution for them,” he said. “A fine spray
+      with an air-brush, and presto! I am not.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This deftly accomplished, he said, “Now I shall move about, and do you
+      tell me what sensations you experience.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Have you any other warnings of my presence?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “For God’s sake!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But their locked bodies smote against my knees, and I was overthrown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0007"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      ALL GOLD CANYON
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    “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’!).”
+ </div>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Looks good to me,” he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and
+      gold-pan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved down the stream a few steps and took a second panful of dirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Five,” he muttered, and repeated, “five.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “If it ain’t the real thing, may God knock off my head with sour apples!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Almost enough to save,” he remarked regretfully as he allowed the water
+      to sweep them away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when no specks at all were found in several pans, he straightened up
+      and favored the hillside with a confident glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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’.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Guess I’ll take another whack at her,” he concluded, starting to cross
+      the stream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come down out o’ that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an’ agreeable, an’ come
+      down!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Gosh darn my buttons! if I didn’t plumb forget dinner!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good night, Mr. Pocket,” he called sleepily. “Good night.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’d just better take a hike down-stream a ways,” he said. “There’s no
+      tellin’ what cuss may be snoopin’ around.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just about two yards above that manzanita bush an’ a yard to the right,”
+       he finally concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He yawned and glanced across at his side-hill. “Good night, Mr. Pocket,”
+       he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hey, you, Mr. Pocket!” he called down into the canyon. “Stand out from
+      under! I’m a-comin’, Mr. Pocket! I’m a-comin’!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nightfall found him by the edge of the stream his eyes wrestling with the
+      gathering darkness over the washing of a five-dollar pan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wisht I had an electric light to go on working,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Sufferin’ Sardanopolis!” he cried. “Lumps an’ chunks of it! Lumps an’
+      chunks of it!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened his shirt and felt himself, front and back, on his left side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He shot me in the back, the measly skunk! He shot me in the back!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When his treasure was quite cleaned up and wrapped securely into a number
+      of blanket-covered parcels, he made an estimate of its value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked angrily over to the dead man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “An’ you shot me in the back!” he said accusingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The measly skunk!” he said, and disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:—
+    </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    “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’!).”
+ </div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a id="link2H_4_0008"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <div class='chapter'><h2>
+      PLANCHETTE
+    </h2></div>
+    <p>
+      “It is my right to know,” the girl said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is my right,” the girl repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know it,” he answered, desperately and helplessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked down at the man. “Well?” she asked, with the firmness which
+      feigns belief that obedience will be forthcoming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Dear, dear Lute,” he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her lips were compressed with the effort of control. His head was sinking
+      back to her knee, when she checked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You are already married, Chris?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No! no!” he cried vehemently. “I have never been married. I want to marry
+      only you, and I cannot!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t!” he interrupted. “Don’t ask me!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is my right to know,” she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know it,” he again interrupted. “But I cannot tell you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You have not considered me, Chris,” she went on gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know, I know,” he broke in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You cannot have considered me. You do not know what I have to bear from
+      my people because of you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I did not think they felt so very unkindly toward me,” he said bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she talked, she continued to pass her fingers caressingly through his
+      hair, sorrowful for the pain that she was inflicting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I had no idea of imposing such slavery,” he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man, his head resting on her knee again, groaned, but made no other
+      reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But why should you go away?” she asked. “Besides, I must know why, before
+      I can send you away.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t ask me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Tell me,” she said, her voice tenderly imperative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t, Lute; don’t force me,” the man pleaded, and there was appeal in
+      his eyes and voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But you must tell me,” she insisted. “It is justice you owe me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come, let us go,” she said, almost in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No—wait!” she cried, before he had touched the two lower bars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, no,” he protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They proceeded to exchange the saddles on the horses, glad of the
+      diversion and making the most of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You look like a young Amazon,” the man said approvingly, his eyes passing
+      tenderly over the girl as she swung the horse around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Are you ready?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “All ready!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “To the old mill,” she called, as the horses sprang forward. “That’s less
+      than a mile.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “To a finish?” he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now for it!” the girl cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Touch her on the neck!” she cried to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Shall I give him the spurs?” Lute shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute leaned to the side and rested her hand for a moment on Dolly’s wet
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ban’s a sluggard alongside of her,” Chris affirmed. “Dolly’s all right,
+      if she is in her Indian Summer.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That accounts for it,” Chris demurred. “Her folly passed with her youth.
+      Many’s the lively time she’s given you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There is summer, here is spring,” Lute said. “Oh, beautiful Sonoma
+      Valley!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Have you ever heard of the secret pasture?” she asked, her eyes still
+      fixed on the remote green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, Dolly, this is most remarkable,” Lute began reprovingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A genuine buck!” Chris called out, and the next moment the mare was
+      rising under him in a second buck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Chris!” she said, so softly that it was almost a whisper. Then she
+      sighed, “Thank God.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I know where there is a spring,” she said, a moment later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Regular bucking-bronco proposition.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But what should she know about bucking?” Lute demanded. “She was never
+      known to buck—never.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders. “Some forgotten instinct, perhaps, long-lapsed
+      and come to life again.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl rose to her feet determinedly. “I’m going to find out,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whatever it was, it was subjective, that much is certain,” Chris said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Obsession,” Lute suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “An evil spirit,” Chris laughed; “but what evil have I done that I should
+      be so punished?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she talked, she took hold of the stirrup-strap and started to shorten
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What are you doing?” Chris demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m going to ride Dolly in.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, you’re not,” he announced. “It would be bad discipline. After what
+      has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has happened,”
+       Lute said, as they rode into camp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “My thoughts were of you,” Chris answered, and felt the responsive
+      pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her face up to his and met his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good night,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Dear Lute, dear Lute,” he caressed her with his voice as she moved away
+      among the shadows.
+    </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s going for the mail?” called a woman’s voice through the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute closed the book from which they had been reading, and sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “We weren’t going to ride to-day,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Let me go,” Chris proposed. “You stay here. I’ll be down and back in no
+      time.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s going for the mail?” the voice insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where’s Martin?” Lute called, lifting her voice in answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “All right, Aunty, we’re starting,” Lute called back, getting out of the
+      hammock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Like a kitten,” was Lute’s comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yet I shall never be able wholly to trust her again,” Chris said. “Not
+      after yesterday’s mad freak.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I feel the same way,” Chris laughed back. “Ban could never possibly
+      betray me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris looked up reassuringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled back and went over to the fallen beast, letting go the girths of
+      the saddle and getting the head straightened out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I thought so,” he said, after a cursory examination. “I thought so at the
+      time. Did you hear that sort of crunching snap?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shuddered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the top of the bank Chris turned and looked down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good-by, Washoe Ban!” he called out. “Good-by, old fellow.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was done deliberately,” Chris burst forth suddenly. “There was no
+      warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don’t know where.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Can you shoot a horse?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The groom nodded, then added, “Yes, sir,” with a second and deeper nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “How do you do it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Draw a line from the eyes to the ears—I mean the opposite ears,
+      sir. And where the lines cross—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That will do,” Chris interrupted. “You know the watering place at the
+      second bend. You’ll find Ban there with a broken back.”
+     </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, here you are, sir. I have been looking for you everywhere since
+      dinner. You are wanted immediately.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris tossed his cigar away, then went over and pressed his foot on its
+      glowing fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You haven’t told anybody about it?—Ban?” he queried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute shook her head. “They’ll learn soon enough. Martin will mention it to
+      Uncle Robert to-morrow.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But don’t feel too bad about it,” she said, after a moment’s pause,
+      slipping her hand into his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That’s the only explanation,” he answered, starting off with her. “But
+      why am I wanted urgently?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Planchette.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I remember. It will be a new experience to me. Somehow I missed it
+      when it was all the rage long ago.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “So did all of us,” Lute replied, “except Mrs. Grantly. It is her favorite
+      phantom, it seems.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Positively uncanny... at times.” Lute shivered involuntarily. “She gives
+      me the creeps.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s that?” Chris whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Doesn’t look as though he could give an ox points on imagination.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m almost bursting with vanity from listening to you,” he laughed,
+      passing his arm around her and drawing her against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned more closely against him, and sighed as with fatigue. He
+      breathed a kiss into her hair and held her with firm tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aunt Mildred stirred briskly and looked up from the Planchette board.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come, let us begin,” she said. “It will soon grow chilly. Robert, where
+      are those children?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Here we are,” Lute called out, disengaging herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now for a bundle of creeps,” Chris whispered, as they started in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who’s first?” Uncle Robert demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Brave woman,” applauded her husband. “Now, Mrs. Grantly, do your worst.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I wish the influence would hurry up,” Aunt Mildred protested at the end
+      of five motionless minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just a little longer, Mrs. Story, just a little longer,” Mrs. Grantly
+      said soothingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For another five minutes this continued, when Aunt Mildred withdrew her
+      hand with an effort, and said, with a nervous laugh:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hen-scratches,” was Uncle Robert’s judgement, when he looked over the
+      paper upon which she had scrawled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You try it, Story,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now, Robert, none of your ridiculousness,” his wife warned him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do try to be serious,” Mrs. Grantly warned them. “An atmosphere of levity
+      does not conduce to the best operation of Planchette.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “There, that will do, I guess,” Uncle Robert said as he took his hand
+      away. “Now let’s see.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, what flourishes!” Lute exclaimed, as she looked at the paper. “And
+      look there, there are two different handwritings.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Iron Top’s pretty low,” Mr. Barton murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Robert, you’ve been dabbling again!” Aunt Mildred cried accusingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Your subconscious mind,” Chris suggested. “You read the quotations in
+      to-day’s paper.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, I didn’t; but last week I glanced over the column.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how about that other stuff?” Uncle Robert demanded. “Sounds like what
+      I’d think Christian Science ought to sound like.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Or theosophy,” Aunt Mildred volunteered. “Some message to a neophyte.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Go on, read the rest,” her husband commanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’d like to have you explain that theosophy stuff on the basis of the
+      subconscious mind, Chris,” Uncle Robert challenged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris shrugged his shoulders. “No explanation. You must have got a message
+      intended for some one else.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lines were crossed, eh?” Uncle Robert chuckled. “Multiplex spiritual
+      wireless telegraphy, I’d call it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ll be good,” Uncle Robert rejoined. “But if I really must snort, may I
+      silently slip away?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look at him,” Lute whispered to her aunt. “See how white he is.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I think I wrote something,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I should say you did,” Mrs. Grantly remarked with satisfaction, holding
+      up the sheet of paper and glancing at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Read it aloud,” Uncle Robert said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Quite a sanguinary turn, I should say,” Uncle Robert remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have already made two attempts upon your life,” Mrs. Grantly read from
+      the paper, which she was going over a second time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “On my life?” Chris demanded between yawns. “Why, my life hasn’t been
+      attempted even once. My! I am sleepy!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, Chris!” Lute cried impulsively. “This afternoon! The hand you said
+      must have seized your rein!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I was joking,” he objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Nevertheless...” Lute left her thought unspoken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Grantly had become keen on the scent. “What was that about this
+      afternoon? Was your life in danger?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked triumphantly at them. Planchette had been vindicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who are you?” she asked. “What is your name?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s Dick,” Aunt Mildred cried, a note of the mildly hysterical in her
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband straightened up, his face for the first time grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s Dick’s signature,” he said. “I’d know his fist in a thousand.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Dick Curtis,’” Mrs. Grantly read aloud. “Who is Dick Curtis?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Let me see,” Uncle Robert demanded, taking the paper and examining it.
+      “Yes, it is Dick’s handwriting.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But who is Dick?” Mrs. Grantly insisted. “Who is this Dick Curtis?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Dick Curtis, why, he was Captain Richard Curtis,” Uncle Robert answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I knew,” Chris answered, “and it was I that operated Planchette. The
+      explanation is simple.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the handwriting,” interposed Mr. Barton. “What you wrote and what
+      Mrs. Grantly wrote are identical.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris bent over and compared the handwriting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Besides,” Mrs. Grantly cried, “Mr. Story recognizes the handwriting.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him for verification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded his head. “Yes, it is Dick’s fist. I’ll swear to that.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Let me put it to the test,” she heard Mrs. Grantly saying. “Let Miss
+      Story try Planchette. There may be a further message.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Robert can return,” she called back, “as soon as he has seen me to my
+      tent.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute’s hand had ceased moving, and Mrs. Grantly was already reading the
+      message that had been written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It is a different handwriting,” she said. “A woman’s hand. ‘Martha,’ it
+      is signed. Who is Martha?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute was not surprised. “It is my mother,” she said simply. “What does she
+      say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And please don’t let us have any more Planchette,” Lute continued
+      hastily. “Let us forget all the nonsense that has occurred.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘Nonsense,’ my dear child?” Mrs. Grantly was indignantly protesting when
+      Uncle Robert strode into the circle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hello!” he demanded. “What’s being done?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      “Well, what did you do last night after we left?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, took a stroll,” Chris answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute’s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was
+      palpably assumed, “With—a—with Mr. Barton?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, yes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And a smoke?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes; and now what’s it all about?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where I am going to take you this afternoon.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You plan well without knowing my wishes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I knew well what your wishes are. It is to see a horse I have found.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, “Oh, good!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He is a beauty,” Chris said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “For a while, at least,” she pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ridiculous!” he cried. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?—you who
+      are always so abominably and adorably well!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.’”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You refuse to take me seriously,” Lute said, when she had laughed her
+      appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You don’t explain it—the handwriting of my father, which Uncle
+      Robert recognized—oh, the whole thing, you don’t explain it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris caught her hand, crying: “Come on! It will be a lark.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hand in hand they ran down the path to the tree-pillared room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But there is one thing I don’t see,” she objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But you don’t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a
+      message from the dead?” he interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know, Chris,” she wavered. “I am sure I don’t know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And what have you to say to that?” he challenged, placing his hand on
+      Planchette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the instant his hand began to write. Both were startled by the
+      suddenness of it. The message was brief:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Lute did not share his bravado. Her fright showed itself in her face.
+      She laid her trembling hand on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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—”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She pointed out a sentence that read: “You cannot escape me nor the just
+      punishment that is yours!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She crumpled up the scrawled sheets of paper, and put Planchette away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He debated for a few steps. “I have thought of telling your uncle and
+      aunt.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What you couldn’t tell me?” she asked quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But it would be easier if I went away,” he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am happier when you are here.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The cruelty of circumstance,” he muttered savagely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Comanche,” he answered. “I know you will like him.”
+     </p>
+<div class='poem'>
+    *       *       *
+</div>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s a good test,” she called across the canyon. “I’m going to put him
+      down it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Bravo!” Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris, in his anxiety, had sat up to observe more closely what she
+      meditated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t tackle it,” he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I have faith in Comanche,” she called in return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And Comanche is that very horse,” she answered. “Watch him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am all tense,” Chris answered. “I was holding my breath.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “His owner says that he has never been known to lose his feet, that it is
+      impossible to get him down.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “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.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris smiled agreement as he changed the saddles. Meanwhile she compared
+      the two horses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “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!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris gave her a hand into the saddle, and followed her up the slope to
+      the county road. She reined in suddenly, saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “We won’t go straight back to camp.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You forget dinner,” he warned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “But I remember Comanche,” she retorted. “We’ll ride directly over to the
+      ranch and buy him. Dinner will keep.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the cook won’t,” Chris laughed. “She’s already threatened to leave,
+      what of our late-comings.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Even so,” was the answer. “Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook, but
+      at any rate we shall have got Comanche.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Look!” he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, Chris, it is good to be alive... and to have you here by my side!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered her by the warm light in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “If only he will lie quietly,” Lute breathed aloud, her mind at work on
+      the means of rescue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Chris!” she called once, and twice; but she called hopelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the depths, on the windless air, arose only the murmur of bees and
+      of running water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Chris!” she called yet a third time, and sank slowly down in the dust of
+      the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moon-Face and Other Stories, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Moon-Face and Other Stories
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Posting Date: July 31, 2008 [EBook #1089]
+Release Date: November, 1997
+Last Updated: September 21, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Espen Ore, Steve Henshaw, and Andrew Sly
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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...t his 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 tonight. 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. Today 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 slay, 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? Tomorrow 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 tomorrow.”
+
+“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 tonight.”
+
+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 Project Gutenberg’s Moon-Face and Other Stories, by Jack London
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES ***
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diff --git a/old/old/1089-0_2016-09-21.zip b/old/old/1089-0_2016-09-21.zip
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Moon-face and Other Stories, by Jack London
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moon-Face and Other Stories, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Moon-Face and Other Stories
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: July 31, 2008 [EBook #1089]
+Last Updated: September 21, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Espen Ore, Steve Henshaw, Andrew Sly, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Jack London
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> MOON-FACE </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> THE LEOPARD MAN&rsquo;S STORY </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> LOCAL COLOR </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> AMATEUR NIGHT </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> THE MINIONS OF MIDAS </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> ALL GOLD CANYON </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> PLANCHETTE </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      MOON-FACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;I do not like that man.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;before
+      I met John Claverhouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Ha! ha!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Ho! ho!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;It is nothing,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the poor, dumb beasties are not to be
+      blamed for straying into fatter pastures.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a dog he called &ldquo;Mars,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning, being
+      Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where are you going?&rdquo; I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Trout,&rdquo; he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. &ldquo;I just dote on
+      trout.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;doted&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fight you? Why?&rdquo; he asked slowly. And then he laughed. &ldquo;You are so
+      funny! Ho! ho! You&rsquo;ll be the death of me! He! he! he! Oh! Ho! ho! ho!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how I hated
+      him! Then there was that name&mdash;Claverhouse! What a name! Wasn&rsquo;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&mdash;but CLAVERHOUSE! I leave it to you. Repeat it to yourself&mdash;Claverhouse.
+      Just listen to the ridiculous sound of it&mdash;Claverhouse! Should a man
+      live with such a name? I ask of you. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; you say. And &ldquo;No&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha! ha! ha!&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;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. &lsquo;O papa!&rsquo; 
+      he cried; &lsquo;a great big puddle flewed up and hit me.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t see any laugh in it,&rdquo; I said shortly, and I know my face went
+      sour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;&ldquo;Ha! ha! That&rsquo;s funny! You
+      don&rsquo;t see it, eh? He! he! Ho! ho! ho! He doesn&rsquo;t see it! Why, look here.
+      You know a puddle&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s naked fist&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;RETRIEVING. I taught the dog, which I called
+      &ldquo;Bellona,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, when I placed the end of the rope in his hand. &ldquo;No, you
+      don&rsquo;t mean it.&rdquo; And his mouth opened wide and he grinned all over his
+      damnable moon-face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I kind of thought, somehow, you didn&rsquo;t like me,&rdquo; he explained.
+      &ldquo;Wasn&rsquo;t it funny for me to make such a mistake?&rdquo; And at the thought he
+      held his sides with laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is her name?&rdquo; he managed to ask between paroxysms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bellona,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He! he!&rdquo; he tittered. &ldquo;What a funny name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out
+      between them, &ldquo;She was the wife of Mars, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the light of the full moon began to suffuse his face, until he
+      exploded with: &ldquo;That was my other dog. Well, I guess she&rsquo;s a widow now.
+      Oh! Ho! ho! E! he! he! Ho!&rdquo; he whooped after me, and I turned and fled
+      swiftly over the hill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, &ldquo;You go away
+      Monday, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded his head and grinned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you won&rsquo;t have another chance to get a mess of those trout you just
+      &lsquo;dote&rsquo; on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he did not notice the sneer. &ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; he chuckled. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+      going up to-morrow to try pretty hard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging
+      myself with rapture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;giant&rdquo;; for such was his method of catching trout. He dynamited them. He
+      attached the fuse by wrapping the &ldquo;giant&rdquo; tightly in a piece of cotton.
+      Then he ignited the fuse and tossed the explosive into the pool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;giant&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Death from accident while engaged in illegal fishing.&rdquo; That was the
+      verdict of the coroner&rsquo;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&rsquo;s sleep deep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE LEOPARD MAN&rsquo;S STORY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent voice,
+      gentle-spoken as a maid&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;nothing but a gray sameness and infinite
+      boredom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly his face brightened with a recollection, for he was really as
+      anxious to give me a story as I was to get it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ve heard of the lion-tamer who was hated by another man?&rdquo;
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and looked pensively at a sick lion in the cage opposite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Got the toothache,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;Well, the lion-tamer&rsquo;s big play to the
+      audience was putting his head in a lion&rsquo;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&rsquo;t any need to call a doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Leopard Man glanced casually over his finger nails in a manner which
+      would have been critical had it not been so sad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, that&rsquo;s what I call patience,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;and it&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;s mouth. He&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I was saying, Wallace&mdash;&lsquo;King&rsquo; Wallace we called him&mdash;was
+      afraid of nothing alive or dead. He was a king and no mistake. I&rsquo;ve seen
+      him drunk, and on a wager go into the cage of a lion that&rsquo;d turned nasty,
+      and without a stick beat him to a finish. Just did it with his fist on the
+      nose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame de Ville&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;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&rsquo;s head into
+      a bucket of paste because he wanted to fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;De Ville was in a pretty mess&mdash;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&rsquo;s direction after that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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
+      &lsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;s back. The look troubled me at the time, for not only did I see
+      hatred in it, but I saw triumph as well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;De Ville will bear watching,&rsquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Finally Wallace cracked the old lion&rsquo;s knees with his whip and got him
+      into position. Old Augustus, blinking good-naturedly, opened his mouth and
+      in popped Wallace&rsquo;s head. Then the jaws came together, CRUNCH, just like
+      that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Leopard Man smiled in a sweetly wistful fashion, and the far-away look
+      came into his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that was the end of King Wallace,&rdquo; he went on in his sad, low voice.
+      &ldquo;After the excitement cooled down I watched my chance and bent over and
+      smelled Wallace&rsquo;s head. Then I sneezed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It... it was...?&rdquo; I queried with halting eagerness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Snuff&mdash;that De Ville dropped on his hair in the dressing tent. Old
+      Augustus never meant to do it. He only sneezed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LOCAL COLOR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not see why you should not turn this immense amount of unusual
+      information to account,&rdquo; I told him. &ldquo;Unlike most men equipped with
+      similar knowledge, YOU have expression. Your style is&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is sufficiently&mdash;er&mdash;journalese?&rdquo; he interrupted suavely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Precisely! You could turn a pretty penny.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he interlocked his fingers meditatively, shrugged his shoulders, and
+      dismissed the subject.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have tried it. It does not pay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was paid for and published,&rdquo; he added, after a pause. &ldquo;And I was also
+      honored with sixty days in the Hobo.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Hobo?&rdquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Hobo&mdash;&rdquo; He fixed his eyes on my Spencer and ran along the titles
+      while he cast his definition. &ldquo;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&mdash;there&rsquo;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 &lsquo;Henry IV&rsquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;&lsquo;The case of a treble hautboy
+     Was a mansion for him, a court.&rsquo; 
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From this to ho-boy is but a step, and for that matter the English used
+      the terms interchangeably. But&mdash;and mark you, the leap paralyzes one&mdash;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&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He absently walked over to the shelves and looked into Loria&rsquo;s &ldquo;Economic
+      Foundation of Society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I like to talk with you,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;You are not indifferently
+      schooled. You&rsquo;ve read the books, and your economic interpretation of
+      history, as you choose to call it&rdquo; (this with a sneer), &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;in short, flashing his
+      luminous genius in a blaze of fire over pages erstwhile dull and heavy and
+      lifeless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely I shall never miss it,&rdquo; I said, and I had in mind the dark gray
+      suit with the pockets draggled from the freightage of many books&mdash;books
+      that had spoiled more than one day&rsquo;s fishing sport.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should advise you, however,&rdquo; I added, &ldquo;to mend the pockets first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Sunflower&rsquo;s face clouded. &ldquo;N&mdash;o,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;the black one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The black one!&rdquo; This explosively, incredulously. &ldquo;I wear it quite often.
+      I&mdash;I intended wearing it to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have two better ones, and you know I never liked it, dear,&rdquo; the
+      Sunflower hurried on. &ldquo;Besides, it&rsquo;s shiny&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shiny!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has seen better days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, and the weather is raw and beastly, and his clothes are threadbare.
+      And you have many suits&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five,&rdquo; I corrected, &ldquo;counting in the dark gray fishing outfit with the
+      draggled pockets.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he has none, no home, nothing&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even a Sunflower,&rdquo;&mdash;putting my arm around her,&mdash;&ldquo;wherefore
+      he is deserving of all things. Give him the black suit, dear&mdash;nay,
+      the best one, the very best one. Under high heaven for such lack there
+      must be compensation!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ARE a dear!&rdquo; And the Sunflower moved to the door and looked back
+      alluringly. &ldquo;You are a PERFECT dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this after seven years, I marvelled, till she was back again, timid
+      and apologetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old ones!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, they pinched horribly, and you know they did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was ever thus the Sunflower vindicated things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;The Road.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could not bring myself to leave until I had thanked you, you of the
+      open hand and heart,&rdquo; he said, on the night he donned my good black suit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s sake?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the sixty days with which you were rewarded for your journalism?&rdquo; I
+      asked. &ldquo;Never mind Loria. Tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, if I must.&rdquo; He flung one knee over the other with a short laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a town that shall be nameless,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I waved my hand impatiently, and he broke off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was just tracing my mental states for you, in order to show the genesis
+      of the action,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Pale youth,&rsquo; quoth I, &lsquo;I pray thee the way to the sanctum-sanctorum, to
+      the Most High Cock-a-lorum.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He deigned to look at me, scornfully, with infinite weariness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;G&rsquo;wan an&rsquo; see the janitor. I don&rsquo;t know nothin&rsquo; about the gas.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Nay, my lily-white, the editor.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Wich editor?&rsquo; he snapped like a young bullterrier. &lsquo;Dramatic? Sportin&rsquo;?
+      Society? Sunday? Weekly? Daily? Telegraph? Local? News? Editorial? Wich?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which, I did not know. &lsquo;THE Editor,&rsquo; I proclaimed stoutly. &lsquo;The ONLY
+      Editor.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Aw, Spargo!&rsquo; he sniffed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Of course, Spargo,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;Who else?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Gimme yer card,&rsquo; says he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;My what?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Yer card&mdash;Say! Wot&rsquo;s yer business, anyway?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I am the census-taker Time,&rsquo; I boomed in sepulchral tones. &lsquo;Beware lest
+      I knock too loud.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know,&rsquo; he sneered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whereupon I rapped him smartly, and he choked and turned purplish.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Well, whatcher want?&rsquo; he wheezed with returning breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I want Spargo, the only Spargo.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Then leave go, an&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll glide an&rsquo; see.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;No you don&rsquo;t, my lily-white.&rsquo; And I took a tighter grip on his collar.
+      &lsquo;No bouncers in mine, understand! I&rsquo;ll go along.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leith dreamily surveyed the long ash of his cigar and turned to me. &ldquo;Do
+      you know, Anak, you can&rsquo;t appreciate the joy of being the buffoon, playing
+      the clown. You couldn&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are a very busy man,&rsquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He jerked a nod with his head, and waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;And after all, is it worth it?&rsquo; I went on. &lsquo;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&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Who are you? What are you?&rsquo; he bellowed with a suddenness that was,
+      well, rude, tearing the words out as a dog does a bone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;A very pertinent question, sir,&rsquo; I acknowledged. &lsquo;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.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;What the hell&mdash;?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Nay, fair sir, a tramp, a man of devious ways and strange lodgements and
+      multifarious&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Quit it!&rsquo; he shouted. &lsquo;What do you want?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I want money.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He started and half reached for an open drawer where must have reposed a
+      revolver, then bethought himself and growled, &lsquo;This is no bank.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;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?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;d do
+      business with me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;But mind you,&rsquo; he said, when he had jabbed a bunch of copy paper into my
+      hand and given me a pencil from his vest pocket, &lsquo;mind you, I won&rsquo;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&mdash;tumble?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I tumbled and borrowed a dollar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t forget the local color!&rsquo; he shouted after me through the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, Anak, it was the local color that did for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The anaemic Cerberus grinned when I took the elevator. &lsquo;Got the bounce,
+      eh?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Nay, pale youth, so lily-white,&rsquo; I chortled, waving the copy paper; &lsquo;not
+      the bounce, but a detail. I&rsquo;ll be City Editor in three months, and then
+      I&rsquo;ll make you jump.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how could you, Leith,&rdquo; I cried, the picture of the consumptive lad
+      strong before me, &ldquo;how could you treat him so barbarously?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leith laughed dryly. &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the local color?&rdquo; I prodded him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;say! Just listen to the tail of my peroration:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;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: &ldquo;Our pride it is to know no
+      spur of pride.&rdquo; 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.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Incidentally, my picture of Sol Glenhart, the police judge, was good. A
+      striking likeness, and unmistakable, with phrases tripping along like
+      this: &lsquo;This crook-nosed, gross-bodied harpy&rsquo;; &lsquo;this civic sinner, this
+      judicial highwayman&rsquo;; &lsquo;possessing the morals of the Tenderloin and an
+      honor which thieves&rsquo; honor puts to shame&rsquo;; &lsquo;who compounds criminality with
+      shyster-sharks, and in atonement railroads the unfortunate and impecunious
+      to rotting cells,&rsquo;&mdash;and so forth and so forth, style sophomoric and
+      devoid of the dignity and tone one would employ in a dissertation on
+      &lsquo;Surplus Value,&rsquo; or &lsquo;The Fallacies of Marxism,&rsquo; but just the stuff the
+      dear public likes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Humph!&rsquo; grunted Spargo when I put the copy in his fist. &lsquo;Swift gait you
+      strike, my man.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Where&rsquo;d you work, you pencil-pusher?&rsquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;My maiden effort,&rsquo; I simpered modestly, scraping one foot and faintly
+      simulating embarrassment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Maiden hell! What salary do you want?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Nay, nay,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;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.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Save John Law,&rsquo; he chuckled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Save John Law,&rsquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;How did you know I was bucking the police department?&rsquo; he demanded
+      abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I didn&rsquo;t know, but I knew you were in training,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s candidate; ergo, your turn to play.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He stood up, shook my hand, and emptied his plethoric vest pocket. I put
+      them away and puffed on the old one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You&rsquo;ll do,&rsquo; he jubilated. &lsquo;This stuff&rsquo; (patting my copy) &lsquo;is the first
+      gun of the campaign. You&rsquo;ll touch off many another before we&rsquo;re done. I&rsquo;ve
+      been looking for you for years. Come on in on the editorial.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Come, now!&rsquo; he admonished sharply. &lsquo;No shenanagan! The Cowbell must have
+      you. It hungers for you, craves after you, won&rsquo;t be happy till it gets
+      you. What say?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In short, he wrestled with me, but I was bricks, and at the end of half
+      an hour the only Spargo gave it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Remember,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;any time you reconsider, I&rsquo;m open. No matter where
+      you are, wire me and I&rsquo;ll send the ducats to come on at once.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thanked him, and asked the pay for my copy&mdash;dope, he called it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, regular routine,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;Get it the first Thursday after
+      publication.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Then I&rsquo;ll have to trouble you for a few scad until&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He looked at me and smiled. &lsquo;Better cough up, eh?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Sure,&rsquo; I said. &lsquo;Nobody to identify me, so make it cash.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And cash it was made, thirty plunks (a plunk is a dollar, my dear Anak),
+      and I pulled my freight... eh?&mdash;oh, departed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Pale youth,&rsquo; I said to Cerberus, &lsquo;I am bounced.&rsquo; (He grinned with pallid
+      joy.) &lsquo;And in token of the sincere esteem I bear you, receive this little&mdash;&rsquo; 
+      (His eyes flushed and he threw up one hand, swiftly, to guard his head
+      from the expected blow)&mdash;&lsquo;this little memento.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had intended to slip a fiver into his hand, but for all his surprise,
+      he was too quick for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Aw, keep yer dirt,&rsquo; he snarled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I like you still better,&rsquo; I said, adding a second fiver. &lsquo;You grow
+      perfect. But you must take it.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;s eyes bulged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s a way I have,&rsquo; I said, pocketing them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Some bloke&rsquo;s dropped &lsquo;em down the shaft,&rsquo; he whispered, awed by the
+      circumstance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;It stands to reason,&rsquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I&rsquo;ll take charge of &lsquo;em,&rsquo; he volunteered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Nonsense!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You&rsquo;d better turn &lsquo;em over,&rsquo; he threatened, &lsquo;or I stop the works.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Pshaw!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And stop he did, between floors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Young man,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;have you a mother?&rsquo; (He looked serious, as though
+      regretting his act! and further to impress him I rolled up my right sleeve
+      with greatest care.) &lsquo;Are you prepared to die?&rsquo; (I got a stealthy crouch
+      on, and put a cat-foot forward.) &lsquo;But a minute, a brief minute, stands
+      between you and eternity.&rsquo; (Here I crooked my right hand into a claw and
+      slid the other foot up.) &lsquo;Young man, young man,&rsquo; I trumpeted, &lsquo;in thirty
+      seconds I shall tear your heart dripping from your bosom and stoop to hear
+      you shriek in hell.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It fetched him. He gave one whoop, the car shot down, and I was on the
+      drag. You see, Anak, it&rsquo;s a habit I can&rsquo;t shake off of leaving vivid
+      memories behind. No one ever forgets me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had not got to the corner when I heard a familiar voice at my shoulder:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Hello, Cinders! Which way?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was Chi Slim, who had been with me once when I was thrown off a
+      freight in Jacksonville. &lsquo;Couldn&rsquo;t see &lsquo;em fer cinders,&rsquo; he described it,
+      and the monica stuck by me.... Monica? From monos. The tramp nickname.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Bound south,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;And how&rsquo;s Slim?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Bum. Bulls is horstile.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Where&rsquo;s the push?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;At the hang-out. I&rsquo;ll put you wise.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Who&rsquo;s the main guy?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Me, and don&rsquo;t yer ferget it.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lingo was rippling from Leith&rsquo;s lips, but perforce I stopped him.
+      &ldquo;Pray translate. Remember, I am a foreigner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; he answered cheerfully. &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Come on, you mugs!&rsquo; Slim addressed them. &lsquo;Throw yer feet! Here&rsquo;s
+      Cinders, an&rsquo; we must do &lsquo;em proud.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;John Ambrose!&rsquo; the clerk called out, and Chi Slim, with the ease of long
+      practice, stood up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Vagrant, your Honor,&rsquo; the bailiff volunteered, and his Honor, not
+      deigning to look at the prisoner, snapped, &lsquo;Ten days,&rsquo; and Chi Slim sat
+      down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chi Slim nudged me. &lsquo;Give&rsquo;m a spiel, Cinders. You kin do it.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shook my head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;G&rsquo;wan,&rsquo; he urged. &lsquo;Give &lsquo;m a ghost story The mugs&rsquo;ll take it all right.
+      And you kin throw yer feet fer tobacco for us till we get out.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;L. C. Randolph!&rsquo; the clerk called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I stood up, but a hitch came in the proceedings. The clerk whispered to
+      the judge, and the bailiff smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You are a newspaper man, I understand, Mr. Randolph?&rsquo; his Honor remarked
+      sweetly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;That&rsquo;s yer graft. Work it,&rsquo; Slim prompted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;It&rsquo;s all over but the shouting,&rsquo; I groaned back, but Slim, unaware of
+      the article, was puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Your Honor,&rsquo; I answered, &lsquo;when I can get work, that is my occupation.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;You take quite an interest in local affairs, I see.&rsquo; (Here his Honor
+      took up the morning&rsquo;s Cowbell and ran his eye up and down a column I knew
+      was mine.) &lsquo;Color is good,&rsquo; he commented, an appreciative twinkle in his
+      eyes; &lsquo;pictures excellent, characterized by broad, Sargent-like effects.
+      Now this...t his judge you have depicted... you, ah, draw from life, I
+      presume?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Rarely, your I Honor,&rsquo; I answered. &lsquo;Composites, ideals, rather ... er,
+      types, I may say.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;But you have color, sir, unmistakable color,&rsquo; he continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;That is splashed on afterward,&rsquo; I explained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;This judge, then, is not modelled from life, as one might be led to
+      believe?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;No, your Honor.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Ah, I see, merely a type of judicial wickedness?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Nay, more, your Honor,&rsquo; I said boldly, &lsquo;an ideal.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Splashed with local color afterward? Ha! Good! And may I venture to ask
+      how much you received for this bit of work?&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Thirty dollars, your Honor.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Hum, good!&rsquo; And his tone abruptly changed. &lsquo;Young man, local color is a
+      bad thing. I find you guilty of it and sentence you to thirty days&rsquo; 
+      imprisonment, or, at your pleasure, impose a fine of thirty dollars.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Alas!&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;I spent the thirty dollars in riotous living.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;And thirty days more for wasting your substance.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Next case!&rsquo; said his Honor to the clerk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slim was stunned. &lsquo;Gee!&rsquo; he whispered. &lsquo;Gee the push gets ten days and
+      you get sixty. Gee!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Leith struck a match, lighted his dead cigar, and opened the book on his
+      knees. &ldquo;Returning to the original conversation, don&rsquo;t you find, Anak, that
+      though Loria handles the bipartition of the revenues with scrupulous care,
+      he yet omits one important factor, namely&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I said absently; &ldquo;yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AMATEUR NIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she was a little angry, and a great deal hurt. &ldquo;I can guess what you
+      would tell me,&rdquo; the editor had kindly but firmly interrupted her lengthy
+      preamble in the long-looked-forward-to interview just ended. &ldquo;And you have
+      told me enough,&rdquo; he had gone on (heartlessly, she was sure, as she went
+      over the conversation in its freshness). &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if there are no openings,&rdquo; she had interrupted, in turn, &ldquo;how did
+      those who are in, get in? How am I to show that I am eligible to get in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They made themselves indispensable,&rdquo; was the terse response. &ldquo;Make
+      yourself indispensable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how can I, if I do not get the chance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make your chance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how?&rdquo; she had insisted, at the same time privately deeming him a most
+      unreasonable man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How? That is your business, not mine,&rdquo; he said conclusively, rising in
+      token that the interview was at an end. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She caught an outbound car, and ere she descended from it she had conned
+      the conversation over and over again. &ldquo;But how?&rdquo; she repeated to herself,
+      as she climbed the three flights of stairs to the rooms where she and her
+      sister &ldquo;bach&rsquo;ed.&rdquo; &ldquo;But how?&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;s Max Irwin,&rdquo; Letty said, talking it over. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a journalist with
+      a national reputation. Go and see him, Ed. He knows how, and he should be
+      able to tell you how.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t know him,&rdquo; Edna objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No more than you knew the editor you saw to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Y-e-s,&rdquo; (long and judicially), &ldquo;but that&rsquo;s different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a bit different from the strange men and women you&rsquo;ll interview when
+      you&rsquo;ve learned how,&rdquo; Letty encouraged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hadn&rsquo;t looked at it in that light,&rdquo; Edna conceded. &ldquo;After all, where&rsquo;s
+      the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or
+      interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I&rsquo;ll go
+      and look him up in the directory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance,&rdquo; she announced decisively
+      a moment later. &ldquo;I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what
+      I mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Letty knew and nodded. &ldquo;I wonder what he is like?&rdquo; she asked softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll make it my business to find out,&rdquo; Edna assured her; &ldquo;and I&rsquo;ll let
+      you know inside forty-eight hours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Letty clapped her hands. &ldquo;Good! That&rsquo;s the newspaper spirit! Make it
+      twenty-four hours and you are perfect!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    *       *       *
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&mdash;and I am very sorry to trouble you,&rdquo; she concluded the statement
+      of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. &ldquo;If you
+      don&rsquo;t do your own talking, who&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus
+      Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney&mdash;&rdquo; He paused,
+      with voice suspended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure I know none of them,&rdquo; she answered despondently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that
+      knows any one else that knows them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Edna shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then we must think of something else,&rdquo; he went on, cheerfully. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll
+      have to do something yourself. Let me see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have it! But no, wait a minute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll do, I think, though it remains to be seen,&rdquo; he said enigmatically.
+      &ldquo;It will show the stuff that&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I hardly understand,&rdquo; Edna said, for his suggestion conveyed no
+      meaning to her. &ldquo;What are the &lsquo;Loops&rsquo;? and what is &lsquo;Amateur Night&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I forgot you said you were from the interior. But so much the better, if
+      you&rsquo;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,&mdash;a place of
+      diversion. There&rsquo;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&rsquo;s what the Loops are.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the theatre is what concerns you. It&rsquo;s vaudeville. One turn follows
+      another&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now the management of the Loops, in its bid for popularity, instituted
+      what is called &lsquo;Amateur Night&rsquo;; 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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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 &lsquo;professional amateurs.&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s great
+      fun&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;but,&rdquo; she quavered, &ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;&rdquo; and there was a
+      suggestion of disappointment and tears in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; he said kindly. &ldquo;You were expecting something else, something
+      different, something better. We all do at first. But remember the admiral
+      of the Queen&rsquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a way it must be considered a test,&rdquo; he added encouragingly. &ldquo;A severe
+      one, but so much the better. Now is the time. Are you game?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll try,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;s not particularly great. What
+      of it? Do it. Show the stuff you&rsquo;re made of, and you&rsquo;ll get a call for
+      better work&mdash;better class and better pay. Now you go out this
+      afternoon to the Loops, and engage to do two turns.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what kind of turns can I do?&rdquo; Edna asked dubiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do? That&rsquo;s easy. Can you sing? Never mind, don&rsquo;t need to sing. Screech,
+      do anything&mdash;that&rsquo;s what you&rsquo;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&rsquo;s what
+      you&rsquo;re there for. That&rsquo;s what the readers of the Sunday Intelligencer want
+      to know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;re crowded for space they can cut off your contents anywhere,
+      reattach the snapper, and the story will still retain form. There, that&rsquo;s
+      enough. Study the rest out for yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And remember, Miss Wyman, if you&rsquo;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&rsquo;t let it master you. But master it you must; for
+      if you can&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They had reached the door and were shaking hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And one thing more,&rdquo; he interrupted her thanks, &ldquo;let me see your copy
+      before you turn it in. I may be able to put you straight here and there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatcher turn?&rdquo; he demanded, ere half her brief application had left her
+      lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sentimental soloist, soprano,&rdquo; she answered promptly, remembering Irwin&rsquo;s
+      advice to talk up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatcher name?&rdquo; Mr. Symes asked, scarcely deigning to glance at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated. So rapidly had she been rushed into the adventure that she
+      had not considered the question of a name at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any name? Stage name?&rdquo; he bellowed impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nan Bellayne,&rdquo; she invented on the spur of the moment. &ldquo;B-e-l-l-a-y-n-e.
+      Yes, that&rsquo;s it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He scribbled it into a notebook. &ldquo;All right. Take your turn Wednesday and
+      Saturday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How much do I get?&rdquo; Edna demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two-an&rsquo;-a-half a turn. Two turns, five. Getcher pay first Monday after
+      second turn.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And without the simple courtesy of &ldquo;Good day,&rdquo; he turned his back on her
+      and plunged into the newspaper he had been reading when she entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Edna came early on Wednesday evening, Letty with her, and in a telescope
+      basket her costume&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A dressing room she finally found, jammed with three other amateur
+      &ldquo;ladies,&rdquo; who were &ldquo;making up&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;Bloomin&rsquo; hamateur!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello, girls!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;make-up&rdquo; was plainly that of the stock tramp of the stage, though the
+      inevitable whiskers were lacking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it don&rsquo;t take a minute to slap&rsquo;m on,&rdquo; he explained, divining the
+      search in her eyes and waving in his hand the adornment in question. &ldquo;They
+      make a feller sweat,&rdquo; he explained further. And then, &ldquo;What&rsquo;s yer turn?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soprano&mdash;sentimental,&rdquo; she answered, trying to be offhand and at
+      ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whata you doin&rsquo; it for?&rdquo; he demanded directly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For fun; what else?&rdquo; she countered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I just sized you up for that as soon as I put eyes on you. You ain&rsquo;t
+      graftin&rsquo; for a paper, are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never met but one editor in my life,&rdquo; she replied evasively, &ldquo;and I, he&mdash;well,
+      we didn&rsquo;t get on very well together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hittin&rsquo; &lsquo;m for a job?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Edna nodded carelessly, though inwardly anxious and cudgelling her brains
+      for something to turn the conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;d he say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That eighteen other girls had already been there that week.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gave you the icy mit, eh?&rdquo; The moon-faced young man laughed and slapped
+      his thighs. &ldquo;You see, we&rsquo;re kind of suspicious. The Sunday papers &lsquo;d like
+      to get Amateur Night done up brown in a nice little package, and the
+      manager don&rsquo;t see it that way. Gets wild-eyed at the thought of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what&rsquo;s your turn?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who? me? Oh, I&rsquo;m doin&rsquo; the tramp act tonight. I&rsquo;m Charley Welsh, you
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+      &ldquo;Oh, is that so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She wanted to laugh at the hurt disappointment which came into his face,
+      but concealed her amusement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, now,&rdquo; he said brusquely, &ldquo;you can&rsquo;t stand there and tell me you&rsquo;ve
+      never heard of Charley Welsh? Well, you must be young. Why, I&rsquo;m an Only,
+      the Only amateur at that. Sure, you must have seen me. I&rsquo;m everywhere. I
+      could be a professional, but I get more dough out of it by doin&rsquo; the
+      amateur.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what&rsquo;s an &lsquo;Only&rsquo;?&rdquo; she queried. &ldquo;I want to learn.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure,&rdquo; Charley Welsh said gallantly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll put you wise. An &lsquo;Only&rsquo; is a
+      nonpareil, the feller that does one kind of a turn better&rsquo;n any other
+      feller. He&rsquo;s the Only, see?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Edna saw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To get a line on the biz,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;throw yer lamps on me. I&rsquo;m the
+      Only all-round amateur. To-night I make a bluff at the tramp act. It&rsquo;s
+      harder to bluff it than to really do it, but then it&rsquo;s acting, it&rsquo;s
+      amateur, it&rsquo;s art. See? I do everything, from Sheeny monologue to team
+      song and dance and Dutch comedian. Sure, I&rsquo;m Charley Welsh, the Only
+      Charley Welsh.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, tra la loo,&rdquo; he said suddenly. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s his highness chasin&rsquo; you
+      up. Yer first on the bill. Never mind the row when you go on. Just finish
+      yer turn like a lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go ahead,&rdquo; Letty whispered, pressing her hand; and from the other side
+      came the peremptory &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t flunk!&rdquo; of Charley Welsh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Puzzle picture! Find Nannie!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello!&rdquo; he greeted her. &ldquo;On Easy Street, eh? Everything slidin&rsquo; your
+      way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled brightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thinks yer a female reporter, sure. I almost split when I saw&rsquo;m layin&rsquo; 
+      himself out sweet an&rsquo; pleasin&rsquo;. Honest, now, that ain&rsquo;t yer graft, is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told you my experience with editors,&rdquo; she parried. &ldquo;And honest now, it
+      was honest, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Only Charley Welsh shook his head dubiously. &ldquo;Not that I care a
+      rap,&rdquo; he declared. &ldquo;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&rsquo;s straight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll treat us well, I hope,&rdquo; he said insinuatingly. &ldquo;Do the right thing
+      by us, and all that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; she answered innocently, &ldquo;you couldn&rsquo;t persuade me to do another
+      turn; I know I seemed to take and that you&rsquo;d like to have me, but I
+      really, really can&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know what I mean,&rdquo; he said, with a touch of his old bulldozing
+      manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I really won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she persisted. &ldquo;Vaudeville&rsquo;s too&mdash;too wearing
+      on the nerves, my nerves, at any rate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whereat he looked puzzled and doubtful, and forbore to press the point
+      further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But on Monday morning, when she came to his office to get her pay for the
+      two turns, it was he who puzzled her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You surely must have mistaken me,&rdquo; he lied glibly. &ldquo;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&rsquo;s
+      fifty cents. It will pay your sister&rsquo;s car fare also. And,&rdquo;&mdash;very
+      suavely,&mdash;&ldquo;speaking for the Loops, permit me to thank you for the
+      kind and successful contribution of your services.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Good!&mdash;that&rsquo;s it!&mdash;that&rsquo;s the stuff!&mdash;psychology&rsquo;s
+      all right!&mdash;the very idea!&mdash;you&rsquo;ve caught it!&mdash;excellent!&mdash;missed
+      it a bit here, but it&rsquo;ll go&mdash;that&rsquo;s vigorous!&mdash;strong!&mdash;vivid!&mdash;pictures!
+      pictures!&mdash;excellent!&mdash;most excellent!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And when he had run down to the bottom of the last page, holding out his
+      hand: &ldquo;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&rsquo;ve got the grip, and you&rsquo;re sure to
+      get on. The Intelligencer will take it, without doubt, and take you too.
+      They&rsquo;ll have to take you. If they don&rsquo;t, some of the other papers will get
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what&rsquo;s this?&rdquo; he queried, the next instant, his face going serious.
+      &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve said nothing about receiving the pay for your turns, and that&rsquo;s
+      one of the points of the feature. I expressly mentioned it, if you&rsquo;ll
+      remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will never do,&rdquo; he said, shaking his head ominously, when she had
+      explained. &ldquo;You simply must collect that money somehow. Let me see. Let me
+      think a moment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind, Mr. Irwin,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve bothered you enough. Let me use
+      your &lsquo;phone, please, and I&rsquo;ll try Mr. Ernst Symes again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He vacated his chair by the desk, and Edna took down the receiver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Charley Welsh is sick,&rdquo; she began, when the connection had been made.
+      &ldquo;What? No I&rsquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell Charley Welsh&rsquo;s sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning, and
+      drew his own pay,&rdquo; came back the manager&rsquo;s familiar tones, crisp with
+      asperity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; Edna went on. &ldquo;And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she and
+      her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne&rsquo;s pay?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;d he say? What&rsquo;d he say?&rdquo; Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One thing, more,&rdquo; he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her
+      previous visit. &ldquo;Now that you&rsquo;ve shown the stuff you&rsquo;re made of, I should
+      esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the
+      Intelligencer people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Wade Atsheler is dead&mdash;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 &ldquo;great trouble&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;nay, well-nigh adopted son and full business
+      partner&mdash;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&rsquo;s
+      will was probated, the world learned that he was sole heir to his
+      employer&rsquo;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&rsquo;s relatives. As for his direct family, one
+      astounding clause expressly stated that Wade Atsheler was to dispense to
+      Eben Hale&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&mdash;well,
+      by those who knew her best she was endearingly termed &ldquo;The Mother of the
+      Gracchi.&rdquo; Needless to state, this inexplicable will was a nine day&rsquo;s
+      wonder; but the expectant public was disappointed in that no contest was
+      made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Some ghastly joke, Mr. Hale, and one in
+      very poor taste.&rdquo; Find here, my dear John, an exact duplicate of the
+      letter in question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. August 17, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear Sir,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s economic forces. Brain,
+      and not brawn, endures; and those best fitted to survive are the
+      intellectually and commercially powerful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;nor in
+      twenty times threescore years&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Morning Blazer.&rdquo; 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&mdash;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&rsquo;s life shall be ground out between. You
+      may save him if you agree to our conditions and act in time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We beg to remain,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., October 1, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear Sir,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very cordially,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly after five o&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Impossible!&rdquo; was Mr. Hale&rsquo;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&rsquo;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 15, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear Sir,&mdash;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,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time Mr. Hale took up the paper, and after a brief search, read to me
+      this account:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A DASTARDLY CRIME
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Barely had he finished this when the police arrived&mdash;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&rsquo;clock in the afternoon, this
+      telegram was received:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M. October 21, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear Sir,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cordially yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As you know, John, Mr. Hale was a man of iron. He refused to surrender.
+      But, oh, John, it was terrible, nay, horrible&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., December 31, 1899.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear Sir,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cordially yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dropped the letter and sprang to the telephone. Great was my relief when
+      I heard the Inspector&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. OF M., February 15, 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear Sir,&mdash;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&rsquo;s closest friend, and at
+      present is visiting her. When your eyes have read thus far her visit will
+      have terminated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very cordially,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My God! did we not instantly realize the terrible import! We rushed
+      through the dayrooms&mdash;she was not there&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day I was surprised at his cheerfulness. I had thought he would
+      be deeply shocked by this last tragedy&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Barely had I left that chamber of death, when&mdash;but too late&mdash;the
+      following extraordinary letter was received:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OFFICE OF THE M. of M., February 17, 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MR. EBEN HALE, Money Baron:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dear Sir,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cordially yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE MINIONS OF MIDAS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. Today 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&rsquo;s papers give the
+      details of the brutal happening&mdash;details which correspond with those
+      furnished me in advance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yours, in long farewell,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      WADE ATSHELER. <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE SHADOW AND THE FLASH
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s eyes were black; Paul&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This intense spirit of rivalry obtained in their studies and their games.
+      If Paul memorized one canto of &ldquo;Marmion,&rdquo; 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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s work and attended the first lectures, he at
+      once followed Paul&rsquo;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&mdash;so deep, in
+      fact, that ere they took their sheepskins they could have stumped any
+      chemistry or &ldquo;cow college&rdquo; professor in the institution, save &ldquo;old&rdquo; Moss,
+      head of the department, and even him they puzzled and edified more than
+      once. Lloyd&rsquo;s discovery of the &ldquo;death bacillus&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;old&rdquo; Moss, one day, after an astounding
+      demonstration in his private laboratory by Paul, was guilty to the extent
+      of a month&rsquo;s salary of backing him to become the bridegroom of Doris Van
+      Benschoten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end she solved the problem in her own way, to everybody&rsquo;s
+      satisfaction except Paul&rsquo;s and Lloyd&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But things came to a head enough. It was at my home, after they had taken
+      their degrees and dropped out of the world&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Color is a sensation,&rdquo; he was saying. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But we see black objects in daylight,&rdquo; I objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very true,&rdquo; he went on warmly. &ldquo;And that is because they are not
+      perfectly black. Were they perfectly black, absolutely black, as it were,
+      we could not see them&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be a remarkable discovery,&rdquo; I said non-committally, for the
+      whole thing seemed too fantastic for aught but speculative purposes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remarkable!&rdquo; Lloyd slapped me on the shoulder. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo; He broke off
+      shortly, then added, &ldquo;Well, I have begun my experiments, and I don&rsquo;t mind
+      telling you that I&rsquo;m right in line for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A laugh from the doorway startled us. Paul Tichlorne was standing there, a
+      smile of mockery on his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget, my dear Lloyd,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forget what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget,&rdquo; Paul went on&mdash;&ldquo;ah, you forget the shadow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw Lloyd&rsquo;s face drop, but he answered sneeringly, &ldquo;I can carry a
+      sunshade, you know.&rdquo; Then he turned suddenly and fiercely upon him. &ldquo;Look
+      here, Paul, you&rsquo;ll keep out of this if you know what&rsquo;s good for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A rupture seemed imminent, but Paul laughed good-naturedly. &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t
+      lay fingers on your dirty pigments. Succeed beyond your most sanguine
+      expectations, yet you will always fetch up against the shadow. You can&rsquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Transparency!&rdquo; ejaculated Lloyd, instantly. &ldquo;But it can&rsquo;t be achieved.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no; of course not.&rdquo; And Paul shrugged his shoulders and strolled off
+      down the briar-rose path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s progress, and they respected me
+      for the seal I put upon my lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you see that red-whiskered man?&rdquo; he asked, pointing across the ring to
+      the fifth tier of seats on the opposite side. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;They are a seat apart. The gap is the unoccupied
+      seat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned over to me and spoke seriously. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was for crossing over to verify Lloyd&rsquo;s statement, but he restrained me.
+      &ldquo;Wait,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s face. But with
+      the passing of the smile his visibility passed, and the chair seemed
+      vacant as before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were he perfectly black, you could sit alongside him and not see him,&rdquo;
+       Lloyd said; and I confess the illustration was apt enough to make me
+      well-nigh convinced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I visited Lloyd&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;White light is composed of the seven primary colors,&rdquo; he argued to me.
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;violet, indigo, green, yellow, orange, and
+      red&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When we paint our houses, we do not apply color to them,&rdquo; he said at
+      another time. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; he said impressively, &ldquo;is the blackest black you or any mortal man
+      ever looked upon. But just you wait, and I&rsquo;ll have a black so black that
+      no mortal man will be able to look upon it&mdash;and see it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Transparency: a state or quality of body which permits all rays of light
+      to pass through,&rdquo; he defined for me. &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Oh! I&rsquo;ve dropped a lens.
+      Stick your head out, old man, and see where it went to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; I echoed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you investigate?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;White quartzose sand,&rdquo; Paul rattled off, &ldquo;sodic carbonate, slaked lime,
+      cutlet, manganese peroxide&mdash;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&rsquo;s ransom. But look at it! You can&rsquo;t see it. You don&rsquo;t know
+      it&rsquo;s there till you run your head against it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eh, old boy! That&rsquo;s merely an object-lesson&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or here!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The litmus paper is still the litmus paper,&rdquo; he enunciated in the formal
+      manner of the lecturer. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He
+      paused for a space. &ldquo;I purpose to seek&mdash;ay, and to find&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t see him about,&rdquo; Paul remarked unconcernedly, and we set off across
+      the fields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you hear anything, Paul?&rdquo; I asked once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he shook his head, and thrust his feet steadily forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dropped to the ground, limp and trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Paul,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;we had better return to the house. I am afraid I am going
+      to be sick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense, old man,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;The sunshine has gone to your head like
+      wine. You&rsquo;ll be all right. It&rsquo;s famous weather.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Tripping over your own feet?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s all up with me,&rdquo; I gasped, covering my eyes with my hands. &ldquo;It has
+      attacked my eyes. Paul, take me home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Paul laughed long and loud. &ldquo;What did I tell you?&mdash;the most
+      wonderful dog, eh? Well, what do you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here! Give me your fist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suffice to say, I speedily recovered my spirits and control. Paul put a
+      collar about the animal&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They&rsquo;re a large family,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&rsquo;s
+      shadow only to fetch up against the rainbow flash.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A couple of days later, before the entrance to Paul&rsquo;s laboratory, I
+      encountered a terrible stench. So overpowering was it that it was easy to
+      discover the source&mdash;a mass of putrescent matter on the doorstep
+      which in general outlines resembled a dog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The reagents I injected into its system were harmless,&rdquo; Paul explained.
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;s head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I started to walk across what had once been its site. &ldquo;This,&rdquo; I said to
+      myself, &ldquo;should be where the step went up to the door.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you think of it, eh?&rdquo; Lloyd asked, wringing my hand. &ldquo;I slapped a
+      couple of coats of absolute black on the outside yesterday afternoon to
+      see how it worked. How&rsquo;s your head? you bumped it pretty solidly, I
+      imagine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never mind that,&rdquo; he interrupted my congratulations. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve something
+      better for you to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Here, give me a coat of
+      this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an oily, shellac-like stuff, which spread quickly and easily over
+      the skin and dried immediately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Merely preliminary and precautionary,&rdquo; he explained when I had finished;
+      &ldquo;but now for the real stuff.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I picked up another pot he indicated, and glanced inside, but could see
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s empty,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stick your finger in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lloyd chuckled. &ldquo;Now spread it on, and keep your eyes open.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a refined and harmless solution for them,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;A fine spray
+      with an air-brush, and presto! I am not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This deftly accomplished, he said, &ldquo;Now I shall move about, and do you
+      tell me what sensations you experience.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the first place, I cannot see you,&rdquo; I said, and I could hear his
+      gleeful laugh from the midst of the emptiness. &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; I continued,
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you any other warnings of my presence?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, and yes,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Now I
+      shall conquer the world!&rdquo; And I could not dare to tell him of Paul
+      Tichlorne&rsquo;s equal success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s voice rang out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Enough! Enough! Oh! Ouch! Stop! You&rsquo;re landing on my naked skin, you
+      know! Ow! O-w-w! I&rsquo;ll be good! I&rsquo;ll be good! I only wanted you to see my
+      metamorphosis,&rdquo; he said ruefully, and I imagined he was rubbing his hurts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few minutes later we were playing tennis&mdash;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&mdash;purest blue, most delicate violet, brightest yellow, and all
+      the intermediary shades, with the scintillant brilliancy of the diamond,
+      dazzling, blinding, iridescent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For God&rsquo;s sake!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But their locked bodies smote against my knees, and I was overthrown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You keep out of this, old man!&rdquo; I heard the voice of Lloyd Inwood from
+      out of the emptiness. And then Paul&rsquo;s voice crying, &ldquo;Yes, we&rsquo;ve had enough
+      of peacemaking!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Now will you keep away?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;O Lord, I&rsquo;ve got &lsquo;em!&rdquo; he sprang to his
+      feet and tore madly out of the court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s colors are good enough for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ALL GOLD CANYON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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 slay, towered
+      minarets of white, where the Sierra&rsquo;s eternal snows flashed austerely the
+      blazes of the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there came a time when the buck&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clash of steel-shod soles against the rocks began to be heard, and the
+      man&rsquo;s voice grew louder. It was raised in a sort of chant and became
+      distinct with nearness, so that the words could be heard:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Turn around an&rsquo; tu&rsquo;n yo&rsquo; face
+    Untoe them sweet hills of grace
+      (D&rsquo; pow&rsquo;rs of sin yo&rsquo; am scornin&rsquo;!).
+    Look about an&rsquo; look aroun&rsquo;,
+    Fling yo&rsquo; sin-pack on d&rsquo; groun&rsquo; 
+      (Yo&rsquo; will meet wid d&rsquo; Lord in d&rsquo; mornin&rsquo;!).&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Smoke of life an&rsquo; snakes of purgatory! Will you just look at that! Wood
+      an&rsquo; water an&rsquo; grass an&rsquo; a side-hill! A pocket-hunter&rsquo;s delight an&rsquo; a
+      cayuse&rsquo;s paradise! Cool green for tired eyes! Pink pills for pale people
+      ain&rsquo;t in it. A secret pasture for prospectors and a resting-place for
+      tired burros, by damn!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From out the screen of vines and creepers he flung ahead of him a miner&rsquo;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jumping dandelions and happy hollyhocks, but that smells good to me! Talk
+      about your attar o&rsquo; roses an&rsquo; cologne factories! They ain&rsquo;t in it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man lay down on the lip of the pool and drank long and deep of its
+      water. &ldquo;Tastes good to me,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Looks good to me,&rdquo; he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and
+      gold-pan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The washing had now become very fine&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his blue eyes were shining with desire as he rose to his feet.
+      &ldquo;Seven,&rdquo; he muttered aloud, asserting the sum of the specks for which he
+      had toiled so hard and which he had so wantonly thrown away. &ldquo;Seven,&rdquo; he
+      repeated, with the emphasis of one trying to impress a number on his
+      memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved down the stream a few steps and took a second panful of dirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five,&rdquo; he muttered, and repeated, &ldquo;five.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not forbear another survey of the hill before filling the pan
+      farther down the stream. His golden herds diminished. &ldquo;Four, three, two,
+      two, one,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it ain&rsquo;t the real thing, may God knock off my head with sour apples!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to where he had started operations, he began to pan up the
+      stream. At first his golden herds increased&mdash;increased prodigiously.
+      &ldquo;Fourteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-six,&rdquo; ran his memory tabulations.
+      Just above the pool he struck his richest pan&mdash;thirty-five colors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Almost enough to save,&rdquo; he remarked regretfully as he allowed the water
+      to sweep them away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just booful, the way it peters out,&rdquo; he exulted when a shovelful of
+      dirt contained no more than a single speck of gold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when no specks at all were found in several pans, he straightened up
+      and favored the hillside with a confident glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, ha! Mr. Pocket!&rdquo; he cried out, as though to an auditor hidden
+      somewhere above him beneath the surface of the slope. &ldquo;Ah, ha! Mr. Pocket!
+      I&rsquo;m a-comin&rsquo;, I&rsquo;m a-comin&rsquo;, an&rsquo; I&rsquo;m shorely gwine to get yer! You heah me,
+      Mr. Pocket? I&rsquo;m gwine to get yer as shore as punkins ain&rsquo;t cauliflowers!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s voice, raised in ragtime song, still dominated
+      the canyon with possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I&rsquo;ve got an appetite. I could scoff iron-filings an&rsquo; 
+      horseshoe nails an&rsquo; thank you kindly, ma&rsquo;am, for a second helpin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Guess I&rsquo;ll take another whack at her,&rdquo; he concluded, starting to cross
+      the stream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They ain&rsquo;t no sense in it, I know,&rdquo; he mumbled apologetically. &ldquo;But
+      keepin&rsquo; grub back an hour ain&rsquo;t goin&rsquo; to hurt none, I reckon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;V.&rdquo; The converging sides of this &ldquo;V&rdquo; marked the
+      boundaries of the gold-bearing dirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The apex of the &ldquo;V&rdquo; was evidently the man&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Mr.
+      Pocket&rdquo;&mdash;for so the man familiarly addressed the imaginary point
+      above him on the slope, crying out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come down out o&rsquo; that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an&rsquo; agreeable, an&rsquo; come
+      down!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he would add later, in a voice resigned to determination.
+      &ldquo;All right, Mr. Pocket. It&rsquo;s plain to me I got to come right up an&rsquo; snatch
+      you out bald-headed. An&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll do it! I&rsquo;ll do it!&rdquo; he would threaten still
+      later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gosh darn my buttons! if I didn&rsquo;t plumb forget dinner!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night, Mr. Pocket,&rdquo; he called sleepily. &ldquo;Good night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep yer shirt on, Bill; keep yer shirt on,&rdquo; he admonished himself.
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the good of rushin&rsquo;? No use in gettin&rsquo; all het up an&rsquo; sweaty. Mr.
+      Pocket&rsquo;ll wait for you. He ain&rsquo;t a-runnin&rsquo; away before you can get yer
+      breakfast. Now, what you want, Bill, is something fresh in yer bill o&rsquo; 
+      fare. So it&rsquo;s up to you to go an&rsquo; get it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He cut a short pole at the water&rsquo;s edge and drew from one of his pockets a
+      bit of line and a draggled fly that had once been a royal coachman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mebbe they&rsquo;ll bite in the early morning,&rdquo; he muttered, as he made his
+      first cast into the pool. And a moment later he was gleefully crying:
+      &ldquo;What&rsquo;d I tell you, eh? What&rsquo;d I tell you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d just better take a hike down-stream a ways,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s no
+      tellin&rsquo; what cuss may be snoopin&rsquo; around.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he crossed over on the stones, and with a &ldquo;I really oughter take that
+      hike,&rdquo; the need of the precaution passed out of his mind and he fell to
+      work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now what d&rsquo;ye think of that, by damn? I clean forgot my dinner again! If
+      I don&rsquo;t watch out, I&rsquo;ll sure be degeneratin&rsquo; into a two-meal-a-day crank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pockets is the damnedest things I ever see for makin&rsquo; a man
+      absent-minded,&rdquo; he communed that night, as he crawled into his blankets.
+      Nor did he forget to call up the hillside, &ldquo;Good night, Mr. Pocket! Good
+      night!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was now a hundred yards from the water, and the inverted &ldquo;V&rdquo; was
+      assuming definite proportions. The width of the pay-dirt steadily
+      decreased, and the man extended in his mind&rsquo;s eye the sides of the &ldquo;V&rdquo; to
+      their meeting-place far up the hill. This was his goal, the apex of the
+      &ldquo;V,&rdquo; and he panned many times to locate it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just about two yards above that manzanita bush an&rsquo; a yard to the right,&rdquo;
+       he finally concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the temptation seized him. &ldquo;As plain as the nose on your face,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Slow an&rsquo; certain, Bill; slow an&rsquo; certain,&rdquo; he crooned. &ldquo;Short-cuts to
+      fortune ain&rsquo;t in your line, an&rsquo; it&rsquo;s about time you know it. Get wise,
+      Bill; get wise. Slow an&rsquo; certain&rsquo;s the only hand you can play; so go to
+      it, an&rsquo; keep to it, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the cross-cuts decreased, showing that the sides of the &ldquo;V&rdquo; were
+      converging, the depth of the &ldquo;V&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;V,&rdquo; by the water&rsquo;s edge, he had found the gold colors at the grass
+      roots. The higher he went up the hill, the deeper the gold dipped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;An&rsquo; there&rsquo;s no tellin&rsquo; how much deeper it&rsquo;ll
+      pitch,&rdquo; he sighed, in a moment&rsquo;s pause, while his fingers soothed his
+      aching back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though the dipping gold-trace increased the man&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+      worth of gold-dust from a shovelful of dirt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll just bet it&rsquo;s my luck to have some inquisitive cuss come buttin&rsquo; in
+      here on my pasture,&rdquo; he mumbled sleepily that night as he pulled the
+      blankets up to his chin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he sat upright. &ldquo;Bill!&rdquo; he called sharply. &ldquo;Now, listen to me,
+      Bill; d&rsquo;ye hear! It&rsquo;s up to you, to-morrow mornin&rsquo;, to mosey round an&rsquo; see
+      what you can see. Understand? Tomorrow morning, an&rsquo; don&rsquo;t you forget it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He yawned and glanced across at his side-hill. &ldquo;Good night, Mr. Pocket,&rdquo;
+       he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in all that mighty sweep of earth he saw no sign of man nor of the
+      handiwork of man&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hey, you, Mr. Pocket!&rdquo; he called down into the canyon. &ldquo;Stand out from
+      under! I&rsquo;m a-comin&rsquo;, Mr. Pocket! I&rsquo;m a-comin&rsquo;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The heavy brogans on the man&rsquo;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&rsquo;s footing was out of the question, he would swing his body past by
+      a moment&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first pan of the morning washed out over two dollars in coarse gold.
+      It was from the centre of the &ldquo;V.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;V&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;V.&rdquo; He nodded his head and said
+      oracularly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s one o&rsquo; two things, Bill; one o&rsquo; two things. Either Mr. Pocket&rsquo;s
+      spilled himself all out an&rsquo; down the hill, or else Mr. Pocket&rsquo;s that
+      damned rich you maybe won&rsquo;t be able to carry him all away with you. And
+      that&rsquo;d be hell, wouldn&rsquo;t it, now?&rdquo; He chuckled at contemplation of so
+      pleasant a dilemma.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nightfall found him by the edge of the stream his eyes wrestling with the
+      gathering darkness over the washing of a five-dollar pan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wisht I had an electric light to go on working.&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Wisht it was sun-up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be ca&rsquo;m, Bill; be ca&rsquo;m,&rdquo; he admonished himself, as he broke ground for
+      the final hole where the sides of the &ldquo;V&rdquo; had at last come together in a
+      point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got the almighty cinch on you, Mr. Pocket, an&rsquo; you can&rsquo;t lose me,&rdquo;
+       he said many times as he sank the hole deeper and deeper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;Rotten quartz,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sufferin&rsquo; Sardanopolis!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;Lumps an&rsquo; chunks of it! Lumps an&rsquo; 
+      chunks of it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talk about yer Too Much Gold diggin&rsquo;s!&rdquo; the man snorted contemptuously.
+      &ldquo;Why, this diggin&rsquo; &lsquo;d make it look like thirty cents. This diggin&rsquo; is All
+      Gold. An&rsquo; right here an&rsquo; now I name this yere canyon &lsquo;All Gold Canyon,&rsquo; b&rsquo; 
+      gosh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;his death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and his
+      wet shirt went cold against his flesh again at the thought&mdash;or else
+      he might receive death as he stooped there over his treasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the instant his feet struck bottom he saw the pocket-miner&rsquo;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&rsquo;s the pocket-miner&rsquo;s body was on
+      top of him. Even as the miner&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next instant the stranger felt the miner&rsquo;s hand grip his wrist. The
+      struggle was now for the revolver. Each man strove to turn it against the
+      other&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The miner was sobbing and struggling for breath. &ldquo;Measly skunk!&rdquo; he
+      panted; &ldquo;a-campin&rsquo; on my trail an&rsquo; lettin&rsquo; me do the work, an&rsquo; then
+      shootin&rsquo; me in the back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never laid eyes on him before,&rdquo; the miner concluded his scrutiny. &ldquo;Just a
+      common an&rsquo; ordinary thief, damn him! An&rsquo; he shot me in the back! He shot
+      me in the back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He opened his shirt and felt himself, front and back, on his left side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Went clean through, and no harm done!&rdquo; he cried jubilantly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet he
+      aimed right all right, but he drew the gun over when he pulled the trigger&mdash;the
+      cuss! But I fixed &lsquo;m! Oh, I fixed &lsquo;m!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His fingers were investigating the bullet-hole in his side, and a shade of
+      regret passed over his face. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s goin&rsquo; to be stiffer&rsquo;n hell,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;An&rsquo; it&rsquo;s up to me to get mended an&rsquo; get out o&rsquo; here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bight of the pack-rope under the dead man&rsquo;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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He shot me in the back, the measly skunk! He shot me in the back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When his treasure was quite cleaned up and wrapped securely into a number
+      of blanket-covered parcels, he made an estimate of its value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Four hundred pounds, or I&rsquo;m a Hottentot,&rdquo; he concluded. &ldquo;Say two hundred
+      in quartz an&rsquo; dirt&mdash;that leaves two hundred pounds of gold. Bill!
+      Wake up! Two hundred pounds of gold! Forty thousand dollars! An&rsquo; it&rsquo;s
+      yourn&mdash;all yourn!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked angrily over to the dead man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would, would you?&rdquo; he bullied. &ldquo;You would, eh? Well, I fixed you good
+      an&rsquo; plenty, an&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll give you decent burial, too. That&rsquo;s more&rsquo;n you&rsquo;d have
+      done for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An&rsquo; you shot me in the back!&rdquo; he said accusingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;pick and shovel and
+      gold-pan, extra food and cooking utensils, and divers odds and ends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The measly skunk!&rdquo; he said, and disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Tu&rsquo;n around an&rsquo; tu&rsquo;n yo&rsquo; face
+    Untoe them sweet hills of grace
+      (D&rsquo; pow&rsquo;rs of sin yo&rsquo; am scornin&rsquo;!).
+    Look about an, look aroun&rsquo;,
+    Fling yo&rsquo; sin-pack on d&rsquo; groun&rsquo; 
+      (Yo&rsquo; will meet wid d&rsquo; Lord in d&rsquo; mornin&rsquo;!).&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PLANCHETTE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is my right to know,&rdquo; the girl said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is my right,&rdquo; the girl repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it,&rdquo; he answered, desperately and helplessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked down at the man. &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she asked, with the firmness which
+      feigns belief that obedience will be forthcoming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear, dear Lute,&rdquo; he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She shivered at the sound of his voice&mdash;not from repulsion, but from
+      struggle against the fascination of its caressing gentleness. She had come
+      to know well the lure of the man&mdash;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&rsquo;s
+      madness. It was vigorous, compelling, masculine. For that matter, it was
+      largely unconscious on the man&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What more can I tell you?&rdquo; the man said. He raised his head and met her
+      gaze. &ldquo;I cannot marry you. I cannot marry any woman. I love you&mdash;you
+      know that&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her lips were compressed with the effort of control. His head was sinking
+      back to her knee, when she checked him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are already married, Chris?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No! no!&rdquo; he cried vehemently. &ldquo;I have never been married. I want to marry
+      only you, and I cannot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t!&rdquo; he interrupted. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t ask me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is my right to know,&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it,&rdquo; he again interrupted. &ldquo;But I cannot tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have not considered me, Chris,&rdquo; she went on gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, I know,&rdquo; he broke in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You cannot have considered me. You do not know what I have to bear from
+      my people because of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not think they felt so very unkindly toward me,&rdquo; he said bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she talked, she continued to pass her fingers caressingly through his
+      hair, sorrowful for the pain that she was inflicting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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. &lsquo;For it looks very much like it,&rsquo; 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, &lsquo;When I think of Chris,
+      it almost makes me wish I were younger myself.&rsquo; And Uncle would answer, &lsquo;I
+      don&rsquo;t blame you, my dear, not in the least.&rsquo; And then the pair of them
+      would beam upon me their congratulations that I had won the love of a man
+      like you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And they knew I loved you as well. How could I hide it?&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no idea of imposing such slavery,&rdquo; he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rsquo;t you see?
+      You did not seem to do things at all. Somehow they were always there, just
+      done, as a matter of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The slavery was love&rsquo;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&mdash;how much, you will never
+      know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had other lovers. You drove them away&mdash;No! no! I don&rsquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;Uncle Robert with a face like an
+      undertaker, and Aunt Mildred&rsquo;s heart breaking. But what could I do, Chris?
+      What could I do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man, his head resting on her knee again, groaned, but made no other
+      reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aunt Mildred was mother to me, yet I went to her no more with my
+      confidences. My childhood&rsquo;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?&mdash;when we played blindman&rsquo;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&mdash;your fingers, Chris, your fingers. It was the touch of
+      you made visible. It was there a week, and I kissed the marks&mdash;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,&mdash;oh! I cannot explain, but I loved you so!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must tell me, Chris,&rdquo; the girl said gently. &ldquo;This mystery&mdash;it is
+      killing me. I must know why we cannot be married. Are we always to be this
+      way?&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo; She caught her breath quickly. &ldquo;But we are never to be
+      married. I forgot. And you must tell me why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have considered you, Lute,&rdquo; he began doggedly. &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why should you go away?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Besides, I must know why, before
+      I can send you away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t ask me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; she said, her voice tenderly imperative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t, Lute; don&rsquo;t force me,&rdquo; the man pleaded, and there was appeal in
+      his eyes and voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must tell me,&rdquo; she insisted. &ldquo;It is justice you owe me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man wavered. &ldquo;If I do...&rdquo; he began. Then he ended with determination,
+      &ldquo;I should never be able to forgive myself. No, I cannot tell you. Don&rsquo;t
+      try to compel me, Lute. You would be as sorry as I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If there is anything... if there are obstacles... if this mystery does
+      really prevent...&rdquo; She was speaking slowly, with long pauses, seeking the
+      more delicate ways of speech for the framing of her thought. &ldquo;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 &lsquo;Come,&rsquo; 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&mdash;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 &lsquo;Come,&rsquo; I will&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t! Don&rsquo;t!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;It is impossible! Marriage or not, I cannot
+      even say &lsquo;Come.&rsquo; I dare not. I&rsquo;ll show you. I&rsquo;ll tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;she
+      knew it; and she knew, likewise, with the sureness of faith, that it was
+      because he could not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo; 
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her gaze wandered on beyond the Diogenes&rsquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, let us go,&rdquo; she said, almost in a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No&mdash;wait!&rdquo; she cried, before he had touched the two lower bars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She urged the mare forward a couple of strides, and then the animal lifted
+      over the bars in a clean little jump. The man&rsquo;s eyes sparkled, and he
+      clapped his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You beauty! you beauty!&rdquo; the girl cried, leaning forward impulsively in
+      the saddle and pressing her cheek to the mare&rsquo;s neck where it burned
+      flame-color in the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s trade horses for the ride in,&rdquo; she suggested, when he had led his
+      horse through and finished putting up the bars. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve never sufficiently
+      appreciated Dolly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; he protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think she is too old, too sedate,&rdquo; Lute insisted. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s only
+      sixteen, and she can outrun nine colts out of ten. Only she never cuts up.
+      She&rsquo;s too steady, and you don&rsquo;t approve of her&mdash;no, don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They proceeded to exchange the saddles on the horses, glad of the
+      diversion and making the most of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad I was born in California,&rdquo; Lute remarked, as she swung astride
+      of Ban. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s an outrage both to horse and woman to ride in a sidesaddle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You look like a young Amazon,&rdquo; the man said approvingly, his eyes passing
+      tenderly over the girl as she swung the horse around.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you ready?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All ready!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the old mill,&rdquo; she called, as the horses sprang forward. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s less
+      than a mile.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To a finish?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now for it!&rdquo; the girl cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Touch her on the neck!&rdquo; she cried to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I give him the spurs?&rdquo; Lute shouted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Beaten by three lengths!&rdquo; Lute beamed triumphantly, as they pulled into a
+      walk. &ldquo;Confess, sir, confess! You didn&rsquo;t think the old mare had it in
+      her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute leaned to the side and rested her hand for a moment on Dolly&rsquo;s wet
+      neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ban&rsquo;s a sluggard alongside of her,&rdquo; Chris affirmed. &ldquo;Dolly&rsquo;s all right,
+      if she is in her Indian Summer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute nodded approval. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a sweet way of putting it&mdash;Indian
+      Summer. It just describes her. But she&rsquo;s not lazy. She has all the fire
+      and none of the folly. She is very wise, what of her years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That accounts for it,&rdquo; Chris demurred. &ldquo;Her folly passed with her youth.
+      Many&rsquo;s the lively time she&rsquo;s given you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; Lute answered. &ldquo;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&mdash;the animal&rsquo;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&mdash;never, not
+      once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is summer, here is spring,&rdquo; Lute said. &ldquo;Oh, beautiful Sonoma
+      Valley!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you ever heard of the secret pasture?&rdquo; she asked, her eyes still
+      fixed on the remote green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Dolly, this is most remarkable,&rdquo; Lute began reprovingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A genuine buck!&rdquo; Chris called out, and the next moment the mare was
+      rising under him in a second buck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute looked on, astounded at the unprecedented conduct of her mare, and
+      admiring her lover&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint cry of fear, suppressed in the instant of utterance, slipped past
+      Lute&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris!&rdquo; she said, so softly that it was almost a whisper. Then she
+      sighed, &ldquo;Thank God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m all right,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know where there is a spring,&rdquo; she said, a moment later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was that you said about Dolly&rsquo;s never cutting up?&rdquo; he asked, when
+      the blood had been stanched and his nerves and pulse-beats were normal
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am stunned,&rdquo; Lute answered. &ldquo;I cannot understand it. She never did
+      anything like it in all her life. And all animals like you so&mdash;it&rsquo;s
+      not because of that. Why, she is a child&rsquo;s horse. I was only a little girl
+      when I first rode her, and to this day&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, this day she was everything but a child&rsquo;s horse,&rdquo; Chris broke in.
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Regular bucking-bronco proposition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what should she know about bucking?&rdquo; Lute demanded. &ldquo;She was never
+      known to buck&mdash;never.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;Some forgotten instinct, perhaps, long-lapsed
+      and come to life again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl rose to her feet determinedly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to find out,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went back to the horses, where they subjected Dolly to a rigid
+      examination that disclosed nothing. Hoofs, legs, bit, mouth, body&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whatever it was, it was subjective, that much is certain,&rdquo; Chris said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Obsession,&rdquo; Lute suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An evil spirit,&rdquo; Chris laughed; &ldquo;but what evil have I done that I should
+      be so punished?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think too much of yourself, sir,&rdquo; she rejoined. &ldquo;It is more likely
+      some evil, I don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she talked, she took hold of the stirrup-strap and started to shorten
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you doing?&rdquo; Chris demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to ride Dolly in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you&rsquo;re not,&rdquo; he announced. &ldquo;It would be bad discipline. After what
+      has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was a very weak and very sick mare he rode, stumbling and halting,
+      afflicted with nervous jerks and recurring muscular spasms&mdash;the
+      aftermath of the tremendous orgasm through which she had passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has happened,&rdquo;
+       Lute said, as they rode into camp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor Dolly, she is really sick,&rdquo; Lute said that evening, when they had
+      returned from a last look at the mare. &ldquo;But you weren&rsquo;t hurt, Chris, and
+      that&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My thoughts were of you,&rdquo; Chris answered, and felt the responsive
+      pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her face up to his and met his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear Lute, dear Lute,&rdquo; he caressed her with his voice as she moved away
+      among the shadows.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    *       *       *
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s going for the mail?&rdquo; called a woman&rsquo;s voice through the trees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute closed the book from which they had been reading, and sighed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We weren&rsquo;t going to ride to-day,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me go,&rdquo; Chris proposed. &ldquo;You stay here. I&rsquo;ll be down and back in no
+      time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s going for the mail?&rdquo; the voice insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where&rsquo;s Martin?&rdquo; Lute called, lifting her voice in answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; came the voice. &ldquo;I think Robert took him along somewhere&mdash;horse-buying,
+      or fishing, or I don&rsquo;t know what. There&rsquo;s really nobody left but Chris and
+      you. Besides, it will give you an appetite for dinner. You&rsquo;ve been
+      lounging in the hammock all day. And Uncle Robert must have his
+      newspaper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, Aunty, we&rsquo;re starting,&rdquo; Lute called back, getting out of the
+      hammock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dolly looks as though she&rsquo;d forgotten all about yesterday,&rdquo; Chris said,
+      as they sat their horses knee-deep in the rushing water. &ldquo;Look at her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s enjoyment was evident, and she drooped her head over against the
+      shoulder of his own horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like a kitten,&rdquo; was Lute&rsquo;s comment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet I shall never be able wholly to trust her again,&rdquo; Chris said. &ldquo;Not
+      after yesterday&rsquo;s mad freak.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a feeling myself that you are safer on Ban,&rdquo; Lute laughed. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t he
+      handsome! He&rsquo;ll be as wise as Dolly when he is as old as she.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel the same way,&rdquo; Chris laughed back. &ldquo;Ban could never possibly
+      betray me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s back, pleasuring in the lines of the bare neck
+      and the sweep out to the muscular shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris looked up reassuringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am getting used to it,&rdquo; Lute smiled down to him. &ldquo;Of course I need not
+      ask if you are hurt. Can I do anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled back and went over to the fallen beast, letting go the girths of
+      the saddle and getting the head straightened out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought so,&rdquo; he said, after a cursory examination. &ldquo;I thought so at the
+      time. Did you hear that sort of crunching snap?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shuddered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, that was the punctuation of life, the final period dropped at the
+      end of Ban&rsquo;s usefulness.&rdquo; He started around to come up by the path. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+      been astride of Ban for the last time. Let us go home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the top of the bank Chris turned and looked down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-by, Washoe Ban!&rdquo; he called out. &ldquo;Good-by, old fellow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The animal was struggling to lift its head. There were tears in Chris&rsquo;s
+      eyes as he turned abruptly away, and tears in Lute&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was done deliberately,&rdquo; Chris burst forth suddenly. &ldquo;There was no
+      warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was no warning,&rdquo; Lute concurred. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should have seen it, had you done it,&rdquo; Lute said. &ldquo;But it was all done
+      before you had a chance to do anything. It was not your hand, not even
+      your unconscious hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don&rsquo;t know where.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you shoot a horse?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The groom nodded, then added, &ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; with a second and deeper nod.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you do it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Draw a line from the eyes to the ears&mdash;I mean the opposite ears,
+      sir. And where the lines cross&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will do,&rdquo; Chris interrupted. &ldquo;You know the watering place at the
+      second bend. You&rsquo;ll find Ban there with a broken back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    *       *       *
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, here you are, sir. I have been looking for you everywhere since
+      dinner. You are wanted immediately.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris tossed his cigar away, then went over and pressed his foot on its
+      glowing fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t told anybody about it?&mdash;Ban?&rdquo; he queried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute shook her head. &ldquo;They&rsquo;ll learn soon enough. Martin will mention it to
+      Uncle Robert tomorrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But don&rsquo;t feel too bad about it,&rdquo; she said, after a moment&rsquo;s pause,
+      slipping her hand into his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was my colt,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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&rsquo;t fight for the bit, for that matter. He wasn&rsquo;t unruly, nor
+      disobedient. There wasn&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was deliberate&mdash;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&rsquo;s behavior yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But horses go insane, Chris,&rdquo; Lute said. &ldquo;You know that. It&rsquo;s merely
+      coincidence that two horses in two days should have spells under you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the only explanation,&rdquo; he answered, starting off with her. &ldquo;But
+      why am I wanted urgently?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Planchette.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I remember. It will be a new experience to me. Somehow I missed it
+      when it was all the rage long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So did all of us,&rdquo; Lute replied, &ldquo;except Mrs. Grantly. It is her favorite
+      phantom, it seems.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A weird little thing,&rdquo; he remarked. &ldquo;Bundle of nerves and black eyes.
+      I&rsquo;ll wager she doesn&rsquo;t weigh ninety pounds, and most of that&rsquo;s magnetism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Positively uncanny... at times.&rdquo; Lute shivered involuntarily. &ldquo;She gives
+      me the creeps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Contact of the healthy with the morbid,&rdquo; he explained dryly. &ldquo;You will
+      notice it is the healthy that always has the creeps. The morbid never has
+      the creeps. It gives the creeps. That&rsquo;s its function. Where did you people
+      pick her up, anyway?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know&mdash;yes, I do, too. Aunt Mildred met her in Boston, I
+      think&mdash;oh, I don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s gaze
+      roved over them, and he was aware of a guilty sorrow-pang as he paused for
+      a moment on Lute&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; Chris whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Mr. Barton. The train was late. That&rsquo;s why you didn&rsquo;t see him at
+      dinner. He&rsquo;s only a capitalist&mdash;water-power-long-distance-electricity
+      transmitter, or something like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t look as though he could give an ox points on imagination.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He can&rsquo;t. He inherited his money. But he knows enough to hold on to it
+      and hire other men&rsquo;s brains. He is very conservative.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is to be expected,&rdquo; was Chris&rsquo;s comment. His gaze went back to the
+      man and woman who had been father and mother to the girl beside him. &ldquo;Do
+      you know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;and
+      to-day, too. And yet I could see no difference from of old.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear man,&rdquo; Lute sighed. &ldquo;Hospitality is as natural to them as the act of
+      breathing. But it isn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t help it. You can&rsquo;t help it. You are universally lovable, and
+      the best of it is that you don&rsquo;t know it. You don&rsquo;t know it now. Even as I
+      tell it to you, you don&rsquo;t realize it, you won&rsquo;t realize it&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, in a minute we shall go in and join them. Mark the affection, almost
+      maternal, that will well up in Aunt Mildred&rsquo;s eyes. Listen to the tones of
+      Uncle Robert&rsquo;s voice when he says, &lsquo;Well, Chris, my boy?&rsquo; Watch Mrs.
+      Grantly melt, literally melt, like a dewdrop in the sun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m almost bursting with vanity from listening to you,&rdquo; he laughed,
+      passing his arm around her and drawing her against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;and in this very moment, when you are laughing at
+      all that I have said, you, the feel of you, your soul,&mdash;call it what
+      you will, it is you,&mdash;is calling for all the love that is in me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned more closely against him, and sighed as with fatigue. He
+      breathed a kiss into her hair and held her with firm tenderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aunt Mildred stirred briskly and looked up from the Planchette board.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come, let us begin,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It will soon grow chilly. Robert, where
+      are those children?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here we are,&rdquo; Lute called out, disengaging herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now for a bundle of creeps,&rdquo; Chris whispered, as they started in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute&rsquo;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, &ldquo;Well, Chris, my boy, and
+      what of the riding?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who&rsquo;s first?&rdquo; Uncle Robert demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a moment&rsquo;s hesitancy, then Aunt Mildred placed her hand on the
+      board, and said: &ldquo;Some one has always to be the fool for the delectation
+      of the rest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Brave woman,&rdquo; applauded her husband. &ldquo;Now, Mrs. Grantly, do your worst.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I?&rdquo; that lady queried. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be patient,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly counselled. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish the influence would hurry up,&rdquo; Aunt Mildred protested at the end
+      of five motionless minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a little longer, Mrs. Story, just a little longer,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly
+      said soothingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly Aunt Mildred&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For another five minutes this continued, when Aunt Mildred withdrew her
+      hand with an effort, and said, with a nervous laugh:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hen-scratches,&rdquo; was Uncle Robert&rsquo;s judgement, when he looked over the
+      paper upon which she had scrawled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite illegible,&rdquo; was Mrs. Grantly&rsquo;s dictum. &ldquo;It does not resemble
+      writing at all. The influences have not got to working yet. Do you try it,
+      Mr. Barton.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You try it, Story,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By George!&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s curious. Look at it. I&rsquo;m not doing it. I
+      know I&rsquo;m not doing it. Look at that hand go! Just look at it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, Robert, none of your ridiculousness,&rdquo; his wife warned him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you I&rsquo;m not doing it,&rdquo; he replied indignantly. &ldquo;The force has got
+      hold of me. Ask Mrs. Grantly. Tell her to make it stop, if you want it to
+      stop. I can&rsquo;t stop it. By George! look at that flourish. I didn&rsquo;t do that.
+      I never wrote a flourish in my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do try to be serious,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly warned them. &ldquo;An atmosphere of levity
+      does not conduce to the best operation of Planchette.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There, that will do, I guess,&rdquo; Uncle Robert said as he took his hand
+      away. &ldquo;Now let&rsquo;s see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bent over and adjusted his glasses. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s handwriting at any rate, and
+      that&rsquo;s better than the rest of you did. Here, Lute, your eyes are young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, what flourishes!&rdquo; Lute exclaimed, as she looked at the paper. &ldquo;And
+      look there, there are two different handwritings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She began to read: &ldquo;This is the first lecture. Concentrate on this
+      sentence: &lsquo;I am a positive spirit and not negative to any condition.&rsquo; Then
+      follow with concentration on positive love. After that peace and harmony
+      will vibrate through and around your body. Your soul&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Iron Top&rsquo;s pretty low,&rdquo; Mr. Barton murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Robert, you&rsquo;ve been dabbling again!&rdquo; Aunt Mildred cried accusingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I&rsquo;ve not,&rdquo; he denied. &ldquo;I only read the quotations. But how the devil&mdash;I
+      beg your pardon&mdash;they got there on that piece of paper I&rsquo;d like to
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your subconscious mind,&rdquo; Chris suggested. &ldquo;You read the quotations in
+      to-day&rsquo;s paper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I didn&rsquo;t; but last week I glanced over the column.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A day or a year is all the same in the subconscious mind,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+      Grantly. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how about that other stuff?&rdquo; Uncle Robert demanded. &ldquo;Sounds like what
+      I&rsquo;d think Christian Science ought to sound like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or theosophy,&rdquo; Aunt Mildred volunteered. &ldquo;Some message to a neophyte.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go on, read the rest,&rdquo; her husband commanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This puts you in touch with the mightier spirits,&rdquo; Lute read. &ldquo;You shall
+      become one with us, and your name shall be &lsquo;Arya,&rsquo; and you shall&mdash;Conqueror
+      20, Empire 12, Columbia Mountain 18, Midway 140&mdash;and, and that is
+      all. Oh, no! here&rsquo;s a last flourish, Arya, from Kandor&mdash;that must
+      surely be the Mahatma.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to have you explain that theosophy stuff on the basis of the
+      subconscious mind, Chris,&rdquo; Uncle Robert challenged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;No explanation. You must have got a message
+      intended for some one else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lines were crossed, eh?&rdquo; Uncle Robert chuckled. &ldquo;Multiplex spiritual
+      wireless telegraphy, I&rsquo;d call it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It IS nonsense,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A certain befitting gravity should grace the occasion,&rdquo; Chris agreed,
+      placing his hand on Planchette. &ldquo;Let me try. And not one of you must laugh
+      or giggle, or even think &lsquo;laugh&rsquo; or &lsquo;giggle.&rsquo; And if you dare to snort,
+      even once, Uncle Robert, there is no telling what occult vengeance may be
+      wreaked upon you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be good,&rdquo; Uncle Robert rejoined. &ldquo;But if I really must snort, may I
+      silently slip away?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at him,&rdquo; Lute whispered to her aunt. &ldquo;See how white he is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I wrote something,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should say you did,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly remarked with satisfaction, holding
+      up the sheet of paper and glancing at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Read it aloud,&rdquo; Uncle Robert said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here it is, then. It begins with &lsquo;beware&rsquo; 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&mdash;And here it
+      abruptly ends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite a sanguinary turn, I should say,&rdquo; Uncle Robert remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have already made two attempts upon your life,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly read from
+      the paper, which she was going over a second time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On my life?&rdquo; Chris demanded between yawns. &ldquo;Why, my life hasn&rsquo;t been
+      attempted even once. My! I am sleepy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, my boy, you are thinking of flesh-and-blood men,&rdquo; Uncle Robert
+      laughed. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Chris!&rdquo; Lute cried impulsively. &ldquo;This afternoon! The hand you said
+      must have seized your rein!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I was joking,&rdquo; he objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nevertheless...&rdquo; Lute left her thought unspoken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Grantly had become keen on the scent. &ldquo;What was that about this
+      afternoon? Was your life in danger?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris&rsquo;s drowsiness had disappeared. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m becoming interested myself,&rdquo; he
+      acknowledged. &ldquo;We haven&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder, I wonder,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly communed aloud. &ldquo;There is something in
+      this.... It is a warning.... Ah! You were hurt yesterday riding Miss
+      Story&rsquo;s horse! That makes the two attempts!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked triumphantly at them. Planchette had been vindicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; laughed Uncle Robert, but with a slight hint of irritation in
+      his manner. &ldquo;Such things do not happen these days. This is the twentieth
+      century, my dear madam. The thing, at the very latest, smacks of
+      mediaevalism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had such wonderful tests with Planchette,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly began,
+      then broke off suddenly to go to the table and place her hand on the
+      board.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who are you?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;What is your name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The board immediately began to write. By this time all heads, with the
+      exception of Mr. Barton&rsquo;s, were bent over the table and following the
+      pencil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Dick,&rdquo; Aunt Mildred cried, a note of the mildly hysterical in her
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her husband straightened up, his face for the first time grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Dick&rsquo;s signature,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d know his fist in a thousand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Dick Curtis,&rsquo;&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly read aloud. &ldquo;Who is Dick Curtis?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By Jove, that&rsquo;s remarkable!&rdquo; Mr. Barton broke in. &ldquo;The handwriting in
+      both instances is the same. Clever, I should say, really clever,&rdquo; he added
+      admiringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me see,&rdquo; Uncle Robert demanded, taking the paper and examining it.
+      &ldquo;Yes, it is Dick&rsquo;s handwriting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who is Dick?&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly insisted. &ldquo;Who is this Dick Curtis?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dick Curtis, why, he was Captain Richard Curtis,&rdquo; Uncle Robert answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was Lute&rsquo;s father,&rdquo; Aunt Mildred supplemented. &ldquo;Lute took our name.
+      She never saw him. He died when she was a few weeks old. He was my
+      brother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Remarkable, most remarkable.&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly was revolving the message in
+      her mind. &ldquo;There were two attempts on Mr. Dunbar&rsquo;s life. The subconscious
+      mind cannot explain that, for none of us knew of the accident to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew,&rdquo; Chris answered, &ldquo;and it was I that operated Planchette. The
+      explanation is simple.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the handwriting,&rdquo; interposed Mr. Barton. &ldquo;What you wrote and what
+      Mrs. Grantly wrote are identical.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris bent over and compared the handwriting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Besides,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly cried, &ldquo;Mr. Story recognizes the handwriting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him for verification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded his head. &ldquo;Yes, it is Dick&rsquo;s fist. I&rsquo;ll swear to that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But to Lute had come a visioning. While the rest argued pro and con and
+      the air was filled with phrases,&mdash;&ldquo;psychic phenomena,&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;self-hypnotism,&rdquo; &ldquo;residuum of unexplained truth,&rdquo; and &ldquo;spiritism,&rdquo;&mdash;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&mdash;and all this had constituted the material
+      out of which she had builded him in her childhood fancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is the possibility of one mind unconsciously suggesting to another
+      mind,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly was saying; but through Lute&rsquo;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&mdash;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 &ldquo;Fighting Dick Curtis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me put it to the test,&rdquo; she heard Mrs. Grantly saying. &ldquo;Let Miss
+      Story try Planchette. There may be a further message.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, I beg of you,&rdquo; Aunt Mildred interposed. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; Mingled with
+      the &ldquo;Good-nights,&rdquo; were half-hearted protests from Mrs. Grantly, as Aunt
+      Mildred withdrew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Robert can return,&rdquo; she called back, &ldquo;as soon as he has seen me to my
+      tent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be a shame to give it up now,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly said. &ldquo;There is no
+      telling what we are on the verge of. Won&rsquo;t you try it, Miss Story?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;man&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;a saint&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute&rsquo;s hand had ceased moving, and Mrs. Grantly was already reading the
+      message that had been written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a different handwriting,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;A woman&rsquo;s hand. &lsquo;Martha,&rsquo; it
+      is signed. Who is Martha?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute was not surprised. &ldquo;It is my mother,&rdquo; she said simply. &ldquo;What does she
+      say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear child,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly read, &ldquo;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&rsquo;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.&mdash;Martha.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me see it,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This IS remarkable,&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly was reiterating. &ldquo;There was never
+      anything like it. Think of it, my dear, both your father and mother here
+      with us tonight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And please don&rsquo;t let us have any more Planchette,&rdquo; Lute continued
+      hastily. &ldquo;Let us forget all the nonsense that has occurred.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Nonsense,&rsquo; my dear child?&rdquo; Mrs. Grantly was indignantly protesting when
+      Uncle Robert strode into the circle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hello!&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s being done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too late,&rdquo; Lute answered lightly. &ldquo;No more stock quotations for you.
+      Planchette is adjourned, and we&rsquo;re just winding up the discussion of the
+      theory of it. Do you know how late it is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    *       *       *
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what did you do last night after we left?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, took a stroll,&rdquo; Chris answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute&rsquo;s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was
+      palpably assumed, &ldquo;With&mdash;a&mdash;with Mr. Barton?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And a smoke?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; and now what&rsquo;s it all about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lute broke into merry laughter. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where I am going to take you this afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You plan well without knowing my wishes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew well what your wishes are. It is to see a horse I have found.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, &ldquo;Oh, good!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a beauty,&rdquo; Chris said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s called Comanche,&rdquo; Chris went on. &ldquo;A beauty, a regular beauty, the
+      perfect type of the Californian cow-pony. And his lines&mdash;why, what&rsquo;s
+      the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let us ride any more,&rdquo; Lute said, &ldquo;at least for a while. Really, I
+      think I am a tiny bit tired of it, too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his
+      eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see hearses and flowers for you,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;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&mdash;all
+      this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a
+      horse. A horse, Lute! a horse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For a while, at least,&rdquo; she pleaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ridiculous!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter? Aren&rsquo;t you well?&mdash;you who
+      are always so abominably and adorably well!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it&rsquo;s not that,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;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&mdash;perhaps
+      it&rsquo;s superstition, I don&rsquo;t know&mdash;but the whole occurrence, the
+      messages of Planchette, the possibility of my father&rsquo;s hand, I know not
+      how, reaching, out to Ban&rsquo;s rein and hurling him and you to death, the
+      correspondence between my father&rsquo;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&mdash;my father was a great horseman&mdash;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&rsquo;t you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very doubt? It may
+      be a very small doubt&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes, I know, call it unreality. But I&rsquo;ve heard you paradoxing upon
+      the reality of the unreal&mdash;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&mdash;is real as a nightmare is
+      real, in the throes of it, before one awakes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The most logical argument for illogic I have ever heard,&rdquo; Chris smiled.
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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,
+      &lsquo;Foh a fack, Mis&rsquo; Martin, you jis&rsquo; tawk like a house afire; but you ain&rsquo;t
+      got de show I has.&rsquo; &lsquo;How&rsquo;s that?&rsquo; Martin asked. &lsquo;Well, you see, Mis&rsquo; 
+      Martin, you has one chance to mah two.&rsquo; &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t see it,&rsquo; Martin said.
+      &lsquo;Mis&rsquo; Martin, it&rsquo;s dis way. You has jis&rsquo; de chance, lak you say, to become
+      worms foh de fruitification of de cabbage garden. But I&rsquo;s got de chance to
+      lif&rsquo; mah voice to de glory of de Lawd as I go paddin&rsquo; dem golden streets&mdash;along
+      &lsquo;ith de chance to be jis&rsquo; worms along &lsquo;ith you, Mis&rsquo; Martin.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You refuse to take me seriously,&rdquo; Lute said, when she had laughed her
+      appreciation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t explain it&mdash;the handwriting of my father, which Uncle
+      Robert recognized&mdash;oh, the whole thing, you don&rsquo;t explain it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know all the mysteries of mind,&rdquo; Chris answered. &ldquo;But I believe
+      such phenomena will all yield to scientific explanation in the not distant
+      future.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just the same, I have a sneaking desire to find out some more from
+      Planchette,&rdquo; Lute confessed. &ldquo;The board is still down in the dining room.
+      We could try it now, you and I, and no one would know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris caught her hand, crying: &ldquo;Come on! It will be a lark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hand in hand they ran down the path to the tree-pillared room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The camp is deserted,&rdquo; Lute said, as she placed Planchette on the table.
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Grantly and Aunt Mildred are lying down, and Mr. Barton has gone off
+      with Uncle Robert. There is nobody to disturb us.&rdquo; She placed her hand on
+      the board. &ldquo;Now begin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.&mdash;Martha.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that whole message is the dictate of your own heart,&rdquo; Chris cried.
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you see, Lute? The thought is your very own, and your subconscious
+      mind has expressed it there on the paper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is one thing I don&rsquo;t see,&rdquo; she objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you don&rsquo;t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a
+      message from the dead?&rdquo; he interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, Chris,&rdquo; she wavered. &ldquo;I am sure I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is absurd!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what have you to say to that?&rdquo; he challenged, placing his hand on
+      Planchette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the instant his hand began to write. Both were startled by the
+      suddenness of it. The message was brief:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was distinctly sobered, but he laughed. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Lute did not share his bravado. Her fright showed itself in her face.
+      She laid her trembling hand on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do be calm,&rdquo; Chris said soothingly. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I don&rsquo;t care for any more of it,&rdquo; Lute said, when the message was
+      completed. &ldquo;It is like witnessing a fight between you and my father in the
+      flesh. There is the savor in it of struggle and blows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She pointed out a sentence that read: &ldquo;You cannot escape me nor the just
+      punishment that is yours!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She crumpled up the scrawled sheets of paper, and put Planchette away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We won&rsquo;t bother with it any more,&rdquo; Chris said. &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t think it would
+      affect you so strongly. But it&rsquo;s all subjective, I&rsquo;m sure, with possibly a
+      bit of suggestion thrown in&mdash;that and nothing more. And the whole
+      strain of our situation has made conditions unusually favorable for
+      striking phenomena.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And about our situation,&rdquo; Lute said, as they went slowly up the path they
+      had run down. &ldquo;What we are to do, I don&rsquo;t know. Are we to go on, as we
+      have gone on? What is best? Have you thought of anything?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He debated for a few steps. &ldquo;I have thought of telling your uncle and
+      aunt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What you couldn&rsquo;t tell me?&rdquo; she asked quickly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he answered slowly; &ldquo;but just as much as I have told you. I have no
+      right to tell them more than I have told you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This time it was she that debated. &ldquo;No, don&rsquo;t tell them,&rdquo; she said
+      finally. &ldquo;They wouldn&rsquo;t understand. I don&rsquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should go away, I know I should go away,&rdquo; he said, half under his
+      breath. &ldquo;And I can. I am no weakling. Because I have failed to remain away
+      once, is no reason that I shall fail again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She caught her breath with a quick gasp. &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it would be easier if I went away,&rdquo; he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am happier when you are here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The cruelty of circumstance,&rdquo; he muttered savagely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go or stay&mdash;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&mdash;unless... unless some time,
+      some wonderful, happy time, you can come to me and say: &lsquo;Lute, all is well
+      with me. The mystery no longer binds me. I am free.&rsquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;though
+      I wish you wouldn&rsquo;t ride any more... for a few days, anyway, or for a
+      week. What did you say was his name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Comanche,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;I know you will like him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    *       *       *
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s corduroy riding-habit and of the bay horse that
+      moved beneath her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a good test,&rdquo; she called across the canyon. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to put him
+      down it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bravo!&rdquo; Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The wisest-footed, clearest-headed horse I ever saw,&rdquo; Lute called back,
+      as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of
+      rubble and into the trees again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris, in his anxiety, had sat up to observe more closely what she
+      meditated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t tackle it,&rdquo; he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have faith in Comanche,&rdquo; she called in return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He can&rsquo;t make that side-jump to the gravel,&rdquo; Chris warned. &ldquo;He&rsquo;ll never
+      keep his legs. He&rsquo;ll topple over into the pool. Not one horse in a
+      thousand could do that stunt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Comanche is that very horse,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Watch him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am all tense,&rdquo; Chris answered. &ldquo;I was holding my breath.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Buy him, by all means,&rdquo; Lute said, dismounting. &ldquo;He is a bargain. I could
+      dare anything on him. I never in my life had such confidence in a horse&rsquo;s
+      feet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His owner says that he has never been known to lose his feet, that it is
+      impossible to get him down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Buy him, buy him at once,&rdquo; she counselled, &ldquo;before the man changes his
+      mind. If you don&rsquo;t, I shall. Oh, such feet! I feel such confidence in them
+      that when I am on him I don&rsquo;t consider he has feet at all. And he&rsquo;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&rsquo;m enthusiastic, but if you
+      don&rsquo;t buy him, Chris. I shall. Remember, I&rsquo;ve second refusal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris smiled agreement as he changed the saddles. Meanwhile she compared
+      the two horses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course he doesn&rsquo;t match Dolly the way Ban did,&rdquo; she concluded
+      regretfully; &ldquo;but his coat is splendid just the same. And think of the
+      horse that is under the coat!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Chris gave her a hand into the saddle, and followed her up the slope to
+      the county road. She reined in suddenly, saying:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We won&rsquo;t go straight back to camp.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You forget dinner,&rdquo; he warned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I remember Comanche,&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll ride directly over to the
+      ranch and buy him. Dinner will keep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the cook won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; Chris laughed. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s already threatened to leave,
+      what of our late-comings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even so,&rdquo; was the answer. &ldquo;Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook, but
+      at any rate we shall have got Comanche.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s broader blazes. The sound of
+      rushing water ascended on the windless air, and there was a hum of
+      mountain bees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; he cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Chris, it is good to be alive... and to have you here by my side!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered her by the warm light in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All things tended to key them to an exquisite pitch&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s fall began
+      again. She saw the stirrup-strap draw taut, then her lover&rsquo;s body and
+      arms. The manzanita shoot yielded its roots, and horse and man plunged
+      over the edge and out of sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If only he will lie quietly,&rdquo; Lute breathed aloud, her mind at work on
+      the means of rescue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s
+      hoofs on the road and of his body where it had slid over the brink.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris!&rdquo; she called once, and twice; but she called hopelessly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of the depths, on the windless air, arose only the murmur of bees and
+      of running water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chris!&rdquo; she called yet a third time, and sank slowly down in the dust of
+      the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She felt the touch of Dolly&rsquo;s muzzle on her arm, and she leaned her head
+      against the mare&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg&rsquo;s Moon-Face and Other Stories, by Jack London
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moon-Face and Other Stories, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Moon-Face and Other Stories
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Posting Date: July 31, 2008 [EBook #1089]
+Release Date: November, 1997
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Espen Ore, Steve Henshaw, and Andrew Sly
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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...t his 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 tonight. 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. Today 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 slay, 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? Tomorrow 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 tomorrow."
+
+"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 tonight."
+
+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 Project Gutenberg's Moon-Face and Other Stories, by Jack London
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Moon-Face and Other Stories by London
+#'s 19 to 26 in our series by Jack London
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+Moon-Face and Other Stories
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+
+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 trave 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 I 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 him self. 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 tonight. 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 (Copyright, 1901, By Pearson Publishing Company)
+
+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 Ietter 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 2I, 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. Today 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 State;. 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.Therefore 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 I 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!"! 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 slay, 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 tile 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. " s 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? Tomorrow 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 or 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 calm," 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 trust 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 guise 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 then 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 tomorrow."
+
+"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. 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 1ove. 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.
+
+"0n 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
+tonight."
+
+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 he 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 he 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 they 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 wanted.
+
+"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 rock 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 Project Gutenberg's Etext of Moon-Face and Other Stories by London
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Moon-Face and Other Stories 
+by Jack London
+#'s 19 to 26 in our series by Jack London
+
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+Title: Moon-Face and Other Stories
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+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: November, 1997 [Etext #1089]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[Most recently updated: May 31, 2004]
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+Edition: 11
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+Language: English
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Moon-Face and Other Stories by London
+******This file should be named mface11.txt or mface11.zip******
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+This etext was prepared by Espen Ore, Espen.Ore@hd.uib.no
+Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities
+
+
+
+
+
+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 . . .t his 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 tonight. 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.
+Today 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 slay,
+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? Tomorrow 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 tomorrow."
+
+"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 tonight."
+
+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 Project Gutenberg's Etext of Moon-Face and Other Stories by London
+
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